 
# The Peking Incident

Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Philip Bosshardt

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"MacArthur's reaction arose...at least in part from the fact that his legendary pride had been hurt. The Red Chinese had made a fool of the infallible 'military genius'...the only possible means left to MacArthur to regain his lost pride and military reputation was now to inflict an overwhelming defeat on those Red Chinese generals who had made a fool of him. In order to do this, he was now perfectly willing to propel us into an all-out war with Red China and possibly, with the Soviet Union, igniting World War III and a nuclear holocaust."

General of the Army

Omar Bradley

A General's Life
PROLOGUE

Wednesday, November 1, 1950

4:30 a.m.

Six miles southeast of Unsan, North Korea

The frozen ground shook with a thump as the mortar round plowed into a snow bank behind Delaney's head. When the rain of dirt, snow and rock had ended, he lifted his head cautiously, squinting into the dark night, trying to focus on something moving, anything, but there was nothing. He heard grunting in the distance--a shadowy form, then a deafening roar from Lieutenant Camille's M-1 right behind his left ear. Something fell heavily in the bush just ahead--they both heard it--and groaned.

"Jesus Friggin' Christ!" Delaney muttered. The damn chinks were almost on top of them again. He hoisted his own M-1 up and propped the muzzle on a rotted out log, squeezing off several rounds. The clip was empty. Delaney angrily ripped it out and snagged another 8-round clip from his belt and rammed it into the slot. But it jammed--shit! second time tonight--He tossed the rifle away and motioned Camille up and back.

"Fall back, fall back!" he yelled and the snow banks erupted into life as the survivors of Bravo Two Eight scurried off the hilltop and melted away.

"Camille?"

"Sir?"

They humped it down the back slope of Hill 229, six miles below Unsan in the midst of a swirling blizzard and crashed stumbling through a narrow ravine before stopping for breath.

"Find Malone. I need that radio--pronto!"

Lieutenant Curtis Camille had been a platoon leader in Bravo Company, 8th Regiment of the First Cav only two hours before. But Third Platoon was gone now, the entire force killed or captured as wave after wave of Chicom infantry had overrun them on Bravo's left flank.

"We've gotta raise Bravo Five...get some mortar fire up on that hill. Jesus, the place's crawling with chinks."

"Malone's dead, sir. Reeves has the radio. .He was right--"

They hit the ground hard as the ravine was nicely bracketed by quadruple mortar round explosions, the force of the blasts gouging up seams of rock, dirt, tree limbs and a geyser of snow.

"Fuckin' 53s!" Camille cautiously lifted his head, brushing snow from his eyes. A roaring in his left ear was soothed by a trickle of warm fluid--blood, he realized, streaming down the side of his face.

"Reeves was right behind me, sir!" Camille yelled. Delaney crawled through the snow to what was left of the radioman. They found him half buried, his face blown away by the blast. The smashed remnants of the squad radio were scattered around in bits of glass, metal and wire.

Delaney tried to think. "Bravo Five's been overrun, most likely. That means we got no mortar support now."

Camille nodded vigorously. "And the ROKs already bugged out--I saw several platoons of them running like rabbits through that gully over there, not half an hour ago."

Delaney slammed a fist into the snow. Jesus Christ, it was cold tonight. "We're exposed as hell up here. I don't care what Regiment says--we gotta pull back now."

They both ducked as a click and a whistle passed by scant yards overhead. The next barrage of rounds peppered the back slope of the ravine. The concussion knocked over a big tree, which cracked at the base of its trunk and came crashing, thudding down into the snow.

"The command post?" Camille asked.

"Yeah. You go that way, round up any stragglers. Assemble at the hut in twenty minutes."

"Yes, sir. You need a weapon, sir."

Delaney indicated the half-buried corpse of the radioman. "I'll use Reeves'. Go, man, go!"

Camille scampered off, dodging small-arms fire as he scurried down the meandering gully. Delaney cringed at the sound--Chicom infantry with burp guns were crawling all over these hills. Scores of them, maybe hundreds. And if he didn't gather what was left of Bravo Two-Eight and get the hell out of Dodge fast, they'd soon be surrounded and cut off.

Delaney didn't particularly relish the thought of spending Thanksgiving in a Red POW camp, or worse.

He did a little reconnoitering himself as he angled his way up the next slope, toward the mud and thatch hut that served as company command post. Cautiously, he scrambled and squatted, listening, squinting, occasionally whispering as loud as he dared: "Bravo Two-Eight, anybody there? Bravo Two-Eight, fall back! Fall back to the hut--"

And each time, his whispered entreaties were answered the same way. Staccato burp gun fire opened up--Chinese Type 51, 7.62-millimeter rounds slicing through the brush, spraying snow all around him. Delaney bit his lip...the Red bastards were everywhere. Two-Eight had simply disintegrated under the assault.

Ten minutes later, Delaney had made the crude hut and ran right into a firefight. Outside the south perimeter marker--a teepee of ration cans strung together--he heard twigs snap and turned, just as a squad of Red infantrymen opened up from a ridgeline overhead. Delaney fell hard--his arm was on fire--several rounds had hit. He rolled over, trying to get his good arm free to squeeze off a few rounds of his own but the Chicoms were on him. He looked up wide-eyed as a bayonet flashed through the night but the Red never completed his lunge. Someone--it turned out to be Corporal Betters, one of Camille's men--had dropped him with a well-timed burst from the hut.

For the next five minutes, in a driving blizzard, Reds and GIs dueled hand to hand, a rumble in the snow that had Delaney twisting and turning to keep from being bayoneted. He scrambled to his feet and pushed off a chink who had just been shot, dumping the body behind him. Another Red was six feet away, kneeling, just hoisting his carbine to fire but Delaney finished him with a neat burst to the forehead. The chink's head exploded like a watermelon and he crumpled.

"Get the hell outta here!" Delaney yelled. "How Able and I mean right now!" Betters and Camille didn't have to be told twice. The three scampered away from the hut, as Delaney lit the thatch siding with a cigarette lighter. Flames licked up the siding and roof in seconds, lending momentary warmth to the air. Delaney peeled off to catch up with the others, hoping the fire would gut the command post and destroy anything useful before the Reds came back in platoon strength. There were maps inside and regimental orders, along with boxes of ammo and some frozen C-rations. But Delaney wasn't worried about any of that.

They just had to get the hell off that mountaintop before it was too late.

No John Wayne stands for this boy tonight, he thought, as he hustled to keep up with what was left of Two Eight.

The Red Chinese had hit them hard, no doubt about it. Battalion strength, maybe more, Delaney figured, and the bastards had just materialized out of nowhere, rising like ghostly wraiths in the nighttime blizzard, covered in mustard-yellow quilted jackets, canvas shoes, a dull red star on their fur caps. For the past hour, Delaney had been trying to organize an orderly retreat, a pullback south southwest from Unsan, to consolidate with the rest of the First Cav. Those were the last orders Major Towns had given him, now several hours old. Was Towns even still alive? The whole company had gotten scattered in the Red assault and pinned down. Many units had been shredded and overrun. It was already nearly daylight and the men of Two Eight were cold, hungry, exhausted and frightened. More than one squad had simply thrown down their weapons and melted away southward, back along the narrow mountain passes.

Delaney and his men spent the next hour reconnoitering the area, gathering up stragglers, trying to restore order to the withdrawal. After Delaney had torched the hut, they set out along the lower slopes of a barren, snowy ridgeline, darting from tree stump to boulder, trying to avoid Chicom fire. Chink infantry had infested all the hills in Two-Eight's sector like ants and they swarmed to the attack that way too, whistles and bugles and horns blowing like some mad symphony.

They trekked on through pitch black lit with occasional flares--light snow was still swirling on a stiff Siberian wind--thumps of mortars still going off somewhere to the west. Delaney swore under his breath. Fuckin' idiots in Tokyo. He'd been skeptical from the beginning about MacArthur's orders: Roll north, boys, the Supreme Commander had intoned. All the way to the Yalu River. And the latest promise--Jesus!--our boys'll finish off the enemy this fall and be home for Christmas.

Delaney wanted to puke. Three fourths of Bravo Two-Eight was never coming home.

He had a general idea that he and Camille and Betters should head south-southwest. A few miles up the road from the town of Unsan was a small farm. Towns and the Battalion staff were there--if they hadn't already bugged out south. But two miles north of the farm, at a bend in the ridgeline, they ran into trouble.

Camille went down first, mortally wounded in the face. Delaney did what he could for the boy. The young lieutenant's left cheek was shattered and his ear half shot off. Delaney used half-frozen oil rags from his sack to make a quick field dressing but the kid was losing blood too fast. Bullets whined overhead as Betters emptied clip after clip at the Reds not thirty yards in front of them. Finally, Delaney had to give up. He motioned to Betters.

Let's try to flank 'em uphill.

The two of them broke off the engagement and stumbled up icy and rocky ground, trying to keep the low scrubby bushes for what little cover there was. Only the blackness of the night kept them from being picked off. But they made the top of the ridge, amazingly enough. Delaney could hear motion below them--Reds were inching their way toward Camille's position.

A few sharp guttural commands broke the quiet, then he heard the shots and knew Camille was gone.

At least he didn't suffer long.

Sick to his stomach, Delaney pressed on toward the winding frozen dirt lane that led to the farmhouse. He had an idea, if they could make the CP before the main Red force overran it.

Battalion had a small issue of signaling flares--colored flares for tactical use. If he could get in quick, he could light off three red flares in quick succession, followed by three blue ones. If anyone from Third Battalion was still left in the surrounding hills, they'd recognize the pattern from maneuvers last spring--Fall back to the MSR (Main Supply Route). That way, there'd be at least a chance of regrouping and conducting some kind of orderly withdrawal.

Delaney and Betters scrambled down the icy slope of the hill, crabbing sideways through broken rock and knee deep snow drifts. Somewhere behind them, they heard a welcome sound as the deep bass Booms! of 105s going off reverberated around the hills. First Cav had artillery support from several batteries dug in around Unsan itself.

Delaney grinned at the prospect of 105-millimeter shells raining death down on the Reds.

"Fuckin' about time, sir," Betters muttered. Above them, a cold gray fog had set in, backlit now with the lightning flashes of the Unsan batteries to the south.

Ahead of them, in between the thumps of mortar fire and the deeper, earth-rattling booms of heavier artillery, Delaney heard voices. He grabbed Betters by his poncho and slung him to the ground. They bellycrawled to an outpost of tree stumps and boulders and peered gingerly down slope.

It was the Battalion CP all right, the rude clapboard farmhouse with the sagging roof. He could smell the latrine pots on the wind. But the whole clearing was thick was Reds, hundreds of them.

In a wild frenzy, the Chinese infantry were tearing at ration boxes dumped on the ground, scattering cans of beans and Hershey bar wrappers everywhere. An overturned Jeep blocked the entrance. Beside it were sprawled several GIs. Two Red bastards were picking through their jackets while a third was struggling to pull a dead GI's boots off.

Delaney boiled but bit his lip. There was nothing he could do for the poor sons of bitches now. Betters swallowed so hard it could be heard several feet away. And the signal flares were inside.

Delaney froze. He'd heard something. Behind them. He listened, chopping Betters' arm to shut him up.

There it was again. In between the mortar thumps and the heavier 105s, a quiet swooshing sound, light feet for sure, snow muffling the faint tread of--

\--and the whole side of the hill exploded in gunfire--

Delaney had to think fast but he was tired and his reflexes were dulled with fatigue. He sprang forward for a narrow defile just as an entire Red platoon opened up on them. Rifle fire raked the tiny outcropping where he'd just been. He fell heavily and rallied to get his gun free. He rammed a fresh clip home--it was his last one-- and sprayed the hillside behind them wildly.

A terrific explosion burned his eyes and face and he caught a vague sight of Betters--the lanky corporal from Oklahoma--cartwheeling in the air. Another explosion rocked the ground ten feet away and Delaney stared in numb disbelief as a chink potato-masher--a dud grenade--came tumbling out of the debris. It rolled and came to rest right next to his leg, wooden stick handle pointed straight up.

Shouts filled the air. Delaney looked for Betters but he was gone. Bloody froth stained the snow. Delaney could no longer hear very well--the shouts were drowned out by a wild roaring river in his ears, his eyes dulled to slits by the concussion of the blasts.

He could only think of one thing: somehow make it to the roadway junction several miles south of the farm. There was a split there, probably some MPs, a few Motor Transport pukes and Unsan was a short jeep ride away.

He struggled to his feet but it was like swimming up river. The world danced and spun and he nearly pitched headlong down the hillside.

Captain Mark Delaney, from Carson City, California, didn't get very far. Stumbling sideways across the slopes of the hill in the freezing dark, through blowing snow and sleet stinging in his face, he soon ran right into a Chicom ambush. In truth, for nearly an hour's struggle, he had only traveled a few hundred yards.

The Reds pumped sixteen rounds into Delaney before he finally stopped twitching. For good measure, even before they went for his boots and his pockets, he was bayoneted in the gut and the thigh, but he felt no pain by then, only cold.

In the final eternal seconds of his life, Delaney was quiet, even thoughtful. He thought he heard a plane somewhere overhead, a lone airplane, maybe on a recon mission, maybe waiting for dawn, ready to blast away at the Red hordes.

If only that pilot had an atomic bomb, he thought. He remembered the trip he had made to Hiroshima in early '46. First Cav had been on its way to maneuvers somewhere in southern Kyushu. A flat rubble-strewn wasteland where only the wind and the rats dared move--that was all Hiroshima had seemed to him back then.

He was sad now. And angry too.

Goddamn it, we got the bomb! For Chrissakes, we ought to use it!
CHAPTER 1

Friday, November 24, 1950

7:00 a.m.

Tokyo

The day after Thanksgiving had dawned cold, gray, and drizzly in Tokyo and Brigadier General Paul Craft, U.S. Army Far Eastern Command, pulled his olive-drab field jacket tighter as he took the steps into the columned entrance of the Dai Ichi Insurance Company building three at a time. He saluted the pair of MPs at the desk inside, flashed his ID badge and signed in. Security had been tightened recently at SCAP GHQ, General Headquarters Supreme Command Allied Powers. There were Communists and Red sympathizers all about the Japanese capital these days and the "police action" in Korea had taken a decidedly nasty turn recently. Craft went through another security barricade. The detail at the building's main entrance had been doubled in the past two weeks.

The elevator sentry took him to the sixth floor and Craft endured yet another ID check before he was allowed into the warren of offices comprising Far Eastern Command and SCAP. Wood-paneled offices along one wall gave onto a small conference room outside of which a row of flags and banners hung on short standards. A white sign over the cornice proclaimed "War Room. Beneath it, in large letters, another sign read "Secret."

Craft walked briskly to the war room, checking his watch. The air was heavy and quiet, like the weather outside. Inside, papers and maps were strewn among several tables.

General of the Army Douglas MacArthur had just last night returned from a quick inspection trip to the front lines in Korea. Even to Paul Craft, who often went several weeks at a time without seeing the General in person, MacArthur seemed uneasy that morning. Craft knew from gossip around SCAP that "the Old Man" was dissatisfied with the situation in Korea, especially the slow progress of the Marines and the Eighth Army toward the Yalu. MacArthur fiddled with his corncob pipe as the staff gathered and settled themselves in. Promptly at 0700 hours, like a machine being turned on, MacArthur got to his feet and began pacing the small room. He paused at a tactical map of the Eighth Army sector in northwest Korea and tapped it with the stem of his pipe.

"Willoughby, what has G-2 got for me, this morning?"

Major General Charles Willoughby was intelligence officer for Far Eastern Command. He was a stocky, florid man, a long time member of MacArthur's inner circle, known to all as the Bataan Gang.

"General, we got more reports over night of increasing Chinese infiltration along the northern sectors. I've had to up my estimates to several divisions' worth now, based on POW reports."

MacArthur chewed thoughtfully at his pipe stem, continuing to pace. "You still think the situation's manageable?"

"We do, sir. As of last night, there's still no convincing evidence the Chinese have moved anything more than a few volunteer regiments across the border. They're scattered, uncoordinated."

"But you just said division strength."

Willoughby coughed. The General did not like surprises. "Total strength across the front, sir. We're pretty sure we're not dealing with regular units of the People's Liberation Army. Volunteers, militia, that sort of thing."

"What makes you so sure?"

Willoughby straightened some papers in front of him. "Our aerial reconnaissance would have detected anything bigger, sir. But we've seen nothing."

MacArthur seemed mollified. "Gentlemen, we need to keep an eye on the situation. Eighth Army is today starting its final offensive north. And the Marines are already encamped around the Chosin Reservoir. They're stalled for some reason. I'll have to light another fire under Ned Almond and Smith again. We have to push on, before the real winter sets in." MacArthur stopped pacing, just long enough to relight his pipe. "I don't need to tell you that this Chinese business introduces some new and worrisome factors."

Paul Craft listened to the discussion for a few moments. Attending a SCAP staff meeting was like having an audience with the King. And, as he scanned the assembled faces, he mentally ticked off all the King's men: there was Willoughby, Far Eastern Command G-2, and Brigadier General Courtney Whitney, nominally chief of SCAP's Government Section, also an original member of the Bataan Gang. Opposite Craft was a balding parrot named General Doyle Hickey, the King's Chief of Staff. And General Edwin "Pinky" Wright next to him. Wright was G-3 for Far Eastern Command, and Craft's boss. General Emmett "Rosie" O'Donnell, chief of Far Eastern Air Forces (FEAF) Bomber Command was sitting in, ready to detail the Air Force's recent interdiction campaign across North Korea's Yalu River frontier.

There were a few others too: Colonel Kades, the deputy chief of staff, Colonel Bunker, MacArthur's staff secretary, furiously taking notes.

And Craft himself, deputy to the G-3. He'd been invited to the daily staff briefing to outline a new plan for MacArthur. Reflexively, Paul Craft clutched tighter at the zippered notebook padlocked to a cuff on his wrist.

The briefing continued. "--all the way from Taechon to the Chong'chon River," Pinky Wright was saying. "Now, if FEAF could give us some close air support--"

"You'll get it," O'Donnell snapped gruffly. "I can put two squadrons of B-26s over Unsan and Huichon, fully loaded with frag, HE and incendiaries by 1200 hours today."

"--as I was saying," Wright went on, "with close air support, we can get Eighth Army off and running at a brisk pace. Including the 24th, provided they get their supply situation at Sinanju straightened out."

MacArthur was pleased. "Excellent, Pinky. That's the kind of news I like to hear. Hit the enemy hard and keep hitting him where he least expects it. General Craft," SCAP turned his attention to the zippered notebook. "Pinky tells me you've got something."

Craft unlocked the padlocked cuff from his wrist. "Yes, sir. It's the plan I wrote a synopsis of last week for you, sir."

MacArthur was intrigued. He sat down, steepling his fingers on the heavily varnished map table. "Which plan was that, Paul?"

"The plan I've drawn up, General, would completely sever the Chinese from this war. At the source. At Manchuria. If this plan is adopted and executed, the Red Chinese will not be a threat to anyone for a very long time."

MacArthur's lips tightened. He was mindful of the running feud he had had with the Joint Chiefs about bombing Chinese bases in Manchuria, denying the enemy any sanctuary.

"I scanned your first brief last week. Go ahead."

Craft took a deep breath. "General, as we all know, the Chinese continue to increase their level of infiltration into the Korean theater. This plan, which I call Operation Gallant Flag, is based on the assumption that such infiltration and mobilization of forces continues, indeed that it may even increase. Without the ability to interdict such a flow of forces southward, the UN forces could soon face a very grave situation. This plan assumes we have permission for an extensive campaign, north of the Yalu River."

For the next hour, General Paul Craft detailed the most daring, risky yet potentially effective plan imaginable. Craft proposed, much to the astonishment of the rest of the staff, that SCAP approve the organization, equipping, training and operation of a covert task force, to be known as Gallant Flag, to carry out high altitude, strategic atomic bomb strikes against selected targets in Red China. Most of the targets were in Manchuria. One, however, was Peking itself, targeting the military and political leadership of the newly proclaimed People's Republic.

MacArthur was intrigued. When Craft was done, he and the staff spent the next hour trying to pick holes in the plan but it was apparent that Craft had done his homework.

O'Donnell had the most serious objections. "General, only the B-29 can carry atom bombs. Right now, all my Superforts are dedicated to interdiction up North. I don't think I can spare any for this kind of mission. And where do we get a few extra atom bombs anyway?"

MacArthur was calm. "The Joint Chiefs have authorized preparations for an atomic strike, Rosie." He knew full well that was not quite true but O'Donnell could be a loose cannon sometimes. There was indeed such a proposal floating around the Pentagon. But no authorization had been issued. And only the President could authorize actual use of such weapons. Still, the theater commander had to prepare for any eventuality, didn't he?

Craft reminded them, "General, the Gallant Flag plan proposes several ways for atomic bombs to be transported into this theater. Given intelligence concerns about Russian and other spies in Japan, the normal routing may not be the best."

"What do you mean by that?"

With MacArthur's permission, Craft continued. There were, he informed them, a small group of like-minded officers in the Army and the Air Force who felt the Chinese threat needed to be neutralized before it could affect the war. In very general terms, these men were aware of ideas floating around to bomb the Chinese mainland, though not the specifics of Gallant Flag. Moreover, there was also a very small but influential group in the nuclear weapons community in the U.S. who were willing to help furnish nuclear devices, under cover of an upcoming nuclear test series at the Pacific Proving Grounds to make the strikes possible.

"Security considerations are critical," Craft said. "If the Russians get any notion we're bringing atom bombs into the Korean theater--"

"--we'll be facing a whole new ball game," O'Donnell finished the thought. "Unless we bring 'em in for their deterrent value."

MacArthur got up and started pacing again. "We can't ignore what the Red Chinese are doing. I've told the President that the Chinese have already missed their best tactical opportunity to intervene and that was before Inchon." He pointed his pipe stem at Willoughby. "If G-2 is right, then we're just facing a few regiments. Tenth Corps and Eighth Army should be able to handle them with no problem. More than likely, these are just Chinese militia detailed to Kim Il-Sung to protect a small base in the mountains for later guerrilla action. I've told Almond and Walker to smash all resistance before Christmas so we can get our boys out of there."

"And if G-2 is wrong, sir?" General Hickey asked, warily eyeing Willoughby's reaction.

MacArthur clenched the pipe between his teeth. "Then the battle is joined, men, and we may as well be ready for it. As theater commander, it's my responsibility to run this war the best way I can, to be ready for anything. Any commander who does less is guilty of criminal negligence." SCAP paused at a map of the world, taped to the paneling behind the door. He knew he had no specific authorization from Bradley and the Joint Chiefs to bring atomic warheads into the combat theater. But he'd heard nuclear talk before from the Chiefs. Plans existed. Warheads were available. Hadn't Marshall himself cabled him not two months ago, saying, "We want you to feel unhampered tactically in conducting operations north of the 38th parallel?"

MacArthur sensed his staff was expecting a decision from him. Like an actor with lines to finish, he could not disappoint them.

"The prevarication and lack of direction from Washington on this business of bombing China is criminal. The very purpose of any war is victory, not prolonged indecision. If we don't act on the situation now, the war will drag on for months, maybe years. And we'll pay for our indecision with the lives of American boys."

MacArthur stood at the end of the map table. "I can't countenance such negligence. Not and bear the title of Supreme Commander, knowing it's in my power to do something about it. General Craft?"

"Yes, sir?"

"I approve the initial phases of this plan, this Operation Gallant Flag. You've done excellent work here. But I'm approving with certain provisions. I'm reserving the right to cancel the operation at any time. You'll have any and all resources you need, with the full authority of this office behind you. Is that understood by everyone here?"

A chorus of nods and yessirs circled the room.

"Obviously, this operation is classified Most Top Secret. And I expect every man to give General Craft his full cooperation."

Satisfied with the decision, MacArthur sat down and leaned forward across the table on his forearms.

"Now, gentlemen, is the moment that History has given us. The battle we've been expecting is joined. This is the historic moment when Communism must be confronted and defeated on the battlefield.

"General Craft, you will provide my office weekly progress reports. When can Gallant Flag be ready to go?"

Without hesitation, Craft replied, "January 1, 1951, sir."

"Very good." SCAP ended the briefing. "A new year, a new beginning. And a new order in the world."

11-23-50 (Thanksgiving night)

9:45 p.m.

Los Alamos, New Mexico

As parties went, the Thanksgiving Day bash for stay-behind employees of T Division was fairly subdued. Held in the assembly room of the old Ranch School annex at the end of Central Avenue, the dinner, dance and piano playing seemed forced, even sad, to Dr. Albert Ranier. He sat out most of the late-evening festivities and hunkered down in a corner of the cramped, smoky room with several glasses of his favorite apple schnapps and a fresh pack of Lucky Strikes. While the others laughed and waltzed and joked across the parquet floor, Ranier smoked and sipped his schnapps, indifferent to all the gaiety swirling around him. For the better part of three hours, he became little more than furniture, a brooding fixture rooted to the darkest corners of the hall.

Tolkach noticed him, several times. Two minutes after ten, he decided to do something about the dour Czech physicist who sat like a bespectacled Sphinx on a tattered bar stool.

"Albert, you've not danced a single minute with Galina. What's the matter with you tonight? It's Thanksgiving."

Galina, Mrs. Ranier, was out of hearing, engaged in animated laughter across the room. Ranier sniffed at the dregs of his schnapps, wanting more.

"I'm bored."

"You're always bored at parties. Didn't you go to parties in Czechoslovakia? Why do you come, if you're bored?"

"Galina drags me here, you know that."

Tolkach counted five glasses. He clucked at Ranier. "That's nearly a whole bottle, Albert. You leave any schnapps for me?"

Ranier snorted. "You don't like schnapps, Edvard."

"Neither will you, in about two hours. You eat anything tonight? Got something on your stomach?"

Ranier shrugged and downed the last drops defiantly. He made an elaborate show of how precisely he could situate the glass with the others on the bar.

Tolkach squeezed the physicist's shoulder. "You've been plotting the end of the world again, haven't you?"

Ranier shrugged him off. "I'm okay."

Tolkach lit a cigarette, a Camel, and offered one to Ranier. He took it and lit up, blowing smoke hard through his nostrils.

"Let's go outside, Albert. It's cooler and the air's fresh with pine scent. Party's winding down anyway."

The two of them squeezed through some diehard jitterbugging couples and went out into the backyard of the school, finding a wooden porch railing overlooking a parking lot. A faint Tommy Dorsey tune wafted on the chilly night breeze, a car radio at the end of the drive. Inside, two shadows moved languidly, embraced in love.

Ranier's face glowed in the red light of the cigarette tip. He faced Tolkach and smoothed back the bushy side lobes of his hair.

"You know, Edvard, it's like I've said before: Stalin is the basic problem."

Tolkach sniffed. "Stalin is always the problem, isn't he? This has become an obsession with you. Let it go...what's done is done."

Ranier exploded. "How can I forgive the monsters who put my mother in prison? And then murdered her? You have no right to--" He stopped abruptly when several couples joined them on the porch deck, seeking cooler air.

Tolkach nodded to Helmut Witmer, head of T Division's instrument lab and his pretty Danish wife Ingrid. Witmer nursed a cocktail, his eyebrows arching inquisitively. "Did I interrupt something here? A serious technical discussion?"

Tolkach grabbed Rainier's elbow. "Dr. Witmer. Mrs.Witmer. A pleasure to see you tonight. We were just on our way out for a little stroll." He guided Ranier off the porch and around the front of the Mechanics' Lodge building that now served as an assembly hall. They headed for Central Avenue. To their right, white gateposts of the main security checkpoint shone in bright floodlights. MPs lounged in Jeeps all about the entrance. Holiday traffic had dwindled to a trickle out the East Gate Road. The MPs paid them no attention.

Tolkach and Ranier turned left, heading up the street past the old Fuller Lodge, now Technical Administration at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. Bathtub Row was mostly dark tonight as those who could had left the compound for friends and family elsewhere. At the 15th Street intersection, they made a left and strolled on in near darkness between rows of Quonset huts and aluminum shacks, past wooden signs labeled Machine Shop, Metrology Lab and Physical Chemistry. The heart of Los Alamos' technical area was normally awash in pedestrian traffic but on this Thanksgiving Day night, the shops were dark and the street empty. Only an occasional pool of yellow light from crude streetlamps disturbed the night.

Ranier flicked away his cigarette and lit up another. "I tell you, Edvard, something must be done. It must! We've all seen what Stalin's up too. No more Uncle Joe, eh? First, he liberates us with his Red Army. Then he kills all the decent politicians. His own thugs take over. When people have the audacity to protest, they're taken away and shot too. He's not going to stop, I'm telling you. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland today. Tomorrow, who knows? Germany, France, who can say?"

Tolkach had heard all this before. Best to humor the physicist. "And what are you going to do, Albert? Drop an atom bomb on the Kremlin?"

"Don't mock me like that. In fact...it's not so far-fetched an idea--"

"Come, come, now, you're drunk. You don't know what you're saying." He tried to drape a friendly arm around Ranier but the physicist shrugged it off.

"Listen to me," Ranier hissed. "Stalin's not a god. He's going to die someday. There are people...there are plans. Assassinations can be accomplished. It's a technical problem, as Witmer likes to say. Like our atomic bombs. There are always solutions. We just have to find them."

"Albert...please, lets get you back to--"

"No, listen to me, please. I've been working late at the lab. You know that."

"Yes, yes, on the instability problem. We've all--"

"And other ideas." Ranier gave a sort of snorting half laugh. "Yesterday, I told Galina I wanted to volunteer for the Army. Fight Communists in Korea."

"What did she say?"

The men paused as a pair of white-helmeted MPs sauntered by. They nodded, half-saluting, with the sort of smirk the physicists had come to expect. Soldiers thought Los Alamos was a freak show, full of funny-looking people with strange accents. Sometimes, Tolkach thought they were right. The MPs snickered and turned down an alley between two shacks.

Ranier went on. "She laughed. What do you think? In any case, it's not quite so impossible to drop an atom bomb on the Kremlin as you think. An interesting technical problem."

"A fantasy of a drunken physicist, I'm afraid."

"No, you're mistaken, Edvard. I've actually thought about it. I've actually made plans."

Ranier and Tolkach reached the end of 15th Street. A wooden sign, hand-lettered and illuminated by crude spotlights said Ordnance Lab. High Explosives. Behind a wire barricade, the clapboard structure had been expanded several times, growing aluminum wings to either side, each one grafted onto the side of the main building, really a crude cottage was all it was. Behind the main structure, concrete barriers marked the test and handling cells for bomb detonating explosives.

Tolkach steered Ranier in a wide circle. "Let's go back. It's late. Galina will be worrying about you."

Ranier stopped in mid-stride. "Edvard, you understand what I am saying. Come. I want to show you something."

Tolkach had come to regard Albert Ranier, brilliant though he was, with a growing mixture of amusement and pity. He'd become something of a caricature lately, and others on the staff weren't as charitable. Was he unstable, perhaps mentally ill? Hard to say. Tolkach knew how bitter he was about how the Communists had seized Czechoslovakia two years ago. Then, his mother imprisoned in Prague. Now, she had died, so the letter had informed Ranier the day before Thanksgiving. Ranier was like the Composition B that the technicians fabricated behind the Ordnance Lab. Fragile, unstable, ready to go off at the slightest touch.

He needs help. Maybe Witmer--

"I wasn't bluffing about what I just said," Ranier blurted out. "An atom bomb just for the Kremlin. A birthday present for Josef Vissarionovich himself. Let me show you something."

"Albert...it's late."

"No, no, only a minute, a quick detour. I promise you'll be intrigued."

They hiked up an alleyway to a small aluminum shack, hardly more than a shed. The sign outside read: Calibration Facility. Somehow, Ranier had a key. He unlocked the front door--it was padlocked--pushed in and threw a light switch.

Inside the shack was lined with shelves of meters, gauges, spools of wire, and assorted instruments. Ranier went to one shelf and pulled it away from the wall. Behind the shelf, painted to resemble the corrugations of the shack, was a small metal box. Ranier produced another key and opened it.

Tolkach peered in. "Albert, these are detonators." The box had four blasting-cap heads, squat cylinders with the DuPont tags still attached. Lead wires had been tied at the base of each one. "What the--what on earth are detonators doing here? This isn't a secure area?"

Ranier nodded, a smirk on his face. "Barometric switches too. And an air pressure type detonator, right over there."

Tolkach stood up, puzzled. "These devices should be in the vault, or in Ordnance. Or maybe over at J Division. Not here. What's going on?"

Ranier couldn't resist a smile. "It's for Uncle Joe, like I told you. I'm putting together a birthday gift...a little present he'll have no trouble appreciating."

Tolkach felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. This was madness. "Albert, you're insane. This...is...it's lunacy. You can't be serious."

Ranier pulled out one of the air pressure detonators and admired it. "It's a simple device, don't you think? A thin strip of metal with a tiny bubble of extremely thin metal forged in the center. Placed directly underneath the very electrical contact that triggers the Comp B explosion. Just invert it when you set it in. When the bomb falls into the thicker part of the atmosphere, air pressure increases and the bubble snaps back to its original position. It simply strikes the contact, completes the circuit and sets off a chain reaction. Clever, don't you think?"

Tolkach felt his heart racing. He didn't know what to do, what to say, what to think. Albert was brilliant--no one doubted that--but at times, he seemed unstable. Even Witmer said Ranier should be watched, and he was right. But that was the Army's job, wasn't it?

"Albert, this is some kind of joke, isn't it? A sick joke. Look, you've had a bottle of schnapps and it's very late and--"

"--and I'm quite lucid, Edvard, thank you." Ranier's smirk faded into a frown. "Would it surprise you so much if I said there are others who agree with me?"

"We all agree with you, Albert. No one disputes the evils of Communism. That's why a lot of us work here in the first place."

"More could be done," Ranier insisted. "I am doing more. We're at war, Edvard. For God's sake, for humanity's sake, we're at war and we can't play by schoolyard rules. People are dying, careers are being ruined. Look..." he put the detonator back in its box and closed the lid, latching the padlock. With his shoulder, he shoved the shelf back into position. "...I've got friends, some of them you know, up at Hanford."

Tolkach folded his arms. He glared out the open door of the shed. He didn't like listening to Albert's rantings but the man was becoming a menace. A security risk, for Christ's sake.

"--Whit Browning's one of them. You remember him from Metallurgy, when we all worked on the Gadget for Oppie?"

"I remember."

"Browning's got a small group. We're all concerned. Browning's diverting a small quantity of plutonium every month. He's already stashed five ounces, by now."

"I suppose no one misses the stuff, either. Just throw it down the sink, eh Albert?"

"Don't mock me. Browning accounts for the discrepancy by logging the diversion as 'impure, out of specification, to be disposed of.' In reality, it's bomb-grade material. He'll have ten ounces in another month."

"Preposterous. You're hallucinating."

Ranier laughed. "You think so? Ask yourself how many Czech and Austrian immigrants work here at Los Alamos? Or at Hanford? We're only a small group now, a small army. But we are waging war, Edvard, and before long, you'll have to decide for yourself. Think about that."

At first, Tolkach was sure Ranier was making it all up. But the Czech physicist was adamant. He insisted Tolkach come to their office at T Division several blocks away. Both worked in a spartan cubbyhole in a small hut, covered with books and papers and chalkboard scribblings. The wooden floor creaked as the two men squeezed inside, between stacks of monographs. In one corner, Ranier had a small cast-iron safe. He spun the lock dial and opened it, extracting several handwritten pages. He insisted Tolkach read.

He did so, scanning quickly, then more deliberately, becoming more and more alarmed as he read on. The pages were hurriedly scribbled notes but they detailed everything Ranier had been saying. The amounts of plutonium to be diverted every month, the location of initiator and tamper material, high explosive formulas, fusing and arming circuit diagrams, drawings of casing designs, everything needed to make a bomb. It was all laid out on paper, all of it TOP SECRET, or higher in classification. And he'd already seen the detonators Ranier had stashed away.

"Why are you showing me this?"

Ranier was firm. "I need your help."

"This is madness. Absolute madness, Albert. You'll never be able to make a bomb and hide it."

Ranier sat down heavily in the creaking wooden chair. "Madness is facing a threat and doing nothing about it. That's madness."

"We are doing something, for God's sake! We are building atomic bombs here, you know!"

Ranier smiled again, patronizing. "My dear, Dr. Tolkach, where do you think these bombs will go after we build them? Into storage. Into inventory. They will never be used for anything. It's all a big game. But I am not fooled and you shouldn't be either. We're fighting a war and you can't fight a war by withholding the very weapon that could end the war. That is immorality of the highest order. No less a man than General Douglas MacArthur has said so."

Tolkach took a deep breath. His head ached and the pain had started radiating down into his neck. "What do you want me to do?"

Ranier squeezed Tolkach on the shoulder, father to recalcitrant child. "I know you have contacts. In the Army. The Air Force. You've been out to the Pacific Proving Grounds. I want you to arrange a meeting with some of these men. My idea--our idea--is simple enough: we are going to make a little bomb--nothing big. A few dozen kilotons is all. The bomb is to be dropped on Moscow. Or maybe somewhere in Korea. It doesn't matter. What matters is doing something, anything, to beat back the Communists before it's too late. Before--" and he was almost in tears "--before others die. How many mothers, how many fathers and innocent people have to be enslaved before we act? That is my concern. I can't save my own family any longer. They're gone now. Maybe I can save others."

"These contacts--these men. You know that will take time. You have to go through channels."

"Nonsense. There are many others who think as I do. Six weeks ago, I met an Army officer, a General Craft. He came to the States for a meeting. In Washington. We met at the Pentagon. We talked. He too is a sympathizer and he said there were others in the Pacific. Far Eastern Command is full of them, men who hate Communism, men willing to do something about it."

Tolkach felt only pity for Ranier. And embarrassment. Maybe if Witmer were less abrasive, the Czech physicist wouldn't have felt so isolated.

Tolkach toyed briefly with the idea of alerting the Army. Maybe even filling out a security notice on Ranier but he just couldn't, out of respect and sympathy for the man. The two of them talked but Tolkach tried to humor him as best he could. He had already decided to talk with Witmer on Monday. Maybe some leave, a few days in California, would do the trick.

Ranier was insistent and finally, reluctantly, Tolkach gave in. He agreed to call up an old Air Force wing commander he'd once known casually in Los Angeles, just to see what could be done.

"What's his name?"

"Clayton LaSalle," Tolkach told him. "I don't even know if he's in the States. Maybe there's an organization you can join or something."

"Good, good." Ranier rubbed his hands together. "It's a step. You won't regret it."

Mollified by Tolkach's half-hearted promises, Ranier pulled himself back together. The two of them left the tiny office and walked back through a cold wind and deserted streets to the remnants of the party at the Ranch School.

Outside the Mechanics Lodge, huddled in scarf and fur coat, Galina Ranier stood waiting, squinting in the dark, hands on her hips. Her face was lined with worry.

11-24-50

10:30 a.m.

People's Liberation Army Headquarters,

Chang-an Street

Peking

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles."

Sun Tzu

c. 500 B.C.

Mid-day morning in Peking was a seething riot of bicycles and pedicabs along Chang-an Avenue. A cold misty fog gripped the city, yet even in the depths of winter, the streetsweeper battalions were everywhere, brushing off the last vestiges of an overnight snowfall. Marshal Peng Dehuai noted their efficient symphony of motion with the satisfaction of an officer unaccustomed to such orderly parade-ground drill.

If only the People's Volunteers were as well disciplined, he thought to himself. No enemy could defeat us, not even the Americans. But reality returned to the Marshal's thoughts as the staff car braked to a sudden halt, and was soon engulfed in the bicycle hordes. Not even the Great Helmsman himself could alter the capital's daily tidal surges of traffic.

Marshal Zhu De, commander-in-chief of the People's Liberation Army, would simply have to start the staff briefing a little later than usual.

Marshal Peng had seen many a Peking dawn and he was sure that no other city in the world could match it. At certain times of the year, commonly in the spring, occasionally in the winter, an almost imperceptible pall of fine dust lingered over the capital. It produced a quality of light, at once both gray and yellow, to be found only in this city and its surrounding Hopei province. The light was breathed as much as seen, and its effects were strangely equivocal; objects suddenly blurred or sharpened, as though some superhuman finger were tampering with the focus. Even in the grip of a late November ice fog, the same, hazy ethereal quality cloaked the labyrinthine alleyways and squares of Red China's first city.

Peng was thoughtful, even appreciative of the scene. It took his mind off of what was sure to be a difficult staff briefing. Today, hard decisions would have to be made.

After an interminable hour of fitful honking and braking, the black Cadillac staff car with the single red star emblazoned on its doors pulled into a damp courtyard in the center of a warehouse block. Less than half a mile to the west of the old grain bins and sorting rooms, the Forbidden City's massive stone walls rose though the bare branches of elm and linden trees but Marshal Peng paid them no attention. Briskly, he departed the car, snapped off a perfunctory salute to the Motor Transport detail and made his way into Command Headquarters. A ground level maze of hastily erected bullpens and partitions still clung with the faint odor of grain dust and animal waste. A few more rounds of salutes and curt nods and Peng found himself in what once had been the warehouse overseer's treasury room, and was now a map and conference center for PLA operations throughout northern China and her Manchurian frontiers.

Marshal Zhu De rose from his writing table, saluted and greeted Peng with both arms.

"Comrade, at last, you've made it. I was afraid you might have been kidnapped by American agents."

Peng grimaced, tossing his leather satchel of maps, codes and tactical orders on the table. "Only caught in traffic, Marshal. The others are all here?"

Zhu nodded, pouring green tea into a porcelain cup for Peng. The Commander-in-Chief of the Chinese People's Liberation Army indicated several other officers: General Song Shilun, commander of the Ninth Army Group and General Li Tianyu, commanding the Thirteenth. Both men rose to greet Peng warmly. General Xie Fang, chief of staff, hovered over a huge map on the opposite side of the table. He added his greetings as well.

Marshal Zhu waved everyone to the map table. An elevation and terrain detail of northern Korea was spread out before them.

"Comrades, this is the tactical situation today, less than twelve hours before the start of our Second Offensive." Zhu found a metal pointer and identified the enemy and Chinese units and positions from west to east. "Our troop strength has now reached nine armies, some thirty divisions, over 380,000 men. We have over 150,000 men on the eastern front against the enemy's 90,000. We have 230,000 men on the western front, the enemy 130,000. We have superior forces on both fronts."

Peng surveyed the carved wooden dragon's head icons symbolizing the Chinese divisions. Some imaginative staff officer had thought to depict the UN forces with carved wooden blocks that resembled miniature city skylines.

"The logistical problems still worry me," Peng told them. "With the element of surprise, we can push the enemy back about halfway to Pyongyang, maybe to the Chongchon River at best. We don't have the supplies to push much beyond the 39th Parallel. In the spring, with more aid from our Soviet comrades, we may be able to go further south."

"Then, we'll fight with what we have," Zhu said. "As we always have. General Xie, you may begin your briefing of our tactical deployments."

Xie assumed a prominent position at the head of a table. Peng thought he looked like an old goat, squinty-eyed with a hint of a white beard.

"Comrades, we face the American Eighth Army in the west and the combined Tenth Corps in the east. The dividing line is the Taebeck mountain range in the center of the country. We have deployed five armies from General Li's Thirteenth Group. The 38th and 42nd Armies are making the major thrust against South Korean units on the right flank of the Eighth Army, the most vulnerable sector. We intend to drive southwestward and cut off the South Koreans north of the Chongchon River. After that, we can destroy the Koreans piecemeal."

General Song grunted an interruption. "The 40th is still defending in the Yongbyan-Unsan area?"

"That is correct, comrade General," Xie admitted. "Also, the 39th Army will deal with the Eighth Army forces around Taechon. And the 66th will drive down the coast."

Marshal Zhu added, "Mao has given his blessings to this general concept."

Peng sniffed. "The Great Helmsman is most wise." Zhu darkened at the sarcasm but let it pass. He indicated Xie should continue.

"Comrades, our biggest fight will be in the east, against the Tenth Corps, and particularly the First Marine Division. We have deployed General Song's 26th Army around the northern shores of the Chosen Reservoir for this task. The 27th and the 20th Armies have preceded them and are already in forward positions in the mountains around Yudam-ni, here and here." He tapped the map in several places.

Song nodded grimly. "My troops have already made probing attacks west of the reservoir. It appears that the American Marines are attempting to consolidate a strong push up from the Hungnam region on the coast, building supply bases, even an airfield near Hagaru-ri. The longer we let them dig in, the tougher they will be to dislodge. We're going to try and cut the supply route--a single narrow mountain road--at several places to isolate battalion-sized groups and then pick them off one at a time."

"And your supply situation?" Peng asked. "Is it any better now that I have assigned more pack animals and porters to the Ninth?"

Song shrugged. "We have an active supply line all the way back to Linjiang but it's tenuous and hard to maintain with American warplanes constantly harassing our pack trains. Our biggest need is for winter clothing. The 26th Army especially. General Zhang's men were formerly deployed across the straits of Taiwan last summer. In five months, they have marched continuously northward but they still have only the summer weight outfits they had facing the Nationalist dogs. My men are suffering greatly from cold and frostbite."

Peng nodded. He was pensive but guardedly optimistic. "Comrades, we have to deal with the situation as it is. The Americans and the South Koreans are facing the same cold weather. Let me remind everyone--"and he glanced over at Marshal Zhu in particular--"that the offensive has limited objectives: liberating Pyongyang and driving the Americans south of the 38th Parallel if our supplies hold out."

Zhu shifted restlessly. The Chairman and the Military Council dislike talk of limited objectives. "I concur with comrade Marshal Peng but our Party leaders fortunately see things in a broader, strategic light. The ultimate aim of all our offensives is to drive the Americans right off the Korean peninsula."

Peng snorted. "Such grand ideas are impossible unless the present supply situation is fixed and soon."

Zhu darkened. Peng could be gruff at times. Veterans of the Long March were like that. His tongue would get him in trouble one day, Zhu was sure of that. "We should not succumb to defeatism at this late hour, should we, Marshal?"

Xie intervened diplomatically, with a suggestion. "Perhaps, we should review the details of the initial assaults? Agree on tactical objectives, timing, force deployments, backup and contingency plans?"

There were murmurs of assent around the table and Xie quickly dived into the order of battle for both eastern and western sectors. Codes, ciphers and general orders were discussed and put into sequence. The precise phasing of assaults, down to the battalion-level was established. Peng made notations in a small black notebook he carried with him. After his meetings in the capital, he would journey by overnight train to the Manchurian city of Andong. There, he would relay decisions made today to his division commanders at an early morning staff briefing at corps headquarters.

And, for his part, Marshal Zhu promised to press the Military Council for more coolies and porters to handle supplies from Manchuria.

"Marshal Peng," Zhu observed, checking his watch. "It's time for our meeting with the Military Council."

Peng agreed. The Great Helmsman himself would be there, as well as Chou En-Lai and Lin Piao, an old war-horse from the Long March days. "Then we shouldn't keep them waiting. But I must be on the Andong train by 1400 hours. I've got a staff briefing at midnight with my division commanders."

Zhu was already cramming papers into a small pouch. "In that case, comrade Marshal, we better hope the Chairman has a sore throat. Otherwise--"

"--we're in for a long afternoon of lectures and tall tales," Peng finished.

They left the map room and were in the staff car, pulling out of the warehouse courtyard in less than five minutes.

A half mile west of the Forbidden City, through the great open square of Tien an Men (The Gate of Heavenly Peace), a cluster of brick and cinder-block buildings gathered under the bare branches of elm and pine trees, only a few hundred yards from the ornate pagoda roofs and dull red walls of the Meridian Gate. The compound was austere, even dilapidated, surrounded as it was by piles of rubble from buildings demolished in the recent citywide cleanup. Peking had suffered heavily from years of Japanese occupation and civil war. Block after block of the traditional, slated-roofed hu'tung houses had been bombed, burned or razed to the ground in wave after wave of aerial and artillery bombardment. Only now, little more than a year after Mao Tse-tung had proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic at Tien an Men Square, was the city getting around to re-building its shattered districts and neighborhoods.

The whole place looks like a war zone, thought Peng, to himself. Appropriate perhaps, since many Chinese expected the Americans to come calling when the People's Volunteers were finally unleashed in Korea.

The cluster of cinder block and stone buildings formed a broad H-shape off the northern ramparts of an old crumbling Peking city wall that dated from the Han Dynasty. Peng knew the walls had been built over many decades of effort, to screen out Mongol and other invaders from the inner city of the imperial capital. Now only mounds of broken stone remained. Testimony, he supposed, to the mutability of all things human. Like war plans, he told himself. Even the best war plans seldom survived their first brush with the reality of combat. Peng expected no less in the coming Second Offensive.

The Chairman maintained his day offices in the center of the H-cluster. Peng had heard rumors of an underground complex, a subterranean palace connected by tunnel to the Forbidden City itself, built in the Ming era, but he didn't know for sure. The staff car parked inside the heavily guarded compound and Peng and Zhu hurried through a biting frigid sleet across the cobblestones to a canopied entrance. Inside, they handed their greatcoats and caps to armed militiamen of the guard and escorted themselves through low vaulted arches to a drafty chamber harshly lit by floodlights sunk into the stone walls.

The Chairman warmed himself by a fire crackling in a blackened fireplace in one corner. His weathered face beamed at the sight of his favorite commanders and he came over, pulling off heavy mittens as he extended a hand.

Zhu and Peng bowed slightly and shook the hands of Mao Tse-tung warmly. Chou En-lai, now a key advisor, came up. And Lin Piao, Minister of Defense. For Peng, it was a reunion of old comrades.

Mao was ebullient. "Come, come, tell me your war stories. I'm hearing marvelous things about our offensive in Korea. We're really got MacArthur's Eighth Army on the run, don't we? The Americans and their capitalist dogs fight like old women. Lin Piao has a map of the front. Let's look...." He had an old Japanese railway map of Korea spread out on a small wooden table. Peng, Zhu and the others gathered around and explained the Ninth and Thirteenth Army Group deployments, the lines of advance, the tactical phasing and objectives.

Mao listened gravely to Peng's synopsis of the Second Offensive operational plan. During the briefing, he smoked one cigarette after another--he preferred Red Lanterns--and sipped steaming hot green tea. When they were done, Mao rose and began pacing the room nervously, gesturing with his hands.

"Comrades, I had a dream two nights ago. I've had the dream several times. Sort of an allegory, I suppose. In my dream, there is a small pond. Much like the Pond of the Golden Lilly, outside Meridian Gate. In this pond are two fish. One fish is large, strong with very sharp teeth. But he is slow and can't get around the water very quickly. The other fish is smaller, very quick, and very smart." Mao was preaching now, his face flush from the heat of the fire, eyes staring beyond the walls to embrace an unseen crowd.

"The fish duel for the right to be 'emperor of the pond.' Who do you think wins?"

Peng said nothing. The Incomparable Teacher of the Masses was warming to his subject.

"The small fish wins. How does he win? With patience and persistence. By knowing when and where to attack, he wears out the bigger fish and eats him. Piece by piece. In the end, he has the pond to himself."

Mao smiled enigmatically, pleased with his analogy. "China and America are like two fish in the pond of the Pacific Ocean. Only one can survive. China has more people but America has more bombs, including the atomic bomb. Comrades, it's very clear to me. The Korean conflict is a race between American bombs and Chinese revolutionary soldiers. The enemy can make bombs faster than we can make soldiers. We must be like the small fish, if we are to push the Americans out of Korea. Only then, will the People's Revolution be safe to grow and prosper."

Peng objected. "Comrade Chairman, we don't have the weapons or the supplies to advance very far south in Korea. I tried to be clear in my briefing. Much past Pyongyang and our supply lines and stocks are vulnerable to American warplanes. Our Second Offensive should concentrate on pushing the Americans south to about the 39th Parallel. Then we should pause for a month or so, to re-supply and re-equip our divisions."

"Nonsense," Mao scoffed. "You're too cautious, all of you. The Americans are defeated, I can smell it. I can smell the fear in them. Truman and his henchmen are already panicked. Your own radio intercepts show that."

"Comrade Chairman--"

But Mao held up his hand. "I've decided and the Military Council agrees, to order the planning for a Third Offensive. A spring offensive. We'll call it the 'Victory of a Thousand Knives.' The objective of this new offensive is nothing less than total defeat for UN forces in Korea. Complete annihilation of the American Army. It will be a glorious campaign for our People's Volunteers."

Peng Dehuai had never been one to fear Mao. He had known the Little Librarian since his days as a schoolteacher in Peking. The son of a Hunan bean farmer was no soldier, though he took full credit for all the military victories of the People's Liberation Army.

"It's unlikely," Peng observed, "that the Americans will permit the destruction of their forces. They will use their atomic bombs if they have to."

"Atomic bombs cannot destroy China," Mao said coolly. "The Mongols couldn't destroy us. The Portuguese and the British couldn't destroy us. The Japanese couldn't destroy us. The Nationalist warlords of the Kuomintang couldn't destroy us. And the atom won't destroy us either. Only lack of faith and will can destroy the Chinese people."

"Perhaps," said Peng. "The atom bomb may not destroy China. But surely, the Revolution might be set back by it."

Mao stormed angrily about the room, his drab-green quilted jacket flying open at the front.

"No, you are wrong! I've already seen it! The Chinese people have overcome every adversity. They'll overcome even America's might too." The Chairman stopped at the fire, now only smoldering in the firepit. He stirred the ashes with a poker until a small tongue of flame shot out.

"Comrades, I've faced death a thousand times. We all have. I'm not afraid of the Americans. Or Truman. Or MacArthur. Not even their atomic bombs."

Peng and Zhu could only look warily at each other, wondering: What direction is the Helmsman going to take us now?

11-25-50

5:30 a.m.

One mile north of Yudam-ni, North Korea

The slopes of Hill 1282 seemed alive as the gook battalions rose en masse to renew their assault on the ridge. The air was filled with blaring horns, bugles and whistles as wave after wave of white-quilted Chinese infantrymen scrambled and clawed their way through rubbly, icy terrain to push the desperate Marines off the peak. For nearly six hours now, ever since just after midnight, the remnants of Bravo Two Five had fought a desperate rear-guard action, surrounded on three sides by better than seven thousand Chinese troops. Now, dawn was less than two hours away, dawn and some much-needed air support by Marine F4U Corsairs. That is, if the weather front now pummeling the mountains around the Chosin Reservoir would move out and the clouds lifted.

Sergeant Ray Skiles, Bravo Two-Five, Second Mortar Platoon, manned the only remaining 81-mm weapon left on the hill. His position was secure for the moment but he was low on ammo. The tiny defilade where he and the rest of the mortar crew had set up and registered their tubes last night was now a sea of metal--piles after endless piles of dud mortar rounds, spilling out and tumbling down the icy slope. He figured he had about ten minutes' worth of rounds left before he'd have to scoot.

The rest of Second Mortar had died during the night's earlier assaults. Skiles had left his buddies alone--no time for a hasty field burial according to the Marine Manual--and the damnable cold had kept them frozen in the same contorted positions they had died in. There was nothing he could do for them now--except keep on firing.

He twisted another priming plate and dropped the finned round down the mortar tube. It thunked out a second later--through curtains of green enemy tracer fire--and arced off into the night. Before the round hit--Skiles mentally ticked off another five dead gooks--he had already primed another round and dropped it down the tube. Like a robot, he grabbed a round, primed it and dropped it in. Fortunately, there had been only a few dud rounds during the night. Nothing like a dud to keep you on your toes, he thought grimly. His shoulders ached but at least the motion of feeding the weapon kept him a bit warmer. An hour ago, a gentle snowfall had started and the wind swirled the snow and flung ice into an eye-stinging blizzard. Skiles' shoe-pacs were already frozen and his feet had gone numb hours ago. He wondered about frostbite.

Six hundred yards southeast of Skiles' position on Hill 1282, Sergeant Tony Benecky and Corporal Jeff Gibson, Bravo Two-Five, First Rifle Platoon, were pinned down. They'd taken heavy casualties trying to skirmish with the gooks on the other side of 1282, in a broad saddle-shaped valley full of boulders and ice patches. Now they both knew they were about to be surrounded and cut off. Both men were scared.

"Let's get the fuck out of here!" Gibson called out. He was hunkered down behind a mound of Chinese corpses, stacked like firewood by Gibson and his squad several hours ago. The gooks had been napalmed by Marine Corsair attacks on the very last strafing run of the day, right at dusk. An orange and black inferno had swept through the valley, the heat close enough to singe Gibson's moustache and melt some of the frozen snot and C-ration crud that had frozen on his beard over the last week. Now his nose was running again and the acrid stench of still-smoldering gook flesh cooked to a crisp inside their quilted jackets made his eyes tear up. Gibson emptied another 8-round clip from his M-1 at a skirmish line of Chinese infantrymen advancing into the valley over the top of 1282.

"Come on, Sarge...we gotta make tracks!"

Sergeant Benecky was a lanky bushy-headed pollock who liked to chew a wad of tobacco and gum. He swore at the BAR...shit! third time in the last ten minutes. The barrel was red hot, warped from heat and continuous firing. Angrily, he slung the weapon away.

"Okay, Gibby, get your candy ass in gear!" He peered cautiously over the frozen bloody stump of what had been a gook soldier's head. "We're bailing..." he looked around for an escape route and another weapon. The only route seemed to be down slope, further into the valley, south-southwest by his reckoning. That was okay. Yudam-ni was in that same general direction. They'd have to grab what stragglers they could and try to re-group at the battalion CP, if it was still there. That was the problem with rear guard. You ran a high risk of being left behind, while the rest of unit pushed on south to Hagaru. But they'd have to chance it.

On Benecky's signal, just after a gook illumination round popped in the snowy sky above them and lit up the valley with an eerie yellow glow, the two Marines scrambled belly first out of their man-made defilade and half-ran, half-slid down the narrow trail to a ravine. Rifle and burp gun fire cracked behind them and both men plunged headfirst into the snow when a fusillade of rounds spanged off rocks and boulders all around them.

"That way!" pointed Benecky, indicating a small patch of leafless trees and blasted stumps. "Move it, man, move it!" They clawed and dove through branches thick with powdery snow, feeling as much as seeing the steadily closing noose of Chicom infantry tightening around their perimeter. Everywhere they turned, every single trail and path seemed to lead ever more deeply into the belly of the assault force.

"Look, Sarge!" Gibson grunted, pointing at some faint lights blinking on and off, through the snowfall. "One of ours? Corpsmen, maybe? Or--"

"Shut the fuck up, will ya?" Benecky held out his hand for caution. The two Marines hunkered down, squinting into the wind-driven sheets of snow as they slogged toward the lights. It turned out to be a crude hut, all thatch and wood, stuck right on top of a wind-swept plateau between two mountainous knobs.

"Gooks?"

"Maybe." Benecky sidled up to the window, seeing the faint light begin to flicker. A fire inside; he could already smell dung and kindling burning on the wind. Cautiously, he peered over the ledge of a slit window, through some kind of gauzy sheeting the occupants had hung up. There were shapes moving inside. And they weren't soldiers.

"Jesus Christ!" whispered Gibson, who'd peered over Benecky's shoulder. "What the hell--it's fuckin' family hour...."

Inside the thatched hut, an elderly Korean woman was tending a small fire, brushing at the flames with the end of a broomstick. Two small children, draped in U.S. Marines ponchos and hoods huddled as close as they could, so close together it looked like they had melted into one pile of clothes. A strong garlic smell issued out of the slit and Gibson's stomach involuntarily croaked at the aroma of kimche and boiling rice and potatoes.

Gibson was about to kick in the splintery door when both men heard something heavy crashing through the snow behind them. They whirled just in time to see a pair of Chinese soldiers hit the snow hard, their faces little more than bleeding masses of pulp. One lay still. The other groaned in pain, flopping over and over in the snow bank like a dying fish. Finally he was still, and as Benecky kicked the gook over, the top of his skull slid off and brain matter oozed out steaming onto the ground.

Gibson raised his M-1 while Benecky whipped out a .45 he'd taken from a dead lieutenant at the sound of more heavy feet plopping and scratching down the icy slope to the hut. Both men froze, realizing just how exposed they were, backlit by the glow of the fire.

"Hold your fire, Marines. Hold your fire. It's me...Skiles."

Benecky's finger tightened on the .45's trigger. What the hell was the password for tonight? Then he remembered.

"Rose," Benecky called out. "Gimme the damn password."

"Bowl, you fuckin' ape," came the reply. That was correct. "Get the hell away from that light. You two bozos tryin' to give the gooks target practice or something?" A face appeared in the swirling snow, bearded, filthy, frozen saliva icicles chattering like obscene Christmas ornaments on a shaggy tree.

"Benecky, First Rifle," Benecky lowered his weapon. He nudged Gibson to do the same. "This here's Gibby."

The Marine stared down at the Chinese soldiers, shaking his head. "Bastards were following you jarheads like they were stalking an animal. Skiles, Second Mortar, by the way. I'm the only one left."

Benecky toed one of the gooks over onto his back with his boot. Like most Chinese soldiers, the poor clod wore a two-piece reversible uniform of quilted cotton, white on one side, mustard-yellow on the other, and a cotton cap with fur-lined earflaps. His shoes were primitive canvas sneakers, with crepe soles. The toes of the shoes were gone, exposing the soldier's bare feet. What had once been the man's real toes had frozen together into a large black mass on each foot, almost like a bush. Here was one gook who'd never be able to get out of his shoes, even if he had lived.

"You shoot these two?" Benecky asked Skiles.

"I reckon I did."

Benecky shook his head. "One in the face. One in the chest. Not bad for a mortarmen."

Skiles shrugged. "I've shot me a fair number of 'coon and rabbit back on the farm. Missoura, that is."

"Never mind." Benecky motioned the others to squat down with him, out of the glare of the fire. Skiles was right. They were perfectly silhouetted targets where they were. "Fellas, we got to get the hell out of here, and fast. Battalion's pulling out, maybe they already have. We're cut off and possibly already surrounded. Last I heard from the Lieutenant, this sector was supposed to be vacated by dawn. Colonel Roise wanted to hold 1282 until the very last moment, so the rest of the column could get going back down to Hagaru."

"So what do we do? Which way do we go?" asked Gibson uneasily.

"How the hell do I know, Gibby? I'm trying to think, for cryin' out loud."

Skiles sniffed the same garlic and potato aroma the others had smelled. "What say we grab some hot chow for the road, before we pull out?"

"Oh that's just great, jarhead," Benecky snapped. "This ain't no fuckin' restaurant, you know. It's somebody's home."

But the aroma was strong and the idea grew on them. A volley of machine gun fire echoed across the top of the ridge behind them. Seconds later, green tracers lit up the skyline.

"Here they come again!"

The men stumbled, crawling on their knees, right through the flimsy plywood door into the hut.

Inside, a scrawny old Korean mama-san glared back at them, broomstick in hand.

The three Marines pushed into the room and pulled the door shut behind them. For a long moment, punctuated only by bursts of machine gun fire across the valley, the three Americans and the Korean family glared at each other. Finally, Gibson pointed at the steaming pot over the fire with the barrel of his M-1.

The mama-san squinted with cold hatred at the Americans but reached for a tiny cup. She ladled a meager dollop of stringy kimche--boiled cabbage--into the cup and held it out. One of the children began crying but Gibson paid him no mind. He took the cup and slurped it dry. Then he held it out for more, gesturing to Skiles and Benecky.

"Them too, lady."

Reluctantly, with the slimmest portions she figured she could get away with, the mama-san fed the three Marines a bit of kimche and garlic soup. Throughout the impromptu dinner, the children cried and whimpered. Feeling guilty, Gibson waved his rifle toward the children.

"Now feed the kids, lady."

The mama-san did so, never taking her eyes off the Americans. In half an hour, the pot of kimche was gone. Gibson belched. Benecky was annoyed, ramming an elbow in his ribs.

"Jesus Christ, shit-for-brains. Watch your manners. What the hell kind of upbringing did you have, anyway?"

Gibson shrugged while Skiles poked around the hut. There was a straw mat for a bed, some snatches of military tarpaulin and canvas--Soviet Cyrillic script stenciled on the side--used as blanketing. A few pots and pans--one of these used as a chamber pot, a few rusty utensils, and a canteen. The mama-san was a first-class scrounger.

"Bitch probably picked our dead clean," Gibson muttered.

"Shut the fuck up!" Benecky snarled. "We got to get the hell out of here."

"Where to?" Skiles was peering through a pile of rags, then realized the rags were clothes. "It's a cinch Colonel Roise's already pulled out of Yudam by now."

All three of them knew they were scheduled to pullback from Hill 1282 to rejoin Bravo Two-Five at 0200 hours. But the gook attack had nixed that idea and now they were probably cut off. Hagaru was the first consolidation point on the withdrawal route back to the coast, a withdrawal that had been ordered by MacArthur himself. But Hagaru was eleven miles south by road, down at the lower reaches of the Reservoir.

Benecky was the senior man present. "Sure thing we can't go north," he told them. He ran his finger around the kimche pot and licked the last scraps of cabbage. "East and west are out too, what with the gooks cutting us off."

"Then it's either south or die," Skiles said. "Unless you can figure out a way for us to go straight up."

"We could try to hold 'em off from right here," Gibson suggested. "I seen me a squad radio on the side of the hill a ways back. I could try to raise Battalion, tell 'em we're surrounded."

"Sure," Skiles said, "and while we're waiting for the limo to arrive, the gooks'll make Swiss cheese out of us. We might as well surrender."

Benecky scowled. "We're not surrendering. And we ain't makin' no heroic John Wayne stand here either. We're Marines and we're going to act like Marines."

"What about the mama-san? We can't take her with us. And she'll squeal like a pig to the gooks, sure as I'm ace marksman of the platoon."

"Tie 'em up," Benecky ordered. "All of them. And grab a few of those potatoes. We're buggin' out of here, while we still can. Across the mountains if we have to."

Skiles and Gibson obeyed. They found some fishing line in a can and tied the mama-san and her kids up. Each man stuffed three potatoes in his poncho, then loaded fresh clips into their rifles.

"Grab every grenade and ammo clip you can," Benecky told them. "We may have to bust out of there in a blaze of glory."

When the men were ready, Benecky ordered the candles doused. The hut became pitch black and the howl of the wind through the thatch siding masked the staccato bursts of machine gun and burp gun fire. Benecky listened for a moment. It sounded liked the firing was growing more distant. Cautiously, on his hands and knees, he fingered the door open and crept out into the snow.

The gooks Skiles had shot were still there, warmth steaming away from their bodies. He listened again--hearing nothing but distant small arms fire--Chinese, he was sure--and then got up to a crouch, motioning the others to follow.

The three of them scurried off into the snow, stumbling and slipping behind Benecky as he angled off down valley, heading in what his best sense of reckoning told him was generally south. He hoped to God he was right. Even if he was, he knew they might still have a nasty fight on their hands.

Less than half an hour later, the Marines had run right into a battalion of Chinese infantry, bivouacked on a side of a hill west of 1282.

Gibson managed to get off a couple of rounds from his M-1 but the trio were surrounded quickly and disarmed. The gooks lobbed a few potato-masher grenades into the icy stream bed where the Marines had taken cover. Benecky felt several fragments slam into his helmet and backpack as the concussion threw him face forward, but he wasn't seriously hurt.

It was Skiles who suggested they surrender. Benecky looked pained at the thought. Marines with ammo didn't surrender. Gibson wanted to charge out firing everything they had. They argued but the gooks made the decision for them. Before Gibson could scrounge up another clip, he found himself staring straight down the business end of a Type 51, 7.62-mm burp gun. He put his hands on top of his head, swearing silently under his breath. Boot camp back at Pendleton had never been like this.

The streambed was soon running thick with Chinese. Before he could get his bearings, Gibson had his hands bound with radio wire. Stood up roughly, he was searched from head to toe. The gooks found his last Hershey bar and a stick of gum. This caused a lot of jabbering and chattering. In his backpack, they also found the pictures of his Mom and Dad back in Kansas, and the polaroid of Susan in her swimsuit, looking for all the world like a brunette Rita Hayworth. These were tossed aside. Gibson was prodded at bayonet point along the streambed, then pulled up to higher ground. There was Benecky and Skiles, their wrists tied too. Benecky's face was bleeding, from a temple cut. The men were wired together at the waist with another length of radio wire, then shoved brusquely into single file, guarded on all four sides by burp-gun wielding Reds.

They set off on a forced march, north by northwest in Benecky's mind, right over the crests of the hills. Balance and footing were their main problems, that and the cold, made all the worse by being bound at the wrist. At least the wind had died off. Bitterly cold Siberian air flecked with sleet settled over the eastern ramparts of the Taebeck range. They marched for two hours, then halted in a shallow draw of frozen rice paddies dotted with bomb craters. Dawn was beginning to lighten the sky behind them and then Benecky understood why they had stopped. Overhead, he heard the drone of aircraft. Corsairs, he imagined. Out hunting for targets of opportunity.

The three Marines were made to lie down, still bound and tied together and were covered with dirt, straw and snow. The gooks did the same, careful to keep their weapons trained on the Americans. They were going to hide, all day if necessary, from the planes.

Benecky sank back in the snow, dead with fatigue and dejection, and passed out.

From the light level, Benecky figured it was late afternoon, when he came to. He realized, with a panic, that he couldn't feel his legs. But he didn't have time to worry. Like ghosts, the Chinese platoon emerged from the snow and straw and shook themselves off. They hoisted the Americans up and made them stand at attention while the Chinese snacked on rice balls, captured Hershey bars, some frozen C-ration pea soup and water. When they were done, they relieved themselves and hustled the Marines into march formation.

Two hours later, it was dark and clear overhead, a bright half-moon casting pale shadows on the snowy landscape of hills and barren rice terraces. The small escort detail had made rendezvous with a much larger formation, maybe company-sized Benecky figured. There were some shouts and laughs and then Benecky saw the long line of American and South Korean POWs in the midst of the gook company. Maybe fifty to sixty men in all, many wounded, all suffering visibly from frostbite and exposure.

Benecky's heart sank. He couldn't bear to glance over at Skiles. They were going north for sure now, north right to Manchuria. He was sure of it. The reality sank in like a cold fist in the stomach.

Beside Skiles, Gibson was scared, already mumbling something half-coherent. He started shivering and slumped to his knees. Nearby, a gook rifleman poked at him with his bayonet, then shouted guttural commands. Gibson started crying...

"No...no...man, I can't...I...." He started to pitch forward but the Reds swarmed around him and forcibly hoisted the Marine to his feet. Gibby wobbled, bounced off Skiles, then stumbled forward, knocking several Chinese away. He plunged out of formation, staggering off balance toward the edge of a rocky terrace. Unnerved by the prospect of spending years in a POW camp, Gibson broke and ran.

"Gibby!" Benecky whistled hoarsely but he got a rifle butt in the back and crumpled hard face first to the ground, semi-conscious. He heard more guttural shouts, then a brief burst from the burp guns. Then came the thud, muffled a bit by a cushion of snow. The crazed Marine's body pitched headlong to the ground.

Benecky lifted his head up but the corporal was gone.

He buried his face in the snow and started sobbing himself but was quickly jerked up to his feet, a bit unsteadily. That's when he saw Gibby.

The poor son of a bitch lay on his side, face a mask of pain, bleeding to death on the side of a steep, twisting gravelly mountain trail. Skiles and Benecky were quickly force-marched into formation with the rest of the POWs. They could only look on forlornly as they marched on, passing by the lifeless heap of Corporal Gibson, as he lay numb and still in a spreading pool of blood.

Son of a bitch. Benecky swore to himself. The kid was maybe all of nineteen....

Both men glanced furtively at each other as they fell into a rhythmic step behind the other prisoners. The same thought flashed between them--

\--to die quickly, painlessly if possible, and end the ordeal as soon as possible--

That became the only thought that mattered. Benecky prayed quietly under his breath...Lord, though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death....

Quietly, without fuss, he kicked off each of his boots and shoe-pacs, and began shrugging out of his jacket and--

...I will fear no evil....

\--and hoped to God Almighty that the fierce Siberian cold would take his life before the night was over.
CHAPTER 2

Saturday, November 25, 1950

11:30 a.m.

Tokyo

Two blocks south of SCAP headquarters in the huge, white Dai Ichi Insurance Company building along the Hibiya Dori, tucked in a corner of a newly renovated apartment building was a small but tidy noodle shop known locally as Onishi's. Nearly in the shadows of the Imperial Hotel, Onishi's was a favorite lunchtime Yank hangout for staffers, correspondents and assorted Occupation hangers-on. Despite the noise and dust of a quickening economy, the Hibiya Dori still surged night and day with thousands of Japanese housewives window-shopping among the newly stocked glass storefronts, each with her own gaily colored furoshiki, a kind of kerchief often used as a shopping bag.

To Paul Craft, the tidal flow of resurgent Japanese shoppers was just one more visible sign of the impact that America's Korean war spending was having on the Japanese capital. In truth, old Edo had simply become a wartime boomtown again, much as it had in the heady days of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in 1941 and '42. And like any boomtown, businessmen and fortune-seekers flocked to the action, trying to grab a share of the pie. Unfortunately, also like any wartime boomtown, the prostitutes and the con men weren't far behind.

Sometimes, one couldn't tell the difference.

Paul Craft was slurping up the last of his noodle soup when he saw Clayton LaSalle pushing through the door. By arrangement, the men had agreed to meet in a booth in the back of Onishi's. It was away from the front door and the glass windows, out of sight of the prying eyes of the MPs who regularly patrolled the streets around SCAP Headquarters. Paul Craft wanted no interference with today's meeting.

General Clayton LaSalle was commanding officer, 19th Bombardment Group of Far Eastern Air Forces Bomber Command. He was as bald as he was tall and he hated the nickname his staff had long ago assigned to him behind his back: 'Scarecrow', or less reverently, 'Old Crow.'

He was also a sympathizer, like Craft, with the 'atomic option,' as it was sometimes called in whispers around the corridors of SCAP and the War Room. Clearly this was the best way for dealing with the Korean situation, according to LaSalle. Send the Red hordes to the lower rungs of Hell itself, where they belonged.

LaSalle spotted Craft and made his way to the back booth. The proprietor, Mr. Onishi, followed closely behind. He bowed at the table.

LaSalle pointed to Craft's bowl of noodles. Onishi bowed again and scurried off to fill the order. LaSalle waited until they were alone. Every booth was filled and the din of conversation picked up again.

"You weren't followed?" Craft asked. He sipped at a steaming cup of tea.

"Hard to say," LaSalle said. He scanned the crowd. No Yanks today. That was good. Meeting at Onishi's was a risk. The noodle shop was a favorite SCAP hangout. "MPs are everywhere today. Checking passes. Running off the comfort girls. I've never seen anything like it, not since '45."

Craft nodded. "It's Korea. And Whitney." Whitney was Brigadier General Courtney Whitney, head of SCAP's Government Section. Whitney was an early member of MacArthur's Bataan Gang. "He sees Reds and spies everywhere, so he's making a big show of cleaning up Maranouchi, Shimbashi, the Ginza, everywhere. 'Sanitizing' is what he calls it."

LaSalle extracted a Lucky Strike from his pocket and nervously lit up. "He may well be right, you know. The Russians don't like being shut out of the Occupation worth a damn." LaSalle pulled hard on the cigarette, exhaling through his nostrils. "You met with the Old Man yesterday?"

Craft nodded, tightlipped.

"And?"

"As Caesar said: 'The Rubicon is crossed.' We got provisional approval for Gallant Flag, the whole works, but verbal only. Planning, recruiting, logistics, SCAP's behind the plan all the way. We can use MacArthur's name and SCAP authority to get whatever we need. We have to be ready to launch on command. I have to make progress reports every week. He's holding off on final approval of the missions until we say we're ready. And he's reserved approving mission launch until the tactical situation is clearer."

"Jesus, how clear does he need it? You gave him dates?"

Craft freshened his tea with the steaming remnants of the small pot. He let the hot vapors rise into his face. "I told him Gallant Flag would be ready to fly by January 1."

LaSalle let out a soft whistle. "You're an optimist, aren't you? January 1?"

Craft shrugged. "Look, Clayton, the Old Man has crossed a serious divide here. And he knows it. It's time for irrevocable decisions to be made. I don't know what the Chinese are up to. Or the Soviets. No good, I'm sure. G-2 thinks the infiltrations we're seeing are just volunteers, Mao saving Kim's face, that sort of thing. Eighth Army thinks the Reds are already in Korea in division strength. MacArthur's worried and he's looking around for anything to pull our asses out of the fire. He's a gambler and he's got our boys as exposed as hell up there on the Yalu River. Gallant Flag gives him an option and he's ready to risk it."

"Whether Washington buys it or not?"

"Right now," Craft explained, "Washington is not on the Old Man's mind. He's got to do something to keep Korea from blowing up in his face. We dreamed up Gallant Flag to give the Man options. Now, he's seen the plan and approved it. It's up to us to do the job."

LaSalle waved off the sermon with his cigarette. "Don't worry. I'm on your side. It's just that you didn't give us a hell of a lot of time."

Mr. Onishi appeared with LaSalle's bowl of noodles. The Air Force general thanked him, then asked for more tea.

"Hai!" Onishi bowed and dashed off for a new pot.

Craft was thoughtful. "The tactical situation in Korea demands speed."

"Maybe treason too." LaSalle stared right back at Craft's incredulous face. "Don't look so surprised. That's what some Army people are saying. I don't agree with them but the scuttlebutt's out there. We'd better be on our toes. There's a helluva lot of minefields to walk through these days...what with loyalty checks, background investigations, and whatnot. Plenty of ambitious snipers out there would jump at the chance to torpedo a national institution and a military legend, if it helped their careers. A few missteps and they'll be calling Gallant Flag treason of the highest order. And you and me'll be swinging from the lampposts after we're court-martialed."

"I'm not worried," Craft said. "The Old Man's been shot at hundreds of times. As long as we have MacArthur's approval, we'll be shielded from any inquiries. There is a war on, you know. And nobody likes second-guessing the theater commander in the middle of a war."

"Just the same," LaSalle admitted, "I'd feel better with a written order."

The generals fell to discussing some of the logistics of the operation: how many men would be needed, how many aircraft, possible bases they could use, how they would recruit, how the bombs would be made and transported, possible targets.

"I got a phone call this morning at the hotel," LaSalle told him. "An old SAC buddy of mine in the States. He said he'd just been contacted by a Dr. Tolkach, some fellow at Los Alamos. It turns out that I knew this Tolkach. Met the man at Bikini Atoll in '46, during Operation Crossroads, when we lit off a few a-bombs to see what they would do to old Jap battleships."

"Los Alamos?"

"Exactly. Turns out Tolkach has a colleague there too. Guy named Albert Ranier. My SAC buddy's sure this Ranier wants to 'join up.' He said the guy's a real Red hater and wants to do something to help out. So he took the message and called me this morning."

Craft couldn't believe it. "I know this Ranier."

"You're kidding."

"Not at all. Albert Ranier, you just said. There's an Albert Ranier I've been in touch with since September. He's my major liaison to the people at Los Alamos and Hanford who can help us. They're all on the Operation Greenhouse test staff for the next atom bomb shots at Eniwetok. As a matter of fact, I'm on a plane tonight back to the States. One of my stops is Albuquerque. I'm meeting Ranier for the first time."

"Son of a bitch." LaSalle slurped up some noodles and chewed for a few moments. "Better watch yourself, pal. Los Alamos is no playground. Those guys take security very seriously. If this Ranier's not careful, he'll just disappear down a very dark and deep hole, never to return. You don't want to tickle that dragon too often."

Both men agreed that MacArthur needed to be shielded from day to day involvement with Gallant Flag.

"SCAP should be insulated from routine decisions, requests, requisitions, travel plans, except for major stuff," Craft said. "If something goes wrong, there has to be deniability for the Old Man."

"Why?" LaSalle asked. "You've got approval, you've got SCAP authority. Why take that kind of risk? We're fighting the same war, aren't we?"

"Some people are, some people aren't. A good military men keeps his eyes and ears on the front lines, watching out for the enemy. But when the enemy flanks you, you've got to protect your rear. And when the enemy's everywhere, even on the home front, then you keep your ass covered and grow eyes in the back of your head. Trust me, it's better if we do everything we can to protect the Old Man's rear."

"Then we better get a schedule going now," LaSalle said.

"I'm already three steps ahead of you, General." Craft pulled out a small black memo pad covered with scribblings. They spent the next half hour laying out a barebones timeline for Gallant Flag: deadlines and action items and who would do what by when. Craft made two copies, both handwritten. LaSalle took one and folded it into his wallet.

"Getting the bombs--that's going to be the hardest part," LaSalle said. "Too many hands involved. Too many ways the whole thing could blow up in our faces."

"Let's hope the blowing up doesn't happen until later, over China. Speaking of which...you may have to do a little headknocking with your intel boys. We need better intel on our proposed targets--photos, approach and exit headings, air defenses...."

"Leave that to me," LaSalle said. "I know just where to go. FEAF has a recon shop at Yokasuka. Colonel named Franks runs the place. They've always got good access to all the strategic stuff--RB-29 overflights, radio and radar runs along the coast of Russia and China, that sort of thing. I don't know how he gets the stuff...normally that kind of recon goes right to the Air Staff in Washington. I do know that 19th Bomb never gets any kind of chop at that kind of raw data. Franks must be doing a little debriefing on the side, maybe running copies of tapes. Stratemeyer uses Frank's outfit as his own personal camera guys over Korea. But I expect Franks lets his pilots do a little detouring every now and then. Jesus, they've got amazing stuff--Chinese airfields, port defenses at Vladivostok."

"Russia?"

"Little known secret," LaSalle admitted. "And we need to keep it that way, too. Colonel Franks' 80th Strategic Reconnaissance is the best place in town for what we want. I'll call him up this afternoon."

Craft scribbled a few more notes. "We'll be lucky to get four or five devices to work with. And that's if this fellow Ranier can change the testing plan for the Greenhouse shots at Eniwetok. We need the most critical targets in China from your intel types, the areas that could bring the war to a quick end."

LaSalle sketched out a handdrawn map of China and the Korean peninsula on a napkin. He tapped his pen on the capital city of the People's Republic.

"Peking, for sure. Cut off the head and let the body twitch and die. There's another good target...Shenyang--" he made a circle in the area of central Manchuria on the napkin. "Big railway complex. Willoughby knows all about it over at G-2. Just inside the border with Russia. Shenyang's a major marshaling point for war supplies heading south."

Craft nodded. "I've heard of it. Make those two our priority targets. Tientsin's another one. Tsingtao too. The PLA Navy base on the Yellow Sea is one we ought to consider. Russians bring in a lot of supplies through that port. Maybe Dairen as well."

"You think Stalin will keep to himself if we drop a few atom bombs on China?" LaSalle knew he was re-opening a sore point with Craft. They had debated the possibilities for Russia entering the war, or making a move in Europe, a hundred times. Prudence dictated caution, yet the Eighth Army front in Korea was collapsing further south every day. Craft wanted to move, to do something. He'd finally gotten SCAP himself to see matters the same way. Now was no time to be timid.

"Clayton, we've already been over that ground. My read on G-2's intel is that the Russians want the Chinese to do their fighting for them. Stalin's not ready to move in central Europe yet. Hell, he just got his ass kicked in Berlin over the airlift."

"True enough. But there are plenty of weaklings around that make tempting targets for the Red Army. Greece, Italy, Austria. Look what happened to the Czechs."

"I know that and I've considered that.. Stalin's a bully but he's not a fool. I just don't see it...Russians fighting in Korea. It doesn't make sense. We all think Korea's a sideshow and Europe's the main attraction. Ike, Bradley, nobody disagrees with that assessment. I think we can safely discount the possibility of the Soviets entering the war here. It would bring the Russians into direct combat against the United States. And we've got more a-bombs than they do. Stalin's not that stupid."

"I'm glad you're so sure," LaSalle said. "Now I can look forward to my retirement. I take a dim view of sitting on the beach, sipping my peach daiquiri and glowing in the dark."

"Very funny." Craft snapped his memo pad shut and put it into his jacket. He'd make sure to change the combination on his office safe that very afternoon. "The sooner Gallant Flag is executed, the better. If Mao sends his hordes across the Yalu without any blocking forces against him, or some kind of threat to his Manchurian sanctuary, the UN will get pushed right off the peninsula, like we almost did at Pusan."

"And if that happens," LaSalle finished the thought, "our whole Far Eastern defense system collapses. Japan, Formosa, everything."

Saturday, November 25, 1950

12 noon

Tokyo

Despite the fact that Fyodor Maximovich Trofimenko was now thirty years old and, at least ostensibly, assistant cultural attaché at the Soviet Embassy, he returned to something like enraptured boyhood love every time he came to the Happy Rose Petal. A traditional Tokyo geisha house (and more, Trofimenko liked to point out), tucked in a dark alleyway between the Sumitomo Building and the rowdy Sapporo Beer Hall, the Petal was the one place in town where Trofimenko could literally shed everything: clothes, inhibitions, the normal reserve of Russians posted abroad, even common sense. That only a few fortunate souls at the Embassy knew of the place and its special "charms" made the twice-weekly afternoon liaisons all the more delicious and divine.

For the truth was that Fyodor Maximovich, though he was surely a dedicated Communist and practicing atheist, was in heaven every time he crossed the delicate, jasmine-scented threshold of the Happy Rose Petal.

To compare the two situations rationally, as any logical Marxist should, Trofimenko had only to review the drab particulars of his foreign service file, which he did regularly and stack them up item by item against the daily life of an NKVD rezident, which he also was. Assigned to Department 8, Section A, tasked with an annual quota of obtaining sensitive military and diplomatic information and handling unreliable, demanding, whining and troublesome operatives recruited for him by the clowns in Section C, Trofimenko found some dwindling satisfaction in ticking off the particulars on his file--the facts of his physical being--against the reality of life as a Communist agent in occupied Japan.

He knew them by heart: Age:...30 years. Height:...1.78 meters, more or less. Weight:...86 kilos. Hair:...thick, black, wavy upswept to a crown in front. Build:...solid and firm. Face:...large and languid brown eyes (but women loved them!, he protested to himself). Distinguishing features (this was always good for a laugh, he admitted)...often raises left eyebrow at a question; likes to affect urbane sophistication, delicate hands (from my mother, a pianist); a flair for the dramatic, smokes ultra-long Western cigarettes; wears expensive watches (a Timex, I got it from an American soldier); likes three-piece suits with a vest pocket watch and gold chain.

All true enough but totally irrelevant to his work, Trofimenko thought. He'd often had to compose the very same curriculum vitae on agent prospects Section C had sent him. It was all worthless rubbish. A lot of literary embellishment went into the reports, the better to impress Moscow Center.

Fyodor Maximovich Trofimenko had been born on 1 May, 1920, in the Moscow suburb of Luzhniki, third child of the distinguished Colonel of Artillery Nikolai Budarin Trofimenko and his pianist-schoolteacher childbride Svetlana Maximova.

From early years, Trofimenko remembered two things very strongly: having to move about the country a lot and always being in the presence of things and men of the military...the Army, men in uniforms. These were the formative impressions.

His NKVD code name was Windward. Though it was a state secret, somehow unaccountably, the four lovely Japanese ladies attending to him in the tiny steaming bath all knew the code designation and laughed in squeals of delight as they lovingly bathed him and tried to pronounce the foreign words, succeeding only in mangling both the English and the Russian versions, to his ever-lasting amusement.

They were charming little porcelain dolls, really, Trofimenko thought. Fumei An, the proprietress of the Happy Rose Petal, had chosen well, selecting the brightest and most vivacious trainees from the Karyukai, the world of willows and flowers, as the geisha society was known. All of them well schooled in the arts of conversation and gossip and entertainment, yes, most definitely the entertainment, it should be noted. A variety of techniques could be experienced, if only one could get one's desires across to the young ladies. They spoke no Russian and little English and Trofimenko's Japanese was laughably crude at best. But there was always a way and in the fragrant baths of the Happy Rose Petal, Trofimenko enjoyed every moment of such "cultural exchanges."

He had been at the Petal for over an hour when his pleasures were loudly interrupted by a commotion outside the bathhouse. Trofimenko could see a pair of elaborate shoji screens rocking as someone came barging into the bath.

It turned out to be Oleg Kalugin, from the Embassy. Kalugin was second assistant secretary in Department 10, the code room. He had an important message from the Ambassador himself, Terenty Shtykov.

Disgusted with Kalugin's tactless sense of timing, Trofimenko wearily hauled himself out of the water, patting one of his favorite charmers on the head, and wrapped himself in a warm towel. He tore open the brown envelope and read the handwritten note. It was on Embassy stationery.

It seemed that the Ambassador had an important job for him. With a growing sense of dread, Trofimenko sat down on a pine bench beside the pool, dripping and sweating in the steam, and read the flimsy over several times.

By order of the Chairman, People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, he was to return at once to Russia. Beria himself had signed the order. The bespectacled axe-man of Soviet state security required his presence, in Vladivostok. Vladivostok? What the hell was going on?

"Get dressed now," Kalugin ordered. "You've got to pack and be at Yokahama docks by four o'clock. The Marshal Suvorov sails at sunset and you'd better be on it."

Trofimenko felt a cold chill run through his body. He shivered, wrapping himself tighter in the towel. He wasn't sweating any longer. He looked up at Kalugin.

"Oleg Sergeyevich, what's this about?"

Kalugin shrugged. "I'm just the messenger. But it looks like you're vacationing in Mother Russia next week. And they don't have whorehouses like this in Vladivostok, do they?" He smirked faintly at the thought.

Trofimenko ignored the jab. What was happening? What did it mean? He hadn't been back to the Rodina in five years. He got up and went straight away into the dressing stalls, fussing a moment with Fumei An, who had followed Kalugin after he burst into the bath. He kissed her on the forehead, and from his trousers, paid her generously, over five hundred yen, for the girls' company and the bath. Then, hurriedly, he got dressed. One thing was for sure: nothing good could come from such an ominous order.

On the ride back to the Embassy, through heavy midday traffic in the Ginza, Trofimenko imagined all kinds of trouble awaiting him: Stalin would sentence him to the Gulag, he would be arrested and shot without a trial, he would be re-assigned to some God-forsaken part of the world, Mongolia perhaps. Yes, that was it: he would be demoted to rezident in Ulan Bator, with a quota of yak herdsmen to recruit as spies. Even Kalugin could offer no insights as to why he was being summoned. Only that he was to go to Vladivostok, not Moscow.

Vladivostok? thought Trofimenko. Even the Ambassador himself, said the note, would be in that port city, waiting for him.

"It has to be Korea," Trofimenko offered. He held on tight as Kalugin gunned the Mercedes around a knot of cars clogging up the Showa Dori, riding up on the curb in front of the Kabuki-za, a renovated theater. Pedestrians scattered everywhere as the Mercedes clunked back down on the asphalt and sped on through the warren of streets in the district known as Shimbashi. "Korea is the only thing that makes sense. Now that the Chinese are in the war."

"All the big shots have been meeting," Kalugin added. "They know what you've been up to at the Happy Rose Petal. Communism has suffered a serious setback, Fyodor Maximovich, just because you can't keep your dick in your pants. There's a new policy...."

At first, Trofimenko thought Kalugin was serious but the hint of a smirk on his face said otherwise. Trofimenko knew the Muscovite for a practical joker and a sarcastic horse's ass.

"Very funny, my foolish comrade," Trofimenko frowned. What did they know about the Petal? "No, it's Korea, I'm sure of it. Josef Vissarionovich is getting pressure from the Chinese to provide troops. Or at least equipment and ammunition. Shtykov must want to discuss something in that connection."

They reached the Soviet Embassy after a half hour ride, and pulled through the black wrought-iron gates into a courtyard surrounded by high stone walls. The Embassy was an imposing classical building, surrounded by massive columns and ornate Greco-Roman pediments at the top. Once a bank for the pre-war Mitsui combine, the building had escaped the worst of the war's bombing damage. Two blocks east, just past the split with Sakurada Dori, red, white and blue awnings denoted the American Club, a raucous hangout for capitalist stooges and American GIs, with its neon-bright bowling alley and ten-cent hot dogs. Officially a forbidden zone to the Embassy staff, Trofimenko had long pegged the club as extraordinarily fertile grounds for recruiting work. It didn't hurt that he'd developed a taste for strawberry ice cream and Coney Island burgers.

Trofimenko had an office in a cluster of open cubicles on the third floor.

Entering the secure area of the department's bullpen, he found Petrov, the first deputy assistant director, waiting impatiently, holding a leather diplomatic pouch, just arrived by courier from Russia. Petrov reminded Trofimenko of a fat squirrel, with glasses.

"You're a popular man today, comrade." Petrov dangled the pouch in the air and Trofimenko had to reach for it like a dog grabbing a bone. "Perhaps your Red Banner of Lenin award has arrived. How many months in a row is it...five, no, I believe it's six, not making the quota for recruits? A new record. Beria's planning a celebration I'm sure. Probably in the Lubyanka."

Trofimenko brushed past the clod and went to his desk. He was authorized to open diplomatic pouches with Level 2 security. Petrov didn't like it but field agents still had some privileges. He scanned the typed pages, bordered in blue to signify their level of approved access, and scowled.

Now, it seemed, Moscow Center was modifying his orders once again. Why couldn't they make up their minds? The memorandum had come right from Ambassador Shtykov himself, already in Vladivostok. The pouch had been flown right into Atsugi Field in Tokyo, and driven to the Embassy, arriving in Petrov's hands only minutes before he himself had gotten there.

Before coming to Vladivostok, the memo said, Trofimenko was to make a little detour. He would travel by Soviet freighter, the Marshal Suvorov was even now at the Yokahama docks, from Japan to the Red Chinese port city of Tientsin, then go by train to a major supply center in the Manchurian city of Shenyang. There he was to collect first-hand observational intelligence on the real supply situation facing the Chinese, as they geared up for the next offensive in Korea.

While in Shenyang, he was to meet with officials of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), including Marshal Xie Fang, chief of staff of the Chinese People's Volunteers (CPV). Shtykov had noted, in an aside, that Xie was first deputy to Marshal Peng Dehuai, who commanded all CPV forces in Korea.

Trofimenko, according to the Ambassador, was to reconnoiter the supply center and establish the Chinese' real needs as well as provide to the Ambassador and his handlers at Moscow Center vital political intelligence on the true loyalties of the PLA staff there, especially Xie. Reading between the lines, Trofimenko could imagine that Beria wanted to know just how secure Mao really was, whether he could be outmaneuvered and forced out by others if the Soviets backed another faction.

Trofimenko sat at his desk for a very long time, folding, unfolding and re-reading Shtykov's letter. Already approaching two o'clock, he knew he had to be packed and at the Yokahama docks by four. Yet he couldn't move. Only Petrov's bark roused him from the fog he'd fallen into.

"Fyodor Maximovich, you'd better get moving. The car is waiting downstairs. And don't look so downcast. We all envy you, going back to our beloved Rodina. Perhaps, after you've adjusted to the Gulag lifestyle, we'll take up a collection for you and send along some of that wonderful scented tea from the Happy Rose Petal. I know you'd like that."

Trofimenko ignored him. Two floors below, in his spartan quarters, he packed simply and quickly, then rode with the Embassy driver through midafternoon traffic to the dingy and dilapidated Yamashita pier along Yokahama's waterfront. A makeshift passport control station had been erected amidst the burned-out ruins of the old Silk Building. Trofimenko flashed his diplomatic ID and was brusquely waved through. A squad of American soldiers squinted at him as he walked down the broken stones of the wharf.

Docked at the very end of the pier, the huge Soviet freighter Marshal Suvorov was already gathering steam, her gray top funnels emblazoned with a red hammer and sickle amid black clouds of soot. Trofimenko felt his throat tighten as he approached the purser's station and was cleared through.

Walking up the main gangway, he was filled with apprehension, leaving Japanese soil for the first time in over five years, wondering if he was about to step into the lion's mouth, wondering if he would ever be this free again.

Trofimenko reached the top of the gangway and stepped onto the main deck, sovereign Soviet territory. He thought it odd that a dedicated Communist would feel so remorseful at leaving behind the corrupt, immoral, and decadent freedoms of so sleazy a place as occupied Japan.

He stared back across the bleak industrial landscape of Yokahama's dock and rail yards. On a slight rise behind the waterfront, a bare patch of snowy ground identified the Iseyama Shrine, its cypress wood torii a serene beacon of life in the manmade squalor of its surroundings.

Maybe he was not the dedicated Communist he once had been. Uncomfortable with the thought, Trofimenko became even more apprehensive, his hands shaking as he tried to light a cigarette. Would Beria's henchmen put him through a political debriefing once he was in Vladivostok? And what if he inadvertently revealed insufficient Communist dedication and ardor in such an interview?

He knew Beria's people had been shot for less.

Saturday, 11-25-50

4:30 p.m.

Kobe, Japan

The Fortune Electronics Company had spent millions rebuilding a factory in Kobe's warehouse district, an old shell and munitions plant on Hamabe Dori, in Fukiai ward, a block from the new port Customs House. Harue Murimota was enormously proud of the place. As plant manager, it was his duty to see that nothing was left to chance when Tetsuko-san came to the dedication ceremony this cold and blustery Saturday afternoon. To make sure there were no surprises, Murimota had mobilized the entire workforce of the plant. They had turned out at noon, on the terrazzo front steps, rank ordered in good military fashion, for their assignments.

Murimota had quickly put them to work scrubbing floors and cinder block walls until they shone bright with wax and polish. By the time the official motorcade rumbled up to a stop before the main entrance shortly after four o'clock, Murimota had re-assembled everyone on the steps. The great industrialist and founder of the company emerged from the black Cadillac and squinted up at the massed ranks of the Kobe plant workers, appraising them critically like some latter-day shogun. At Murimota's signal, the workers broke into song, chanting a new company ditty, while Tetsuko-san beamed with pride.

It was going to be a glorious day indeed.

Murimota had only met the founder once. Masuhiro Tetsuko--"Tetsuko-san" to one and all-- was truly a great man. For one thing, he knew "Makassar," the American General who lived in Tokyo and had audiences with the Emperor. It was "Makassar" or perhaps his staff who had approved the building of the new radio and electronics plant in the middle of Kobe's bombed-out central business district. Fresh from meetings at the Dai Ichi, Tetsuko-san had been permitted to invest his millions in re-building the factory to manufacture radios and other newfangled items for the growing economy. The new factory was most welcome. It would soon bring much-needed jobs and pride to a city severely depressed in the aftermath of the war. Thinking of his own spartan apartment furnishings and the many hungry days he had endured, Murimota sang the company song louder and more enthusiastically than ever. Yes, it was surely so that Tetsuko-san was the savior of old Kobe.

Tetsuko shambled up the steps to greet Murimota, who bowed deeply. The founder was a stocky, rotund man of dark complexion, whose black moustache drooped down in a perpetual scowl. Murimota remembered his eyes--black beads nearly lost in folds of acne-scarred flesh, and the permanent scar on his forehead. Tetsuko-san pulled out a Pall Mall cigarette and straightened up to admire the scene.

"Domo. Arigato, Murimota-san. It's all excellent, excellent. The place sparkles like a palace. I'm glad to see a little color at the windows too. So drab before. We must bring joy into the lives of our people, no?"

"Indeed, Tetsuko-san. It's true. Come, come, let me show you the factory. You will be pleased."

Tetsuko brushed off Murimota-san's flowery history of plant construction and barged on out to the shop floor to see for himself.

If he only knew what it took to get the Americans' permission for this place.

Tetsuko felt he had swung a fair deal with SCAP, especially the nervous General Craft-san. Under Occupation law, you needed Tokyo's permission to build a plant or spend more than a few million yen on capital improvements. Of course, without a market, new plants meant nothing and it was on this very point that he had hectored and pestered and finally bribed his way to an accommodation of sorts with the American Army bureaucrats at SCAP Headquarters. Every man had a price, Tetsuko was sure, and you just had to find it. Hadn't old Kurusu-san said the very same thing at the fish shop in Yokahama? Tetsuko smiled at the boyhood memory, and ticked off the old fishmonger's rules of the marketplace:

1. Don't take the first offer, no matter how good

2. Find some flaw to haggle over and work it

3. Every man has a point below which he won't go. Find it. That's the best you'll get.

4. Leave the man some dignity in the end.

Tetsuko-san had lived by old Kurusu's rules for years. And that was the trouble with the Americans, he had to admit. They had the right ideas. They just didn't know how to put them to work.

The tour progressed up one aisle and down the other, Tetsuko pausing to feel the precision of the lathes and the grinders and the dies, with his own hands.

Finally, the shop floor tour was over and Murimota-san steered them to a clean, brightly lit cafeteria. Here, the mayor of Kobe greeted Tetsuko warmly, pumping his hand as if he were drawing water up from a well.

The mayor, a hollow, nervous man, gazed upon Tetsuko-san with awe. He inquired, most delicately, if Tetsuko had recently spoken with the honorable "Makassar."

Tetsuko loved to regale his audiences with personal details of his relationship with the Supreme Commander. Embellished though they might be, he invariably found that proximity to power was a useful lubricant in getting things done. Though he had only seen the General twice in the last two years, and that from a great distance, he had nonetheless developed a ready supply a intimate details for every occasion.

"Makassar-san's office is a very clean and simple place," he told them, aware that all eyes were now on him. "He has no papers on his desk, only a simple blotter, a pen stand, an ornamental box his wife gave him and a telephone. He sits with his back to the Imperial Palace at a window on the sixth floor of the Dai Ichi. His chair has legs cut to make him taller when sitting than anyone else sitting before the desk. When you sit before his desk, his head and face are lost in the glare from the window. Since you can't see his expression, you are at a disadvantage." Tetsuko smiled enigmatically at the image he was creating. "Talking to Makassar is like talking to Fujiyama itself."

A chorus of nods and smiles circled the table while Tetsuko stared off into the distance, serene in his own aura of power. He enjoyed moments like this.

For nearly an hour, Tetsuko told stories and fables about "Makassar" and of his own life as well. He had the rapt attention of everyone at the table.

He told them of the early days of Fortune Electronics and its sister company, Sunrise Haulage. How he had worked under contract to the Japanese Army in Manchuria, when it had been a Japanese colony called Manchukuo. How he had traveled throughout Manchukuo and Korea, drumming up business. How he had become good friends with General Daru of the Seoul garrison. And how profits from the Army business had financed the purchase of two ships for hauling cargo to Japan's far-flung colonies. In October 1943, one of these ships, the Bunjuko, had been torpedoed by an American submarine.

"I was on that ship," Tetsuko explained. "I broke my ankle as we abandoned the ship. She was sinking fast and went under in less than half an hour. I drifted on a piece of a sea chest from someone's cabin for two days. The Navy rescued me and pulled most of the other survivors from the water."

"You were a brave and resourceful businessman, a patriot," said Murimota.

Tetsuko accepted that judgement. "I was also lucky." He went on to explain how he had nearly been tried as a war criminal in 1945, on charges of profiteering. But he had been released from the camp in an early purge, on the condition that he not seek elective office. "I still have my purge papers. I had no interest in politics. So I went to work for the Americans, unloading supplies from aircraft at Atsugi Field in Tokyo. Several years later, I was able to build up a small business doing contract hauling around the country for the American Army. That was in '47. From there, I started Sunrise Haulage again. Fortune Electronics came a year later."

"And now," beamed Murimota, "both companies are part of the Omisumi group, are they not?"

"Indeed," Tetsuko admitted, "business has been very good. The Americans and I have an excellent relationship."

The late afternoon tales were briefly interrupted by a message hand delivered to Tetsuko's table. It was for him. He scanned the note and frowned.

"What is it, Tetsuko-san? Is it bad news?"

"No, just urgent. My friends, it appears that I must return at once to Tokyo. There is some matter I must see to."

"Then you won't be staying for our late shift start?" Murimota was disappointed. "We're running the first batch of radio chassis from our new dies."

"I'm sure things will go well, Murimota-san. But I must return to Tokyo. General Craft-san has asked that I come at once to the Dai Ichi. An urgent audience, the message says."

Murimota and his staff chattered excitedly among themselves for a few moments. It was clear the local officials were impressed.

"Surely," Murimota explained, "Tetsuko-san is an important man, to be so personally summoned."

Tetsuko rose and pleasantries were exchanged around the banquet table. Murimota bowed repeatedly and insisted the industrialist meet everyone at the table. Formal good-byes were offered, followed by expressions of gratitude, best wishes for health and good fortune, salutes to profitable business ventures in the future, salutations on the health and well-being of his family and respects to his ancestors and, in the end, all assembled sang the last stanza of the company song.

Tetsuko accepted their final toasts and tributes and resolutely backed out of the cafeteria, surrounded by a protective barrier of Omisumi security agents.

"Konnichiwa, Murimota-san. Best wishes to all of you. Peace, health and prosperity to your families." And he turned and practically ran down the front steps to the waiting Cadillac. The motorcade peeled away from the curb and sped off toward Motomachi Station in the center of Kobe. The train ride back to Tokyo would take nearly four hours.

"Hayaku," he told the uniformed limousine driver. "Hurry up. Craft-san's an impatient man. I must be at the Dai Ichi by ten tonight. Very urgent, very urgent, he says." Tetsuko sank back in the cool leather seat and thought. What in the name of the Emperor could Craft-san want at this late hour? Whatever it was, a summons to the Dai Ichi could not be ignored.

The train trip was uneventful. Just before ten, Tetsuko was met at Tokyo's Shimbashi Station by the chief of security for Omisumi Holdings. Maisi Torijima was a dark slug of a man. Once Yakuza, he still had discreet ties to the underworld but Tetsuko valued him for his loyalty and thoroughness. Few competitors tried to undercut Omisumi anymore in bidding for American business. Torijima had seen to that. The last competitor had suffered a terrible "accident" not long after his winning bid had been submitted. To have had one's legs and arms and even one's tongue cut off in such a senseless and tragic nighttime assault was surely to be despised. Tetsuko shuddered, remembering the gruesome newspaper photos. Thankfully, Torijima had offered no details.

The Dai Ichi was brightly lit when the security chief braked to a stop at the entrance plaza. Rain water swept over the side gutters of the Hibiya Dori as Tetsuko emerged. He hunkered down under his overcoat and ran slogging through the downpour to the canopied Military Police checkpoint out front. He flashed ID, signed the log and was waved through. Inside, he shook himself dry and placed a phone call upstairs on the building's phone system, to SCAP's General Staff section, the fifth, sixth and seventh floors.

Craft answered himself.

"Tetsuko-san, what the hell took you so long? You'd better get up here right away. I'll send an escort. Major Donovan."

Tetsuko was soaking wet, out of breath and mightily intrigued at Craft's tone of voice. "A crisis, Craft-san? What's going on?"

"Not now. Just get up here." The line went dead.

Major Donovan turned out to be a brusque staff assistant to SCAP G-3, General Wright's Plans and Operations shop. He was tight-lipped, said little and towered over the burly Tetsuko as they rode the elevator up. Throughout the Dai Ichi, Tetsuko noted, offices were lit and officers rushed about. There was a definite air of foreboding, even tension in the place. The rain squall only seemed to emphasize the gloomy atmosphere.

Commands were short and sharp, bitten off and shot out like M-1 rounds. Replies were curt, even abrupt monosyllables.

They reached the General Staff section and Donovan showed Tetsuko to a tiny bullpen of offices. Paul Craft emerged from one, khaki shirt rumpled and tie uncinched at the neck. He waved the industrialist inside and returned Donovan's salute, then shut the door.

"Sit, sit. We've got a new project going, very big stuff and I need your help."

Tetsuko had grown accustomed over the last few years to the brusque and direct ways of the Americans. It could be startling, even jarring, to more refined Japanese sensibilities. But Tetsuko found it a refreshing change from the endless babble and small talk so common to his countrymen. He'd once told Torijima that he could make ten deals with the Americans in a single hour, if he tried. In the same time, a Japanese businessman would be still be finding ways to say hello.

"A late hour, my dear Craft-san, for a meeting, don't you think?"

"Sorry for the cloak and dagger stuff," Craft said, "but like I said, the Old Man's approved a new project and time is short. I need your help in some matters."

"I'm always happy and honored to help my American friends."

Craft smiled at the feigned innocence on Tetsuko's face. "You needn't look so naïve. I know what you're thinking and you'll get the usual considerations. Maybe more, if you're quick. General MacArthur's behind this one himself, by the way. So keep your nose clean."

Tetsuko spread his hands wide. "For 'Makassar,' anything at all. Even a clean nose."

Craft extracted a black memo pad from his pocket. He poured himself and Tetsuko a cup of coffee--Tetsuko despised the American drink but accepted it anyway--and sank back in his squeaking desk chair. Enveloped in steam from the cup, he laid out the barebones of Operation Gallant Flag: the basic mission, the security arrangements, the aircraft, the logistical needs. Careful not to divulge too much in the way of operational details, he finally leveled an even gaze at the Japanese businessman.

"Tetsuko-san, the logistics part is where I need help. We don't have much time. I need a secure warehouse, some trucks, one of your ships, and absolute, unbreakable secrecy in everything you do on this project. And I need to know now, tonight, if I can count on you."

Tetsuko quickly got over his initial amazement at the audacity of Makassar's plan. He was hurt that Craft would speak so of their relationship. "Have I not always been loyal to my American friends, my dear Craft-san."

"Sure, when it suits you. I just want you to know this is a very serious business."

Tetsuko nodded gravely. "Makassar is a great daimyo. To take on the Communist beast is brave. We Japanese owe the General a great debt."

"Perfect," Craft said. "Now you can start re-paying that debt."

"What do you need?"

Craft ticked off the list he had scribbled in his notebook. "The operation involves some rather 'special military equipment,'" He decided he'd better not reveal to Tetsuko that the 'special military equipment' was really atomic bombs. "The equipment is critical to success. Gallant Flag has to have it. It's for a critical combat mission in Korea and it must be safely and securely stored for a few weeks prior to use."

"What kind of equipment is this?"

Craft smiled faintly. "You don't need to know. But I'll tell you this much--storing the special equipment on a military base here in Japan is out of the question. The Reds would know of it right away. Hell, Japan's stinking full of 'em, spies everywhere. The Chinese and the Russians would be warned and the mission would be compromised."

Tetsuko looked dubious. "Nihon is hardly a hotbed of Communism, dear Craft-san."

"The hell it isn't. But never mind that--I need a warehouse somewhere in Japan, preferably a port city. And not Tokyo or Yokahama. I've got to have a secure, protected place to store this equipment. And you'll need some shielding too, Tetsuko-san, say like lead shielding."

"Lead?"

"To...ah, cut emissions. Radio type stuff. We know the Russians are using radio detection for some of their spy work. The place has to be airtight."

Tetsuko was already thinking, calculating. "Lead is costly. There isn't much in Japan, I'm sure. How big an enclosure?"

Craft rattled off some ballpark dimensions. Tetsuko's eyes grew wide.

"Craft-san is surely joking. That's a large room."

"Exactly."

"I will need help getting that quantity of lead sheet. If I can get it all. How thick?"

"Several inches should do the job. I'll get the thickness specs to you after we have an agreement. Can you do it?"

Tetsuko, smelling a unique business opportunity, readily agreed. "If I can be assured of a proper supply of lead sheet, I can supply the warehouse." Fortune-Kobe would be perfect, he realized.

"Great. Excellent. Now, there's more, Tetsuko-san. I want you to do a little mission for me. You have business contacts in Formosa, right?"

"A few. They are shippers mostly. Exporters of things: gifts, precious gems, some drugs. One of them even knows a general in the Army, a Kuomintang member. They say he has Chiang Kai-shek's ear."

"Perfect. You'll probably need all the influence you can get. What I'm about to ask you is strictly between us, Tetsuko-san. Friend to friend. Unofficial. If you make this public, I'll deny it, every word of it. And I'll see to it that SCAP makes your life as miserable as possible for a long time to come. Got it?"

"I got it."

Craft leaned forward on his desk. "There is an abandoned American submarine in Formosa. An old fleet boat with the Seventh Fleet out of Pearl. She used to be known as the Sunfish, hull number SS-355, until she ran aground in June 1945, at Hsinchu, in the Formosa Strait. Jap destroyer holed her with its five-inch guns but the captain beached her before she flooded."

"The crew survived?"

"Most of them. Turns out that last year, the boat was written off as scrap by the Navy. Then some bureaucrat at State got the bright idea of donating it to the Nationalist Chinese government when they fled the mainland. The Chinese said they were going to refurbish her and put her to work in the service of Chiang Kai-shek's navy, to patrol the straits in case Mao got a hankering to come invading some day. That's where she is now."

"At sea again?"

Craft shook his head, lit up a cigarette. "In a dry-dock at Taipei. The refurb's taking longer than expected. And Chiang doesn't have the money, so the U.S. is helping out."

Tetsuko was puzzled. "I don't understand, Craft-san. If you need the submarine back, why not just inform the Chinese. Chiang would help you."

Craft sucked hard on his Lucky Strike. His eyes narrowed. "It's a rather delicate matter, see? Gallant Flag is so deeply classified, we can't go through normal channels. The moment the average Army or Navy or State Department pinhead gets wind of what we're trying to do, it'll be all over the papers, all over Washington, and half the world will know about it. That's America for you. Big and strong as an ox, with two left feet. No, we have to do this differently, if we're ever going to maintain operational security. Tetsuko-san, here's the deal: if you can 'buy' or somehow procure the services of that submarine for a secret mission in the Pacific over the next few weeks, I'm authorized to assure you that General MacArthur will look most favorably on your request to have exclusive rights to make and market radios in Japan, without competition, for up to ten years. That's five more than I originally told you."

Tetsuko regarded Craft warily. "This is a new development."

"But you're interested, right?"

"Of course, I'm interested. But I must discuss this matter with my associates. We are like a family at Omisumi. Perhaps, if I could tell them more about this Gallant Flag, it's importance--"

"Not possible," Craft shut off that line of inquiry immediately. "Suffice it to say, Tetsuko-san, that helping us in these matters is a very patriotic thing to do. It'll go a long way toward defeating the Communists in Korea. And that helps Japan too. It's only fair that the Supreme Commander properly reward those who are willing to risk a lot in defense of democracy."

Tetsuko knew he could hardly refuse Craft's offer. "Ten years is a long time, Craft-san. Omisumi would be permitted this protected market, without competition? All rights to distribute and sell, as well as manufacture radios?"

Craft nodded, an imperceptible head movement easily lost in the wreath of cigarette smoke.

"And you will put this in writing?"

Craft sat up straight and doused the cigarette in a hiss of ashes in the ashtray. "I think you know perfectly well how we work around here. Verbal agreement. Nothing on paper."

Tetsuko was disappointed but not surprised. "I take a big risk here." He remembered old Kurusu's words of advice: Get the best you can get and go on. He massaged the throbbing forehead scar, a leftover from more vigorous days as a Yokahama dockhand. The scar often throbbed on cold, rainy days, a reminder, as he liked to say, that flesh was mortal but the spirit of a man lived on. Code of the bushido...something the Americans would never understand. Tetsuko resolutely commanded his fingers away from the scar.

"I accept your proposal, Craft-san. A big risk but as the samurai teach: you must lunge forward to bury the sword. Not to worry...I can get you a warehouse straight away. There is one in Kobe that would be easy to modify. Your special equipment will be safe there. And Omisumi has very good security."

"Excellent. You're a good businessman, Tetsuko-san. And the submarine in Formosa?"

"Ahhh, yes, the submarine. A more complicated matter. I will travel at once to Taipei. My associates have contacts in Generalisimo Chiang's government. Perhaps, a deal can be worked out. It will not be easy..." he paused, fingering the scar again. "...I am wondering if the price of procuring the submarine is quite high, perhaps the great daimyo Makassar would help out? A few words...a few dollars in the right hands...sometimes negotiations are made easier--"

Craft replied, elliptically, "Rest assured SCAP will make available whatever resources are needed to ensure Gallant Flag goes forward. This mission has got to succeed."

With that understanding, Tetsuko proposed a toast. Craft demurred.

"There's no sake around here at this hour. That's a bit more of a challenge than I can take tonight anyway. We have a deal?"

Tetsuko rose and bowed, then shook Craft's hand. Craft again swore the businessman to absolute secrecy. He buzzed Major Donovan. The staff secretary appeared at the door momentarily.

"Major, escort Mr. Tetsuko here back down to Secure One. Make sure he's squared away on the log sheet too. Just as we discussed."

Donovan saluted. "Right away, sir." He recalled the General carefully instructing him to pre-date the log-out time, to show it as 1800 hours. In fact, it was nearly midnight. Craft wanted no paper evidence lying around that he had held late night meetings at the Dai Ichi with someone like Tetsuko.

Donovan and Tetsuko departed. When he was sure they were gone, Craft buzzed Colonel Joe Walcott, staff G-2 under General Willoughby for domestic intel. Walcott showed up a minute later.

"You're still running a surveillance tail on Masuhiro Tetsuko, I presume?"

Walcott nodded. "That's affirmative, General. For the last two months, we've had at least two pairs of eyeballs on him twenty-four hours a day. Tighter than a whore's ass...that's the way my boys have stuck to him."

"Very well," Craft said. He idly drummed a pen on his desk blotter, then remembered to close up and re-pocket the black notebook. "I don't trust the son of a bitch."

"Not to worry," Walcott offered. "We've got enough dirt on the scumbag to put him away for life. Off hand, I can't think of a single Occupation law he hasn't broken. Racketeering, purge violations, you name it. Tetsuko-san knows what's good for him. We've got him reeled in so far, he couldn't go straight if his life depended on it."

Craft considered Walcott's words, and said, "You know, Joe... it may just come down to that."
CHAPTER 3

Sunday, November 26, 1950

5:30 p.m.

San Francisco

Pan Am Flight 2507 had been a smooth and uneventful trip as far as Paul Craft was concerned. He usually judged such matters by whether and how well he slept on the plane and, from the groggy state of disorientation he found himself fighting off, this flight must have been a good one. Several whiskeys and a handful of aspirin hadn't hurt either. Craft fought his way back to fuller consciousness and peered out the window of the Lockheed Constellation. The Clipper America had just descended through broken clouds at five thousand feet on the upwind leg of her final approach into San Francisco International.

It was nearing dusk as the airliner settled toward the runway. The city by the bay was beautifully backlit with sun-dappled clouds and a picture-postcard sunset was in the works. The Connie floated for a few seconds sweeping in over the threshold, then dropped the last few feet and kissed the tarmac with a mild jolt.

Craft was just glad to be back on the ground again, if only for a few hours. He'd been in flight for what seemed like days, on the multi-leg hop back to the States. Atsugi Field, Tokyo to Andersen Field, Guam. Then Guam to Wheeler Field, Oahu. Then Oahu to San Francisco. He checked his watch, adjusting it to the right time. The connection to Albuquerque, New Mexico took off in about three hours. He had a little time to kill and he felt cramped enough to do a little walking. The plane taxied gently into position outside the terminal building and stopped, her huge props feathered and spinning down. He decided he might as well kill the time by getting drunk in an airport lounge.

Down the stairs and across the windy ramp, Craft followed the rest of the passengers into the terminal. The airport was moderately busy on this Sunday afternoon, though traffic would undoubtedly pick up as the Thanksgiving holidays drew to a close.

At a nearby men's room, Craft freshened himself up and trained a critical eye first on his Army winter greens, then on a face far too young for all the creases and lines the mirror revealed. Maybe the old saying was right after all, he thought. Time wasn't fair. No doubt Korea had aged everyone the last few months. MacArthur himself had declined visibly in the short span of this crazy war. Now well past seventy, the Old Man had finally acquired some of the traits of an old man: the long confident stride had settled into a more hesitant shuffle; the waistline had noticeably thickened; the hair was a touch grayer at the temple, despite years of vanity with various hair color treatments. Mostly it was MacArthur's eyes, Craft thought. He'd seen a certain weary dullness in them at the last staff briefing on Friday, like a fire slowly fading. All the years of command responsibility, the rigors of combat leadership, the failures and even the triumphs had taken their toll on the Supreme Commander. A news reporter had once called SCAP practically a 'force of nature' and it was true. But even mountains eroded and wore down with time.

Korea's been tough on all of us, Craft realized, examining his own weathered, Texas farmhand face. He was fifty years old himself, sad to say, although his father had a phrase of some comfort for that condition. Sure it's hell being old, Wynton Craft liked to say, squinting up into that west Texas sun, until you consider the alternative. When Brigadier General Paul Craft did that, he realized the truth of old Wynton's aphorism, for the reality of it was that plenty of poor sons of bitches caught up in the madness called Korea would never have an alternative, would never grow old enough to worry about such matters as crow's feet and graying hair.

And that, Paul Craft determined, as he cinched up his tie and straightened the quadruple rows of campaign ribbons on his chest, was the real reason that Gallant Flag had to succeed. The Chinese had jumped into Korea with both feet, despite G-2's prevarications, and America could never hope to match the Reds man for man in the godforsaken tundra of North Korea's mountains. Better we use what we had and that meant only one thing...the Bomb.

As old Wynton Magruder Craft liked to say: you don't stop a gullywasher with a kitchen pail. Paul Craft left the men's room feeling moderately refreshed if still a bit stiff and went looking for the nearest bar.

The very end of the concourse gave onto a darkened lounge neon-backlit with a sign reading MacTavish's Saloon. Inside, once his eyes became adjusted, Craft took desultory notice of the faded leather booths and fake gold rush implements of the 'forty-niner' decorative theme. He plopped down heavily on a barstool and ordered a whiskey, double-strength, then nursed a few sips before he bothered taking stock of his surroundings. The bar was lightly patronized, though still quite noisy for the small crowd. There was a couple in one of the booths. Craft noted a quartet of Navy pukes huddled at one end of the bar, regaling each other with tall tales. At the other end of the bar, several men were diagramming something on pieces of paper scraps scattered around two pitchers of beer. Engineers, he surmised, or perhaps businessmen plotting sales strategy for some new Swanson frozen dinner treat to foist off on the public. Craft had tried the things recently and decided he had no use for the rubbery concoctions. But then GIs used to fine dining with C-rations would probably try anything.

Paul Craft finished his whiskey and signaled the bartender for another.

He was keenly sensitive to MacArthur's growing frustration with Washington and U.S. policy in Korea. He knew early on that the Old Man wanted to prosecute the war to the fullest extent. He wanted to extend the battlefield into China and Russia to cut off both sanctuary and supplies. What the hell was wrong with trying to win the war, for Christ's sake? That's what an army was for. But Washington just didn't see it that way. Limited war, police action, containment...these were the words the Pentagon used nowadays. Jesus, you needed a whole new dictionary just to decipher the crap.

Craft knew that MacArthur felt he had a moral right to use every weapon in his arsenal to defeat Communism. Like any good staff officer, he had used his knowledge of MacArthur to fashion a plan, Gallant Flag, to do just that. Rule Number One for survival in the Army: make your commanding officer look good and live a long and fruitful life in the service of your country. Craft was a big believer in following the rules.

Craft idly appraised a pinup poster of Rita Hayworth on the wall behind the bar. An advertisement for something--the actress preened for the camera in high heels, a long full skirt tight at the waist, bulky collegiate sweater and dark hair curled up high on her head. He let his eyes follow every curve, just so he could remember the details later. A bachelor since Natalie had died in that car crash on the highway to Richmond back in January '45, he'd found some success in occupied Japan savoring the local delights, though Japanese females were a bit petite for a man with Texas-sized appetites. Craft figured he'd been in the Army for something like twenty-eight years give or take a few days--married to his country, like the old barracks ballad went--but he had precious little to show for it save the single general's star on his shoulderboards.

Now however, if all went according to plan, he'd finally fathered something more substantial than a Japanese whore with a headache. A war-winning strategy for kicking the Communists out of Korea had to be worth at least another star, if not actual combat command or a few more medals. He'd left Atsugi over twenty hours ago, grimly determined to see Gallant Flag succeed, yet fatalistic about the Army ever appreciating his talents. Staff officers always got shafted in the review boards of Uncle Sam's Army--it was a truism that you had to command in combat, you had to be shot at--before the gods of promotion ever noticed you.

Truth was he hadn't seen or heard a rifle shot in anger since he'd followed General Krueger's Sixth Army staff into Manila in 1945. And the Old Man wasn't likely to let him see any action in Korea either, not with the front lines disintegrating by the hour. No sir, he was certain of only one thing. Gallant Flag was his baby and he was the proud father. This operation would be his best ticket upstairs, maybe his only ticket. He'd felt that fact for a certainty all the way across the Pacific. Life in the Army was about to take a decided turn for the better for Paul Craft.

Just keep Rule Number One in mind, old boy. Make your C/O look good and manna will fall from heaven. And even better that your C/O was practically a force of nature....

Craft sipped the last dregs of his second whiskey. Everything was starting to taste better. He could almost taste the decorations and accolades that a grateful America would soon shower on the man who helped defeat Communism in Asia. MacArthur would be a military genius and a conquering hero once again.

Craft figured there would be plenty of glory to go around. He expected to be able to write his own ticket.

"--sucker's a loose cannon, if you ask me."

Startled out of his pleasant daydream, Craft turned to see where the words had come from. It was the Navy boys, a heated argument erupting over the Korean situation. Craft shifted on his stool.

"Scuttlebutt says Mac's on his way out," one squid was saying. Craft checked the man's sleeves and snorted. A friggin' two-striper, ass-licking his way to the top. Another one agreed loudly.

"For my money, Mac's nothing but a brass-hat, prima donna. You guys ever check out that hokey corncob pipe? What's he smoking anyway...some of that wild weed?"

Loud guffaws followed. Craft had the distinct impression the entire scene was being directed at him. He let his shoes drop audibly to the floor and squared himself to face the Navy officers. Maybe these propeller-heads need a better look at a real general's stars. Craft sidled over to the group, motioning the bartender for another round of whiskey.

"Gentlemen, for your information, General Douglas MacArthur was assaulting enemy positions while you were still getting your butts wiped by your mommies."

There were four of them, O-3s and O-4s mostly, young and hard nosed and well on their way to a fully drunken state. The senior officer, a crew-cutted commander with a hook nose and nearly drained Scotch and soda didn't see Craft's shoulderboard stars. He hopped off his barstool and shifted to a more frontal position among the men.

"For your information, Mr. Army Officer, the United States Navy owns the Pacific Ocean. The Army just pays rent. And also for your information, General 'Dugout Douglas' MacArthur can personally lick the chiseled and exceptionally well-proportioned ass of Admiral Chester Nimitz and just about every other Navy officer who helped beat the snot out of the Japs with nobody's else's help." Commander "Hook-Nose" sneered up at Craft with reddened, bleary eyes and then stumbled slightly, as he tried to plant his feet more firmly.

Craft's face darkened. He relocated so that everyone could get a good look at the difference in rank. A nervous Lieutenant nearly spilled his beer when he realized Craft was a full brigadier general.

"Uh, sir...Commander Haley, sir...uh, flag officer on deck...."

The other officers quickly scrambled, buttoning up their uniform jackets and generally straightening themselves up. Hooknose Haley ignored the commotion. He squinted peculiarly at Craft.

"You're an odd-looking bloke, for a landlubber, ain't you?" Haley smirked. He swirled a few drops of Scotch around in his glass and tossed back the last dregs, smacking his lips. "Is it true...what the scuttlebutt says about the General?"

Craft was developing a real dislike for the little Commander. He sniffed and smelled breath that could curdle paint. "And what's that, sailor?"

Haley snickered. "Oh, nothin'...just that MacArthur's so stiff, he hasn't changed his underwear since Corregidor...can't get 'em off...." He howled with laughter, then started coughing.

"Commander, sir...this is General--" the Lieutenant looked up inquiringly.

"Craft. Brigadier General Paul Craft, United States Army, Far Eastern Command."

"Huh?" Haley's face went from a smirk to an odd mixture of confused disorientation. "What's that--?"

"Gentlemen," Craft offered, swallowing a strong impulse to bury a fist in Haley's face, "I suggest you escort this--" he sniffed, wrinkling his nose "...this decrepit pisspot of a naval officer out of this establishment immediately. I hear that Shore Patrol just loves to bust heads...say on a drunk and disorderly charge."

The Lieutenant quickly agreed. "Yes, sir...sorry, sir...we didn't...I mean, uh, Commander Haley here, sir..." He helped Haley stay upright--itself no mean feat as the O-5's muscle control had gone south for the evening--and jerked his head at the exit. "Men, if you don't mind...a little help here...."

The other officers sprang up like they had been shot and each took one of Haley's arms. The Commander's uniform jacket had come unbuttoned and was sliding off his back. He swore and drooled like an infant. "Goddamn it, you jerks! Let me go...er...uh...this here Army skunk's just about to say something profound...wha?...you know that MacArthur can't even piss straight...just look at his shoes...."

Craft glared back stone-faced at the sorry scene. "The Supreme Commander doesn't bother pissing on rats, Commander. That's too good for them. He just stomps 'em 'till they're--"

But the loudspeaker over the bar blurted out an interruption, an announcement, echoing up and down the concourse.

"--announcing the first boarding call for United Flight One Eighty Five, now ready for departure at Gate Seventeen. United Flight One Eighty Five, nonstop to Albuquerque, New Mexico, now boarding. All passengers--"

"Sorry, sir, General Craft, sir," said the Lieutenant. "We'll be leaving now, sir. The Commander's just a little--"

"--snockered, Lieutenant," Craft replied. "I believe that's the word you're looking for."

"Yes, sir."

Craft waited until the Navy pukes had hustled their garrulous commander out of the bar, then finished his own whiskey and dropped a few coins on the bar for a tip. He grabbed his bag and headed out. His flight has just been called and Craft realized Gate Seventeen was at the other end of the concourse.

He had a date with Dr. Albert Ranier and Dr. Edvard Tolkach in Albuquerque.

The flight was boring and stuffy and Craft slept most of the way. Jolted awake at touchdown, he saw the New Mexico city surrounded by a bowl of scenic snow-covered mountains, but otherwise the place had little to recommend it to the casual tourist. With all the military bases in the area, that was probably just as well, he thought. Hot, dry and dusty was his first impression, as he deplaned, grabbed his bag from the trolley and walked across the ramp to the terminal. Windy, too, as a gust nearly tore off his field cap.

After freshening up again, he got a taxi out front and slung his bag into the back seat. The cabbie was swarthy and obese, and reeked of garlic.

"Where to, Mac?"

"Mesa Verde Hotel," Craft told him. The dark green Mercury jerked into motion as the cabbie gunned the V-8 and swung out into traffic. A few stops and heart-pounding lane changes later, the cabbie took them out into moderate Sunday evening traffic on Candelaria Road.

Mesa Verde was a faded lodge of frontier relics and Western bric-a-brac. The carpet was a dingy beige, depressing enough save for the walls, mounted with dilapidated carcasses of bear and wolf and something Craft assumed had once been a coyote. Dim lighting deepened an already gloomy atmosphere, in contrast to the bright desert sun outside.

He got his bearings for a moment, feeling in his back and neck the long hours in flight, then spied the front desk and headed for it. He was quickly intercepted by two men who had been conversing in a sunken lounge pit by a flagstone fireplace.

"General Craft? General Paul Craft?"

Craft quickly sized up the speaker. He was a slightly stooped older fellow, delicate hands now folded almost in a prayer-like clasp, with hard blue eyes and a crown of mostly gray and white hair around the sides of his head.

"I'm Craft. You are--?"

"Ranier," said the physicist. "Albert Ranier." He took Craft's hand with both of his own and shook them warmly. "Edvard Tolkach, too," he added, indicating a spare, cool man standing beside them. "From Los Alamos."

"Pleased." Craft shook both their hands.

"A long flight you've had, no doubt. About nine thousand, eight hundred miles, I calculate." Ranier indicated a small restaurant up some stairs. The three of them climbed up and were ushered into a dark booth. The place was called the Desert Diner.

"Long enough," Craft admitted. They ordered dinner and drinks. Craft was intrigued by the Czech physicist. "I'm curious, Doctor, why you want to help us? Obviously, there's a risk here. Gallant Flag's a military operation. The mission could fail. You could even be prosecuted, you know. Why take the chance?"

Ranier fidgeted with a knife, then a napkin ring. "General, have you ever seen Communism? I mean, face to face? I have. I've seen it, lived with it. I've lost friends and relatives to this beast. When you and I met in Tokyo last June, my own mother Elisabeth had died on a prison farm outside Prague. You, of all people, should understand this: we are at war and Korea is only one battle. In war, there are no risks. There is only victory or defeat. My own nation was swallowed whole by Russia. Why would I not fight?"

"Los Alamos is overrun with Red spies, so Albert thinks," Tolkach added.

"It's true," Ranier insisted. "In the last six months, I identified two in J-division alone...instrument technicians who could have easily sabotaged our tests in the Pacific."

Craft agreed, sipping cautiously at another whiskey. "America's an easy target to penetrate. The loyalty checks have everybody up in arms but that's the price you pay when the enemy's in your own backyard."

"You've discussed our ideas with General MacArthur?"

"Better than that. The General has seen the plans I drew up. He approved them Friday. That's why I needed to see you."

Ranier rubbed his hands together with relish. "Excellent. Excellent. Then we have much work to do."

"And not a lot of time, Doctor. For maximum military impact, we need to have war-ready devices in theater at the end of this month. The UN's getting the snot kicked out of them right now. With the Chinese, we've got a whole new war. I've promised the General we'll have a mission ready to go by January 1. The men, the planes, and the targets, I can handle from my end. The devices themselves--" he shrugged, "--that's where I need you." Craft paused a moment, to let the waitress re-arrange their table for dinner service. He ordered steak and potatoes, something substantial to get the taste of too much rubbery airline food out of his mouth. When the waitress left, Craft had a question.

"Doctor, what exactly is your situation here? At Los Alamos, I mean."

Ranier looked puzzled. "How do you mean? I'm principal investigator in T-Division for detonation physics and propagation analysis--'

"Albert," Tolkach interrupted, "that's not what he means." The physicist squeezed Ranier's shoulder. "Albert became a bit of a bad boy around T-Division last spring, General. What with the loyalty checks, spies turning up everywhere, indictments, people being questioned in small rooms. The Rosenbergs haven't helped. Or Klaus Fuchs and his situation. When he was arrested by the British, we were shocked. Many of us knew the man. Albert became quite a dedicated spy-hunter."

"We were infected with the vermin," Ranier insisted. "We do have a responsibility to--"

"Yes, yes, that's all true, Albert." To Craft, he apologized. "It's good we have conscientious workers. But the loyalty oaths and the tests, the interviews, the steady stream of bad news, friends disappearing for awhile--it just wasn't a healthy atmosphere for serious work."

"So I was exiled...to the Pacific."

"You were detailed to the Pacific Proving Ground to support ordnance installation for J-Division," Tolkach corrected him. "J-Division installs all the hardware that supports the test shots. They rig the bomb in the shot tower. They set up the test instruments, the scintillation counters, the neutron flux counters. They do all the wiring and the arming and the fuzing. Albert was asked to help out."

"I had no choice," Ranier insisted. "Dr. Purdue said I was contaminating the atmosphere at the lab--he actually said 'contaminate', like I was a hazard or something. All my accusations and charges weren't helping matters. What was I supposed to do?--we have a responsibility to maintain security against Communist agents. Purdue's an ass--he was just blind to what was happening."

"Albert had an enforced tour of field duty, shall we say."

Craft was beginning to understand. "That's when you came to Tokyo. The seminars for SCAP and Far Eastern Command officers. All general staff attended."

"Correct. David Lilienthal had just become head of the Atomic Energy Commission. He wanted the military to know more about what we were trying to do at Bikini Atoll--what kind of shots, the bomb types, basic physics, details like that, as you recall."

"I recall you seemed quite upset."

Ranier nodded glumly. "Poor mother...I received a cable from Vienna, from my brother Vaclav. He escaped before the Russians sealed the border with Czechoslovakia." Ranier shook his head, carefully arranged and re-arranged the knives and forks on the table into perfect squares, then triangles and back again to squares. "Mother wouldn't leave Radowice Street. They came for her a week after the borders were sealed. 'An enemy of the state', she was called. Just because her sons had been successful. They're like that, you know. Everyone who is successful, on their native ability, is an enemy. They tear you down, make you and everyone else like dirt, the same, and nobody is allowed to be better at anything, certainly not better than the ones in charge. If you are successful, if you strive to make life a little better for you and your family, it's a crime. You're punished. Mother was weak...." The Czech physicist swallowed hard, looked down at the table settings. "They knew she wouldn't last at the prison farm. She couldn't work, so she starved--they let her starve, you see. And then she died. One less enemy of the state."

There was a numbing silence, save for the clattering of dishes and waitresses chatting behind them. Craft watched Tolkach try to comfort the Czech physicist, who seemed on the verge of tears. He took off his glasses, wiped his eyes with a table napkin.

"You remember inviting me to come to Los Alamos?" Craft asked. "To see for myself what was going on?"

Tolkach said, "Continuing education for our military men. A perfect cover, no? At first, I didn't see all the spies and enemies the way Albert did. I was sure he was over-reacting, he was emotionally distraught over his family...the situation in Czechoslovakia, throughout Europe, really. But now...."

"Something has happened to change your mind?"

"Korea," Tolkach said simply. "Now, no one doubts what the Reds intend."

"When you gave the seminars in Tokyo last June, we met afterward."

Ranier said, "Yes, I remember that. A number of officers gathered at--what was the place?"

"Lohmeyers. A German restaurant in the Ginza. You and I talked in a club room, with LaSalle and a few others. I asked you then to work up a proposal, on your own and very unofficial, on how it might be possible to obtain a few of the Mark VI fission devices for MacArthur's use in the Far East."

"I've done that, General. I have it with me now." Ranier instantly became more animated, more determined. His eyes cleared. He put his glasses back on, adjusting them.

"Good." Craft was relieved. He didn't want to think he'd squeezed his butt into claustrophobic airline seats for the past twenty hours for nothing. He explained.

"Frankly, our biggest problem inside Far Eastern Command is the Air Force. General MacArthur has long wanted atom bombs assigned to FEC for use in theater, especially now that the Russians have their own bomb, but the Air Force has blocked him all the way up and down the chain of command. The General feels, as theater commander, that he should have a small inventory of devices on hand, just in case. Of course, only the President can authorize their use. But such a small inventory of weapons, in a national emergency when time is critical, could be tactically useful. Especially, if the President were ever incapacitated. And with the Chinese stepping in, it's no longer just tactically useful. It has become tactically essential, if the UN is going to stay in Korea."

Ranier extracted a few pages of handwritten notes from his jacket and spread them out on the table. "We are ready to help, General. When can we get started?"

"Not here," Craft warned them. "Not now." He scanned the light restaurant crowd. Atomic Energy Security Service (AESS) and Defense Department agents made up half the population of New Mexico, he was sure. It paid to be careful. "After dinner, in my room here at the hotel. Let's eat now. Then we'll separate, shake hands, say good-byes, the whole works. Give me half an hour. Then one at a time, you both come up to room three oh eight. Got it?"

They both nodded, a bit eagerly, he thought. Folks, this is no game. He tried a reassuring smile on the physicists. "It's good to have both of you on the team. We need you. The General needs you and the country needs you. They just don't realize it yet."

A few minutes later, Craft's steak and potatoes came. The two physicists sipped wine and munched indifferently on a light cottage cheese salad. Craft chowed down like a starving peasant. It was nearly ten o'clock when he finished and waiters were already stacking chairs on top of tables.

"Come to my room," Craft told them. "One at a time. Half hour between you." He paid the bill, and left, to unpack and clean up before Tolkach and Ranier arrived.

As instructed, the two physicists each made their way separately to Room 308. It was a plain, efficiently furnished unit: single bed and nightstand, small desk with a lamp and chair. The window overlooked the Rio Grande. Tolkach and Ranier sat on the side of the bed, while Craft sorted out papers on the desk.

"This operation depends on you two," Craft said. "We don't have the manpower to block the Reds from moving into Korea in force. The only way we'll ever turn the tide is with firepower. That's why the atom bomb is crucial." Craft sat down at the desk, flipping through his black notebook. "The timeline's tight. Like I said at dinner, January 1 is the date we promised the General. The men, the aircraft, the targets and the weapons have to be ready. That's five weeks, gentlemen. You're sure this is doable?"

Ranier nodded. "Greenhouse makes it possible, General. The next atomic test shot at Eniwetok. I'm going to Washington Monday evening for a meeting with the Atomic Energy Commission. All the chiefs will be there...Teller, Ulam, Weiskopf, Gamow. The Scientific Advisory Board is planning the details of Greenhouse now. At this meeting, Edvard and I will propose expanding the test, adding a few more shots. We have a new method of boosting the fission yield we want to test."

"And Albert is very persuasive," Tolkach added.

"If I can convince the board that the 'Rainier-Tolkach' method is worth testing, we'll have five or six extra shots in the test series. That's five or six additional devices we have to make plutonium and other parts for. If I get these devices made, you can divert them for use in Korea?"

Craft made a few cryptic notes, more to settle his nerves than anything. This was new territory and he wasn't in charge anymore. He drummed his pencil on the desk. "There is a way, yes. These devices...they need to be fully weaponized. Aircraft-capable with fuses, safety circuits, arming systems, the works. Not just test devices."

"We're working on that. Better to get the extra devices approved and made openly, then divert them to Korea. How do you plan to do this, General?"

Craft smiled elliptically. "I have some ideas. It would be better if you didn't know the details. We have to do this so the devices won't be missed, so they'll be written off, sort of."

"An accident?"

"Something like that."

That gave Ranier an idea. "I can arrange a small production 'error', General. This was something Edvard and I had already considered, before the Korean problem."

"Explain."

"Well, there is a way to 'spike' the fissionable core of these extra devices; we'll call them Ranier-Tolkach devices. Change the composition of the plutonium, on paper at least, and make it seem less than the purity required. Unsuitable for a weapon. Plutonium not of the required purity won't fission properly. The yield drops to practically nothing, less even than the weight of equivalent TNT, if it doesn't pre-detonate first. The bomb becomes a dud, as you call it."

"We'll need fully capable atomic weapons if Gallant Flag is to succeed."

"And you shall have them," Ranier promised. When Craft asked for more details, the physicist went on. "I have colleagues at the Hanford Works in Washington. They hate the Communists as much as we do. All this we have discussed before...a way of altering the test documents, altering calibration standards in the radiography lab to indicate that a given batch of plutonium isn't pure, that it's been 'poisoned.' We worked out an entire scenario--just ask Edvard here--for doing this during one of our Pacific tests. At Bikini, the radiography tests would show, in our pre-shot analysis, that the bombs wouldn't work, that they would be duds because of impurities. The shot would have to be cancelled because the test director would assume the device's plutonium core was not up to purity standards. But in reality, the devices would be perfectly useable. Only the tests would be wrong."

Tolkach jumped in. "Then you have a bomb everybody thinks can't work. Ready to be pulled from the shot and shipped back to the States."

"A perfect candidate," added Ranier, "for use somewhere else."

Craft was surprised at the physicists' cunning. "You two make Mata Hari look like an amateur. Question is: will it work? You think the Atomic Energy Commission will buy this new 'method' of yours?"

Ranier was confident. "With Teller there, I'm sure of it. Teller's pushy, arrogant. He wants to build the Super, the hydrogen bomb, and forget about improving fission weapons. But he has a long list of enemies, even on the Board. If Teller acts as he usually does in such meetings, and I present an alternative method of boosting fission yields without the expense of the Super, we can count on politics to do the rest." Ranier rubbed his hands together, anticipating the fight. "Teller is Hungarian. I am Czech. We argue like siblings. No, General, I'm confident we will get permission for extra shots for the Greenhouse test."

Craft closed his notebook. "It might just work." And what choice do I really have, anyway?

"It has to work," Ranier reminded him. "You have made your plans for 'obtaining' the devices, then? After the test director learns they are impure?"

"Let's just say I have some ideas. Like I said, you don't need to know the details." He didn't need to add that he'd never yet found a scientist who could be trusted with a secret. "But I am looking forward to seeing Los Alamos tomorrow." As an official observer from Far Eastern Command, he'd managed to secure permission through SCAP to visit the Lab and pick up a few details on the upcoming Greenhouse shot. That at least was the story. He knew perfectly well that brigadier generals didn't just waltz into Los Alamos on a whim without high-level permission and a need to know. Working for SCAP as assistant G-3 did have its uses.

"Be ready at seven," Tolkach said. "We'll pick you up in the lobby. It's a good two-hour ride up the highway. And security's tighter than ever around the Lab nowadays. The Army scrutinizes everybody's papers very thoroughly."

Just like the Dai Ichi, Craft thought, even though it was the same Army. He figured he could count on the same bureaucracy gumming up things here just as in Tokyo. The ID papers signed off by SCAP should do the trick.

Craft said good night and the physicists disappeared. He wondered if they were driving back north to the Lab tonight. It was nearly midnight. He knew one thing for sure...if he didn't hit the sack soon, fighting off fatigue from too much travel, he'd hit the floor first. Best to get some proper sack time now before his little tour on the Hill tomorrow. He changed and brushed his teeth, then checked his watch. It was still only nine o'clock in San Francisco, he calculated, and he had yet another stop to make there on his way back west to Japan. He fumbled in his wallet for the scrap of paper and finally found it. He had a quick phone call that needed making, this one to a Captain John Ward, U.S.N., at the San Francisco Navy Yard.

He had a little favor he wanted to ask of Ward.

November 27, 1950

7:30 a.m.

Los Alamos, New Mexico

The drive up north along New Mexico Highway 528 did indeed take the three of them almost two hours. Still groggy from travel fatigue, Craft lolled in the back seat of the Chevy, drifting in and out of wakefulness. He helped himself liberally from a thermos of hot coffee, while trying to appreciate the pink and lavender splendor of a desert sunrise on the Jemez Mountains to their west. But the panoramic beauty of the high desert was lost on him as he struggled to keep his eyes open, against the monotonous drone of the car's wheels on the blacktop.

At length, he was jolted fully awake by the sound of voices surrounding the car and realized, after rubbing sleep from his eyes, that they had stopped at a guard shack along the road, their path barred with white gate posts. A sign over the shack said simply EAST GATE. A squad of MPs approached.

Paperwork and identity checks were done and Craft had the satisfaction of snapping off a contemptuous salute as the sergeant of the gate detail recognized his general's stars. The sergeant saluted back smartly and waved them through. Tolkach sped along a dusty, bumpy stretch of asphalt that the signs labeled New Mexico 502. Ten minutes later, they slowed and pulled into the Lab Technical Area, turning off the grandly named Central Avenue--itself little more than a paved camping trail--to a narrow dirt lane of Quonset huts, shacks, cabins and odd concrete bungalows. A rustic lodge dominated one end of the lane. Tolkach parked the Chevy outside a rude collection of aluminum huts and cabins halfway down the street.

"The Chem/Met building," Ranier announced. They got out and went inside, encountering at once a large room with a raised wooden plank floor. The place was filled with workbenches of every size and shape, equipment stands, piping and ductwork running along the floorboards, and wiring bundles taped down with gray and black tape. "Welcome to the Chemistry and Metallurgy Division."

The place was jammed with people of every description. Welders pored over metal frames in front, their torches arcing behind heavy guards. Electricians in the back were pulling cable over, under and around other people, like a big snake rippling across the room. Long benches crisscrossed the room, covered with shielded boxes.

Ranier showed Craft a bench near the front of the room. Two technicians worked through long leaded gloves inside a shielded box on top of the bench. Both were manipulating a grayish, powdery substance, poking and kneading it into a hemispherical mold in a tray.

"Wet plutonium nitrate paste," Rainer explained. He patted the older technician on the shoulder. "This is Emile Vargas. He handles plutonium casting. And he built our ovens over there--" Ranier indicated some breadbox-sized containers on wall racks.

"Gut morning, Doctor," Vargas' voice was muffled, heavily accented behind his glasses and face shield.

"You're up early this morning, Emile."

Vargas withdrew his hands from the glovebox and lifted his face shield. He was swarthy with a thin line of moustache. He regarded Craft warily. "Just getting these slugs ready for machining. Greenhouse, you know."

"Emile, this is General Paul Craft, with the Army. From MacArthur's staff in Tokyo. He's here to learn how we make bombs." Ranier's faint nod told Vargas what he wanted to know. Don't fret. He's one of us. Vargas rolled his head around his shoulders and shrugged some feeling back into his cramped neck. Too much glove box work gave everyone a neck ache.

"Well, we make them very carefully, don't we, Doctor?"

"That we do." Ranier said. "Emile came over to the States from Austria. Thirty eight, wasn't it, Emile? Right before Hitler's Anschluss? He hated the Nazis."

"Bolsheviks too."

"As we all do. Emile's been helping us out in core preparation and finishing ever since. He and Steven here--" Ranier indicated the other technician, still forming a fist-sized mound of plutonium nitrate inside the glove box--" both are doing critical work for our Pacific tests. Joint Task Force Three sails from San Francisco in two weeks. The first test devices have to be aboard the transport ship then."

Emile agreed. "The ordnance team from J Division ships out with the Curtiss on the tenth, Doctor. Already got my suntan lotion, three novels and an armful of crossword puzzles."

"Emile's been on several shots. He was there during Operation Crossroads, back in '46, weren't you?"

Emile nodded ruefully, remembering. "Still got the scars from that coral reef I ran into. They were sharp but we didn't know any better. You know how the Navy treats scientists out there. When you're in the middle of nowhere, you make your own entertainment, don't you, Doctor?"

"Of course."

Craft was curious about the layout of the assembly line. "The bombs are fabricated right here?"

"Only the cores are formed here," Ranier explained. "Final assembly's another building...several hundred yards west of here--you'll see it in a while. We call it the Pit."

Emile was eager to explain. "Hanford Works up in Washington ships us plutonium nitrate paste in small cans, about the size of a can of Maxwell House. That's purified Pu-239, by the way. Hanford runs a batch precipitation process up there in their T Plant. They separate out the plutonium by dissolving and centrifuging a solution of bismuth phosphate. We get it in these cans and do the core casting and machining right here in this building."

"How long does it take?"

Ranier, Tolkach and Emile all started speaking at once. Finally, Emile broke in with an answer. "It depends. A good-sized implosion device--say a modern Mark VI--takes ten to fifteen kilograms of plutonium. To do all the casting and sampling and machining takes maybe a week or so, per batch. Then there's radiographic inspection of the core material. Another two days."

"Bomb assembly adds another week, maybe two," Tolkach chipped in. "Under normal circumstances, a Mark VI takes two months to put together. Of course, Atomic Energy Commission has been cranking up production lately. They've ordered extra shifts, some weekend work, since last summer, when Korea broke. Our weapons inventories were pretty low. Uh, I guess that's supposed to be classified. LeMay and the Air Force now want fifty weapons sets by the time we shove off for Greenhouse. That's why we have extra technicians assigned to Chem/Met."

"Plus we're working on other projects," added Ranier. "Like Greenhouse and other requirements from the field." His eyes met Craft's. "We're stretched pretty thin these days."

"And you can't ignore safety procedures either," Emile added. "Managers only think about numbers, not lives, like we do here. Plutonium's pyrophoric--burns like hell when exposed to air and even a modest ignition source. You don't want this stuff sending off vapors around the building. So--the glove boxes." He patted Steven on the shoulder, who continued working. "Filled with inert helium gas...just in case."

"With all this production work for the Air Force," Craft wondered, "you still expect to have the Greenhouse bombs ready?"

"Oh, most certainly," Emile said. "We have to. National security, see? But mostly, we don't mind. It's like Dr. Ranier says: we're at war and we're all soldiers. Hell, General, my country's still occupied by the Red Army. If I help make more atom bombs, maybe Stalin gets a little more nervous. Maybe he leaves Austria and goes home and minds his own business for a change. That's what I mean."

"We have a very tight schedule," Craft reminded them. "For Greenhouse, I mean."

Emile shrugged. "There are twenty-four hours in a day. If Hanford does their job, all the test devices will be machined, assembled and inspected and ready for insertion into their casings in two weeks. Then we ship them to the Pacific."

"I think we can count on Hanford to do their part," Ranier said. "They too realize we're at war."

"Come," Tolkach suggested to Craft. He didn't want to let the martial politics germinate anymore. Albert Ranier was too damned good at sowing ill feelings around the Fab shop as it was. "The assembly area's a short walk from here. We can get a coffee or tea at the commissary. Other side of P Building--that's the one with bridge connected."

Craft made his goodbyes and left Chem/Met with the two physicists. Outside, the morning sky was hard and brilliant blue, a sheen of frost coating everything. It was cool on the Hill this late November morning, and as the three of them walked between rows of plain clapboard buildings along a dusty street, dodging streams of office and lab workers scurrying to their morning shifts, Craft drank in the pine and pinon scented air and began to think that maybe, just maybe, this end of Gallant Flag might work after all.

Ranier was anxious that Craft be confident. He sensed the Army officer's concern. "Your shoulders, General. They are tense, no?"

"So many details," Craft admitted, more readily than he really wanted to. "So many things could go wrong." He jammed his hands in his pockets, cinched up the brown field jacket tighter against a stiffening breeze. "So many lives depending on this...it's got to work, Doctor."

Ranier hmmmed. "So Dr. Oppenheimer used to counsel us, about the Gadget. Just before the Trinity shot, there were many doubts. The detonators wouldn't work. The plasma instabilities. The beryllium initiator wouldn't kick off enough neutrons to get the chain reaction going. We all had nightmares. Then, down at Trinity Site--" Ranier's face grew distant "--it was like a release for all of us. The Gadget went off--my God, what a spectacle that was--and men cried. I cried. But it wasn't fear or guilt or anything like that was making us cry. It was because we were so damned relieved the thing worked at all. An emotional catharsis--we'd put three years of our lives into the Gadget. So I know a little of what you feel, General."

They reached the commissary and fell into line behind a platoon of high-heeled secretaries from Admin, grabbing a morning thermos of hot coffee before heading on to work. They were all young, Craft observed, barely out of high school. Long skirts and sweaters, hair piled high and too much rouge. They were all Rita Hayworth lookalikes. He wondered, slurping at the hot, greasy coffee, if any of them had brothers or husbands in Korea.

"I think I can address your main concern, General," Ranier interrupted Craft's fascination with the secretaries. "You are worried if we will be ready, are you not? If I can get my devices ready for Operation Greenhouse. And for your mission?"

"It had occurred to me," Craft admitted. They found an empty table and sat down. The smell of leftover scrambled eggs hung in the air. His stomach grumbled, begging for attention.

"Emile Vargas is one of us, General. He's not alone. You heard him. He wants to fight the Russians. It's a common feeling here on the Hill. We've been hurt here, dragged through the mud. You should understand that about Los Alamos. We helped win the war in '45. That was a time of pride for us. But since then, what's happened? The Klaus Fuchs matter. The Rosenbergs. Now Stalin has the bomb. We're investigated like traitors. Given loyalty tests...that's the hardest part. Loyalty tests here? It's insane. General Groves wouldn't have allowed that. Oppenheimer wouldn't have allowed it. And look at Oppie now...they've accused him of treason, of marrying a fellow traveler...even being a Communist agent. It's absurd, it's like a sickness." Ranier shook his head, sipping at a hot tea. He made a fist on the table, looked down at it like an alien thing.

"General, most of us here are eager to fight, to fight back somehow, any way we can. Emile Vargas is only one of many. And the task force at Bikini...don't worry about them. We'll have no problem with them. The technicians are trained to analyze data objectively. If I give them data that shows Ranier-Tolkach devices could be 'duds', as you like to say, they'll make the right decision and the extra devices will be shipped back. Testing and documentation are easy to alter. As a scientist, I abhor such a thing. But as a human being, I see what is necessary to win a war. No, General, I'm quite sure of it. You'll have your bombs."

"For all our sakes," Craft said, "I hope so. If this operation fails, it's more than my ass or yours on the line here. An entire Army could be annihilated."

Tolkach said, "We still have the assembly area to show you. Shall we head that way?"

Craft demurred, finished his coffee. God, the stuff tastes like motor oil. "My flight leaves at two this afternoon. Better take me back down to Albuquerque. I'm meeting an acquaintance at the Navy Yard in Frisco tonight."

Ranier was disappointed. "As you wish, General. I'm glad you came. You are pleased with what you've seen and heard?"

"Let's say re-assured. Look, it's probably better if we don't communicate directly in the future. I'm stretching my orders just being here and Pinky Wright'll have my ass mounted if I do anything to bring more grief to SCAP. We need a contact point, somebody to be go-between, in case I have to talk to either of you."

Tolkach thought about that. "There is a restaurant we both like in Santa Fe. Remington's. What about Rudi, the bartender? We've both known him for several years."

"Well enough to trust sending messages and letters back and forth?"

"Rudi knows everything," Ranier admitted. "Edvard and I often call ahead for a table. Rudi sets it up, right down to the silverware and flower arrangements. He's not just the bartender. He's one of the owners."

"Fair enough. I want a channel to both of you without having to go through the chain of command at Los Alamos. Or the censors. Just in case."

The men paid their commissary bills and walked back to Tolkach's Chevy by the Chem/Met building. They exited East Gate onto Highway 528. Two hours later, they had dropped Craft off at the airport in Albuquerque.

Ranier seemed reluctant to let Craft go. "General, I'm detailed to J-Division for Greenhouse, ordnance support, as I said." Craft hoisted his bags out of the trunk. I'll be aboard the Curtiss or at the shot site itself most of the time, starting in the middle of December. We should meet again, don't you think? But don't worry...your bombs will be there. I would like to help."

Craft shook his hand firmly, then Tolkach. "You're both patriots. You've already helped more than you realize. Just get me five atom bombs to Bikini Atoll by the middle of December and I'll handle it from there. Trust me, General MacArthur's highest priority is this mission. We do this one right and the friggin' Reds will be begging for mercy." Craft started off, then stopped and turned back. "We screw it up and none of us may get out of this mess alive." He left them standing by the curb and went on into the terminal.

Tolkach and Ranier got back in the car. They drove back to Los Alamos in a tense silence.

Craft's flight was on time and the United DC-6 made the three-hour flight to San Francisco International without incident. It was pitch black when the aircraft touched down well past eight o'clock, save for the glow of the city to the north. Craft was hungry. He grabbed a hot dog and a beer from a snack shop on the way to the taxi stand, then hailed a cab for the short ride up to the navy yard at Hunters Point. He was beyond tired, no longer sure what time his body clock was set on, but he had a nine o'clock briefing scheduled with Commander John Ward, skipper of the Chesapeake, at the squadron office of the yard's refit shop.

Craft had known Ward for six years. He'd worked with the man in joint operations at the end of the Pacific war, mainly at Okinawa, and knew Ward for a competent and likeable sort, as far as squids went. Ward had been part of Task Force 58 back then, driving a tin can named Knox, and Craft was detached from Krueger's Sixth Army to the same task force, as liaison to the fleet for tactical support ashore. He remembered Ward as a calculating kind of officer, not overly aggressive in the manner of Bull Halsey but able to bend tactics to fit any situation he ran into. More importantly, he knew from many a late night O Club and wardroom skull session that Ward was a strong supporter of meeting the Commies head-on in Asia. In this, he was not alone. Much of the 7th Fleet staff had developed a severe case of heartburn over who had lost China last year and wanted to do something to fight back. For Ward, the heartburn was particularly acute.

Craft had called Ward before leaving Japan, just to sound out the guy on current thinking and philosophy. Ward said the right things, to Craft's mind, and was receptive to getting together, inviting him to Hunters Point on his stopover. "I'll show you around the best parts of Frisco," the Navy man had promised. Craft had laughed at that, envisioning a night of barhopping with every tart in the city. "No thanks, Commander. I'll settle for a few whiskeys. And maybe a little glory for both us later, if the Fates are kind to us. I need to talk with you about something. Something important."

So they arranged to meet late that Tuesday night at the refit docks on Nimitz Avenue, where Ward was temporarily landlocked, overseeing the overhaul job on the Chesapeake, to enable her to support JTF Three operations during Greenhouse, as an auxiliary to the fleet.

San Francisco was a glittering strand of jewels from the backseat of the cab as the sign to Hunters Point Naval Shipyard flashed by. From the airport, they had taken Bayshore Boulevard due north along the eastern shore of the peninsula all the way to Third Street, right past a darkened Candlestick Park (too bad about the Giants this year, Craft lied), then made a right turn onto Evans Avenue. They passed by the dark oily waters of India Basin and the cab stopped, depositing him at the base main gate. Craft paid off the fare with the last few bills in his wallet. He walked up to the gatehouse and signed in on the log. The bored Marine staff sergeant manning the gate detail then phoned up the refit dock and exchanged words with Ward.

"Yes, sir, right away, sir." The sergeant hung up and pointed to a Jeep behind the gatehouse. "My treat, General. Commander Ward says I'm to run you up to the north yard right away. Hop in."

"Thanks, son." Craft turned his bags over to the Marine and climbed aboard. The Jeep peeled off in a squeal of tires and gravel.

A harrowing ten-minute speed run down Spear Avenue brought them to a narrow lane of low buildings dominated by a hundred-ton bridge crane backlit against the darkness of the Bay. Caught in floodlights, the gray funnels and superstructure of an auxiliary transport ship filled up one slip at the north refit yard. The Marine braked to a halt at a non-descript building with a sign out front reading REFIT ACTIVITY--SQUADRON OPERATIONS.

Craft got out and re-slung his bags. The door opened and Ward came out, grinning.

The two officers saluted, then exchanged handshakes.

"General, a pleasure to have you come by. Welcome to Hunters Point." He ushered Craft into a crowded warren of offices and cubicles and file cabinets, then broke out two coffee cups. "Black or brown?"

Craft dropped his bags inside Ward's tiny office. "Muddy brown, Jack, if you don't mind. Three lumps and cream, the works. Got any whiskey?"

Ward chuckled, making the coffee. "Officially no. But I'm sure I can find some medicinal brandy around here, if you're interested."

Craft was numb with travel fatigue. He dropped heavily into a chair opposite Ward's government-issue metal desk. I think my body's interested. I've noticed even the flies are beginning to avoid me." He gratefully accepted the steaming mug and slurped it down.

Ward nursed his own cup. He sat down at his desk chair. "Been about--what...four years, would you say? Give or take a month?"

"At least. Operations Crossroads--"

"Yeah. And that beer bash the night after the shot." Ward leaned back in his chair, cupped his hands behind his head. He was tall, salt and pepper crewcut. His eyes twinkled. "Remember that skinny-dipping bunch of loony scientists? Jesus, what a sight that was to behold, especially under a tropical moon. And every one of us pickled completely sour from all the beer and liquor. Good thing the shot went off okay."

"Amen to that," Craft muttered. He'd been there as an observer for Far East Command.

"You mentioned a special mission when you called me last week. What kind of mission? Or can you brief me at all on it?"

Craft set the cup carefully down on the desk, noticing a mosaic of coffee stains on the front edge. "Jack, I have to be completely honest with you. I knew you were skippering the Chesapeake these days--I looked that up. Friend of mine at Pearl, in the G-4's office. And I know you're pulling transport duty with JTF Three too, hauling atom bombs out to Bikini for the shots next month. Greenhouse, isn't it?"

"It is." Ward shook his head sadly. "Pearl's gonna crap in its collective trousers when they found out some Army flag officer can waltz right in here and recite my mission orders to me, word for word. Even if he is one of MacArthur's lap dogs. The General is not exactly held in the highest esteem around the fleet these days."

"Believe me, Jack, I know that. But I wanted to see you in person anyway. What I've got to say comes from SCAP himself but this is strictly outside channels and definitely not for attribution. There is a war on, you know, and Ivan's got big enough ears as it is."

"Understood. So shoot. What the hell's this about?"

"It's about a covert mission being organized under Far East Command, even as I speak. This is the big leagues, Jack...a chance, if we don't screw it up, to deal a mortal blow to the whole Red position in Korea and northeast Asia. I can't offer you any details right now but if you're interested, I can say that SCAP wants you on the team and I could fill you in in a week or so."

Ward was intrigued but wary. "CINCPAC know about this?"

"No. And it has to stay that way. Operational security is paramount. And that comes from SCAP himself. In fact, I can show you a letter." He pulled out a piece of paper from his jacket and laid it out on the desk under Ward's curious gaze. Ward unfolded reading glasses and scanned the Army letterhead.

After a few minutes of deepening frowns and hmmms, Ward looked up. "Gallant Flag...MacArthur signed this?"

"Last Friday, in the War Room. Full staff briefing." Craft didn't explain that he had written the memo and had gotten Doyle Hickey, SCAP's chief of staff, to oversign SCAP's signature; MacArthur hated paperwork. "We're talking major intervention here, Jack. Slamming the door on the Chinese and the Russians before they can do any more damage."

Ward scowled, studying the letter for hidden meanings. "How major?"

"Atomic."

At that, the naval commander uttered a low whistle. He gingerly handed the letter back to Craft.

"I did correctly understand you to say atomic, didn't I, General?"

"You did. And you know what happens if that gets out...."

Ward understood. "You'll eat my first-born child alive. Understood perfectly, sir. God Almighty--" he shook his head in amazement--" I can't believe it. Finally, we're doing what we should have done a long time ago. North Koreans have pushed us around enough."

"That ain't the half of it," Craft told him. "SCAP's worried about the Chinese. G-2 says they're in the mountains in division strength but a hell of a lot of people think that's just the tip of the iceberg. This mission's been put together to bottle the Reds up in Manchuria, close off their infiltration routes and pretty well make meatloaf of their supply and industrial centers."

"Hell of a risk, General, if you ask me. The Russians may just jump into the pool with both feet."

"SCAP doesn't think so. Nor do I. Stalin's big prize is in Europe, especially Germany. This mission is nothing more than a tactical assault in the enemy's rear. No different from Eighth Air Force bombing the bejeezus out of Germany five years ago. Or for that matter, LeMay's B-29s pulverizing Tokyo. Just a bigger bomb."

"I'll say."

"Point is, Jack, we've got the mission approved. But security's tighter than a Tokyo whore's ass. Stalin's got spies all over Japan, almost as many as Truman and the Joint Chiefs. We've got to do this away from Stratemeyer and the normal kind of campaign that Far Eastern Air Forces would run. Everything's being held real close on this one: the targets, the mission plan, the weapons mix, the units involved. And the timeline's urgent. If we don't mount this mission in the next month or so, Eighth Army and Tenth Corps will be looking at a catastrophic defeat up North. We're talking complete annihilation of several armies."

Ward blanched, doing the numbers quickly in his head. "Jesus, Paul...I had no idea. That bad? So where does the Navy fit in here? Where do I fit in?"

Craft held up his hands in surrender. "Whoa, wait a minute, Commander. Slow down. I just need you to understand a few things. First, the mission is strictly voluntary. Second, for security reasons, SCAP wants to bypass the normal theater chain of command (and that was an understatement, he thought). This dog's gotta hunt and hunt quickly, so theater support is out. Special mission, special teams. Reports directly to MacArthur himself. If we succeed, there's a high probability you can write your own ticket to the stars."

"And if we don't?"

"That's not even in my vocabulary," Craft told him. "You've seen the letter authorizing operations to proceed. I just need to know one thing tonight: you interested?"

Ward practically shot out of his chair. He banged a fist on the desk. Coffee mugs and ashtrays jumped.

"Hell yes, I'm interested! But I still don't know how I can help out. This baby's got Air Force written all over it."

Craft offered him a small nibble. "You and the Chesapeake are already involved in a critical national security mission in the coming weeks."

Ward stopped pacing, turned around quizzically. "How do you mean? We're just a barge for JTF Three...oh--" he folded his arms and nodded understanding. Then, came a dawning smile. "I see what you mean. Are you trying to tell me that Chesapeake is--?

Craft got to his feet as well, holding up both hands. "I'm not trying to tell you anything, Commander. Except this: if we get the final go from SCAP, Chesapeake will be critical to the success of this mission. For security reasons, I can't tell you anymore than that."

Ward stuck out his hand and Craft shook it. "Tell the General that I would be delighted to help out, if it can be arranged with Seventh Fleet at Pearl."

"Don't worry about that. The Old Man will take care of the bureaucracy. Just hang tight here. By the way, when do you ship out?"

Ward shrugged. "Ask the yard, for Chrissakes. We're tasked as an auxiliary to JTF Three, as you probably know. Admiral Blanchard wants the task force main elements ready to sail by 8 December. We're a little behind--damn boiler room piping again--but we should be seaworthy by 15 December, at the latest. Then, it's ten days' steaming time to the Marshall Islands. My mission is logistical support for the science teams...rather like running a kindergarten for eggheads, don't you think? You should see the list of toys they want to bring."

"Stand by for a change in mission, Commander." Craft checked his watch. "Christ, I need to be on my way. Return flight to Tokyo takes off in an hour." He gathered up his bags.

"I'll get Shore Patrol to run you down to SFO. This late, there shouldn't be any problem with traffic."

The two officers saluted, and shook hands.

"I'll be in touch next week, Jack. I'm sure you'll be getting new orders in the meantime. The Old Man's got plenty of chits he can call in at CINCPAC. Check your in-box everyday."

"Aye aye, sir." They said goodbye and Ward phoned up the Shore Patrol to get Craft a ride to the airport. The Jeep showed up five minutes later.

Craft made the flight only a few minutes before the boarding door was pulled shut and the stairs wheeled away from the aircraft. He found his seat and settled in for some much deserved shuteye. Soon, he felt the aircraft rocking as the huge Connie taxied out for takeoff. Moments later, the four Allison turboprops roared through the cabin walls as the pilot ran them up to maximum power.

Craft was too tired to care about anything. The trip to the States had been his first in nearly five years. Not since Natalie had died in that car crash outside Richmond in '45 and Paul Junior had been shuffled off to live with her grief-stricken parents had he spent any time here. The place seemed more alien that Japan did now. New dances, new music, new fashions--he wasn't sure if he was American, or Japanese or some strange Army-bred hybrid. Pop's Texas farm near Denton was gone, sold off to land developers. He'd heard a new housing tract was going up on what he'd grown up calling Craftville, bare scrubland that had been home to generations of Craft boys. Old Dixie Highway was changing too, mutating into something the papers called a freeway, whatever in hell that was. Natalie was gone. Paul Junior was a stranger, now what? Seven, no, make that eight years old. Probably raised to curse the very ground his absentee father walked on.

Craft stirred restlessly in the airliner seat, and found he couldn't sleep, despite crushing fatigue. The lights were dim in the cabin, Clipper America less than half filled and the drone of the big Allisons outside his window ought to have lulled a normal man to restful peace. But no dice. He shifted and shifted again, then decided to get up for a piss and a little drink.

Twenty hours and two more stops to go. And the Pacific was one hell of a big ocean. Appropriate, when you thought about it, he decided. The distance between Washington and Tokyo was something like eleven thousand miles, give or take a few countries. The gulf between the Dai Ichi and the Nation's Capital could not have been greater if the Korean "police action" had been on another planet.

Craft conned a whiskey and soda from the bored flight attendants in the rear of the cabin.

Come to think of it, maybe they were on different planets.

Atsugi Field was gray, slick and drizzly when the Air Transport Command C-54 bounced onto her northernmost runway and braked gingerly to a halt. BG Paul Craft stumbled sleepily out the door and down the metal stairs, his bags weighing something like a ton apiece, it seemed. At the bottom of the stairs, a voice broke through the fog.

"Afternoon, General. Need a lift?"

Craft stared through bleary eyes and beheld Clayton LaSalle, raincap and poncho thoroughly soaked, reaching out for his bags. He gave them up without argument, then offered a weak salute.

"Sure. A lift to a nice cool bed would be nice. Then a hot shower in the Hotel Natani public bath. Scrambled eggs and coffee and a newspaper for breakfast, or dinner or whatever. And maybe a week to find out what the hell time my body's on."

LaSalle already had a staff car waiting nearby, a dark blue Air Force Ford sedan. He tossed the bags in back.

"No can do, General. We're on the way to Yokota."

"They got hot showers?"

"Even better. A new crop of intel photos from up North. The stuff we had been getting from Group isn't worth crap. Maybe this batch will be better,"

Craft was dead on his feet but unable to complain. "We need good target photos from Manchuria. But Stratemeyer won't let his boys cross the Yalu."

"That's why we're going to Yokota. Current intel basically sucks. We've got to do better. I've got a new recon mission planned and FEAF doesn't know a thing about it." LaSalle sped off, toward Atsugi's main gate, shifting up faster than the staff Ford wanted to go. The car stalled then jerked forward again. LaSalle swore and Craft prayed for deliverance. LaSalle was a lot better in planes.

"How'd you swing that? I thought FEAF had all their recon assets on a short leash."

LaSalle smirked. "My little secret. Stratemeyer doesn't know everything. I found me a sweet little '29 just waiting to have her ass stroked, hiding out in the maintenance hangar down at Yokota. Group's got her listed as a real hangar queen but the crew chief told me otherwise. She takes off in two days, top secret mission. All I need is to get her camera suite installed and checked out."

Craft found himself dozing off as LaSalle steered them onto the Yamashita Road, to Tokyo, and the central districts. Shimbashi, the Ginza, the Imperial Palace. Chiyoda-ku. Home sweet home, he thought sadly.

A recon mission?

"What's being reconned?"

"Oh, nothing major. Just a few North Korean and Manchurian targets for Gallant Flag. Maybe even Vladivostok."

"Into Soviet airspace too? That's clever. Good idea if they can bring it off. Who's the crew?"

LaSalle smiled and replied, "We are."
CHAPTER 4

Wednesday, November 29, 1950

Washington, D.C.

9:00 a.m.

Albert Ranier had always hated Washington, D.C. Like most American cities, it was too big, the monuments gargantuan memorials to oversized egos, its broad avenues devoid of anything sane and cultured, like good coffee shops. Much of America was like that, the Czech physicist believed, as he paid off the cab fare and climbed the granite steps to the old Munitions Building. A swollen, overmuscled teenager, reeling drunkenly around the world, stumbling into fights everywhere, a thrashing cub of a nation, unsure but immensely strong. Washington's colossal architecture was only a symptom.

Ranier shrugged out of his raincoat, dusted snow from his fedora, and looked around the crowded lobby for guidance. He had come to the Nation's Capital, along with Tolkach, and a small army of Los Alamos scientists to attend a conference. The General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was in session today and hard decisions had to be made.

The future direction of America's biggest stick, her atomic arsenal, was up for discussion.

Ranier and Tolkach found the security desk and signed in. The Munitions Building was home to the AEC. Located on the Mall, just east of the Lincoln Memorial, opposite the intersection of Nineteenth Street and Constitution Avenue, 'Munitions' was only half of the structure. The Navy still occupied some of the eastern wing of the huge building while the western wing housed an assortment of federal agencies, departmental offices and military detachments.

From the security desk, Ranier and Tolkach gained ID badges and basic directions to the third floor conference chamber where the General Advisory Committee was to meet.

The elevators were crowded so the physicists decided to take the stairs. In the first floor landing, they came upon Edward Teller.

"Professor Teller, a pleasure," Ranier lied. No one at Los Alamos liked the Hungarian physicist. Tolkach mumbled his own greeting as Teller resolutely climbed the worn linoleum of the staircase, raincoat slung over his arm.

Teller looked back, his face a deep frown under thick black hair and eyebrows. Contempt was written there. "My dear friend, Albert. And Dr. Tolkach as well. You've come to Washington for the sights, no? Pity it's snowing out."

Ranier joined him on the stairs. "Actually, I'm making a presentation to the Committee. A new method for boosting fission yields in our weapons. Edvard and I have done experiments. We've got good data to show."

Teller scoffed as he climbed. He stared down at the steps, as if counting them. "Fission's dead, Albert. Kaput. The Super is coming and you'd better get onboard. Thermonuclear can't be stopped now."

Teller was notorious around the Hill as the foremost proponent of thermonuclear warfare--the Hydrogen Bomb. President Truman had already approved its development back in January.

"I intend to argue otherwise, Professor. We can grow our arsenal faster and cheaper with my new method. All we need now is to scale up the experiments. A full-scale test will show the superiority of this method."

Teller kept on climbing, growing more out of breath with each step. "Then we are enemies, you and I. But I'm not worried. The Committee has other scientists, rational men who understand logic. They'll see their way to the correct decision." He reached the third floor, took several deep breaths, and pushed through a set of swinging doors into a corridor crowded with conference-goers.

Ranier tightened his grip on his attache case full of charts and calculations, and squeezed into the corridor behind him.

They were all there, even Oppenheimer, looking like a pale ghost in his gray double-breasted, inevitable cigarette slung from a corner of his mouth. Minus his trademark porkpie hat--an emblem comforting to so many who had worked on the Gadget--Oppie looked every inch the frail but noble professor of physics he in fact was. He held court in a corner of the hall, beside a water cooler and a pair of open doors topped with panes of frosted glass. ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION the lettering proclaimed.

The Emperor in his palace, Ranier imagined. He and Tolkach plunged into the crowd.

Teller was there, a brooding menace by a coatrack inside the conference room. Carson Mark, as well, the Canadian physicist who'd taken over the leadership of T-Division from Bethe after the war. Isidor Rabi was telling a story at one end of the long oak conference table, re-arranging papers to illustrate a point. Rabi practically wore the Nobel he had won a few years before but Ranier figured the man had earned it. He had bagged the prize back in '44 for his magnetism work on spinning atomic nuclei. Too long to hold a grudge, Ranier figured.

Yes, they were all there. Gamov, the émigré Russian physicist, cognizant of such things as beta decay and the fate of the universe. Lewis Strauss too...Jewish millionaire whom Truman had appointed to the Commission. And Weisskopf, the Austrian, who'd campaigned against the Super for years. Weisskopf had long ago earned Teller's undying enmity. Even now, the physicists regarded each other coldly from across the room, mortal enemies of the intellect with the same vitriolic rivalries their mother countries Austria and Hungary had once nurtured.

Ranier took Tolkach by the arm and noted, "There's enough intellectual arrogance in this room to go critical, don't you think?"

Tolkach agreed, eyeing an empty space in one corner of the room to drop his coat and case. "A chain reaction of egos. They might just annihilate Washington if they don't strangle each other by lunch."

"Teller's the main problem. That and Truman's approval. Now the Big Dog has his bone and he wants to run with it. I've got to keep Weisskopf on our side."

"Oppie too. He has the ears of the military. With Bradley and Vandenberg speaking this afternoon, we've got to keep the speed of bomb development and the efficiency of our plutonium resources on the table. Those are the issues, Albert."

Ranier agreed. "The military wants bombs now. The Russians have at least done us that favor. We keep pushing these two issues and we'll have the generals behind us, I'm sure of it."

"We'd better. It's the best chance we'll get to piggyback on the Greenhouse tests."

Oppenheimer used an empty coffee mug to rap on the table and call the conference to order. When the commotion had settled down, he stood at the head of the table and told the gathering the basic agenda for the day, adding at the end: "Super's been approved by the President. We all know that. Let's don't waste our time and energy debating what's already been decided. The real questions are two-fold: what method is Super going to use? And how do we test them? With Greenhouse less than a month away, we have an opportunity to inject some experiments into the test plan, if we can agree on them today. I'd like to focus the morning talks and papers on this and on Super's methodology. Generals Vandenberg and Bradley are coming by this afternoon. They'll bring the Air Force viewpoint and the thinking of the Joint Chiefs. I'd like to give them some recommendations we've all agreed on. Assuming we can agree on anything...." Oppie smiled at the chuckles that created.

"Questions before we start...?" Oppie's stature alone could smother most of the arguments. He scanned the room. "Good. Then we may as well begin with Edward." He gave the floor to Teller.

The morning proceeded in order through paper after paper, each given with a passion that other Americans would reserve for their favorite football team or movie star. Teller was followed by Stanislaw Ulam, a Polish mathematician who'd co-authored with Teller important work on the radiation-implosion method of thermonuclear ignition. Then Gamov gave a dry talk and Ranier found himself staring out the window through a split in the curtains opposite him, noting in the distance the stone solemnity of Abe Lincoln sitting on his perch, light snow swirling across the monument's face. Gamov droned on, followed by Rabi and Weisskopf before Ranier heard a few polite coughs and realized with a start that Oppenheimer had finally called his name.

"As I was saying, Dr. Ranier works in T-Division. Dr. Tolkach too. They've brought some data on a new method for boosting the fission yield in our current weapons. And a proposed experiment, am I right, Doctor?"

"Precisely." Ranier cleared his throat. "This method uses a carefully calibrated layering of deuterium and tritium in the tamper itself, not for thermonuclear ignition, but simply to react plutonium faster in the initiation phase of the chain reaction. I'll explain."

Ranier went to a chalkboard on one wall and sketched out several equations. For illustration, he added a simple cartoon of a fissioning plutonium nucleus.

"The Ranier-Tolkach Method is essentially a layer cake approach. It's a faster and more efficient way of improving the yield of our existing plutonium and uranium weapons. By alternating layers of lighter elements, such as deuterium and tritium, we should be able to heat the tamper to near thermonuclear temperatures, when the plutonium core fissions." Ranier roughly sketched out a few steps on the chalkboard.

"Under these conditions, we get excellent compression, as the lighter nuclei are nearly completely ionized. This compression is a kind of small-scale fusion, releasing high-energy neutrons that immediately begin to fission the U-238 nuclei in the tamper material. Fusing with the prevailing hydrogen nuclei, we get a potentially enormous increase in our overall yield." Ranier put the chalk down and dusted off his hands.

Vigorous discussion of the merits of the method followed as Ranier took his seat. Teller, to be sure, was the most adamant.

"Your method is elegant," he declared, "but ultimately a dead end. The most importance difference is this question of fuel--resources as you call them. The Super uses hydrogen--the deuterium isotope to be precise--and the most plentiful substance in the universe. My dear professor Albert, have you forgotten your elementary physics?" Teller stood at this seat and leaned forward, producing a handful of charts and graphs, which he spread out on the table.

"A fission reaction proceeds by disassembling the very core of the weapon. Once the core is used up, the fissioning stops. No more uranium or plutonium nuclei to break apart. We'll never get more than a megaton yield from a fission weapon.

"Ah, but the classical Super," he went on, "that is another story. The true thermonuclear weapon is like a chemical reaction. Feed it enough fuel--hydrogen fuel--and she'll burn forever. There is no core. The ultimate limits to yield are unknown. Look at my charts here--we can build this. A radiation implosion device is possible, in fact it's inevitable--" he thumped the table with a fist--Teller the actor--"Indeed we must build it. If we fail, the Soviets will not fail, I can assure you."

The room stirred uneasily. Oppenheimer waved a hand through cigarette smoke. "Edward, the details...we don't know enough about this radiation implosion."

"Indeed," Hans Bethe cut in, "we don't even know if your radiation will be in equilibrium with black-body radiation inside the bomb, do we? I've done the calculations. Nonequilibrium instabilities drain off energy too fast, cool down the reaction. It's impossible, what you're suggesting."

"I say it is not!" Teller thundered. "Look at the stars! Look at the Sun! It's been burning for four billion years...prima facie evidence that thermonuclear is possible. What nature can do, we can do."

Vigorous debate exploded again and soon rolled over the conference room like a strong tide as the pros and cons of various methods were put forth in rapid succession and just as rapidly shot down. At times, the debate was cantankerous, even acrimonious. Oppenheimer was forced to intervene repeatedly, once even calling the meeting into a half-hour recess, to let tempers and passions cool down.

When Oppenheimer called the meeting back to order, the one-time director of Los Alamos warned his colleagues: "We have before us several choices, gentlemen. Let me remind you that the military will be here after lunch, about two this afternoon. Bradley will want our recommendations. We all know how the General feels about atomic bombs. The Air Force is pushing to expand our inventory as fast as possible. Bradley and the Army are more cautious. We have a decision to make and we'll have to make it on the basis of the evidence we see in front of us. Not politics or personalities." He cast a warning glance at Teller.

Ranier asked to speak. Oppenheimer relinquished the floor.

"The whole rationale for the R-T method is to increase the yield and efficiency of America's atom bomb arsenal. This method is faster and cheaper than investing in the hydrogen bomb. Now that the Russians have the bomb, America needs a rapid expansion in quantity and improved weaponization of her atomic devices. The R-T method promises that. In fact, to prove this method, I offer this proposal--" He saw Teller scowling at him, arms folded, ready to attack, "--we vote here, today, to expand the shot series for Operation Greenhouse. Add another five shots. And let these devices incorporate our designs. If it works, we have gained a lot, with relatively little investment."

"And if it does not," Teller blurted out, "we have wasted precious time and scientific talent, to no good end."

Only an end I can't tell you about, Edward, Ranier thought. Oppie rapped on the table for order.

The debate ebbed and flowed, right on through the lunch hour. Oppie let the meeting evolve into scattered knots of arguments, seeming to take perverse pride in the rabble. He leaned back in his chair, smoking one Pall Mall after another. Ranier took advantage of the commotion to bend a few ears, making promises and swapping favors in the best manner of any American machine politician. After nearly half an hour of chaotic racket, Oppie finally stood up at the end of the table and used his coffee mug for a gavel, eventually gaining everyone's attention.

"Gentlemen, I hope we've gotten that out of our system. It's time to vote. We have a choice on which method of improving our arsenal to recommend to the generals. Write down your vote on a piece of paper and pass them up to me. I've asked Dr. Strauss, from the Commission, to be our vote counter."

This was done with a bare minimum of decorum and scattered grumbling, but after a time, Strauss had a handful of paper scraps. He counted out the returns, sorting them into two piles.

In the end, the Committee approved Ranier's proposal, expanding the Greenhouse series by an additional five shots, all of them to incorporate variants of the R-T design, which some scientists had taken to calling the 'layer-cake approach.'

Oppenheimer was thoughtful, cautious, with the result.

"It's a very big responsibility, Albert. In order to add these to the schedule, we'll have to put our recommendation to the Chiefs right away. The Navy also needs to be informed. The Joint Task Force will have to make new plans, maybe add supplies and people. Admiral Blanchard isn't going to like this late change."

"Don't forget Hanford," Carson Mark observed. "Oak Ridge too. The plutonium and tritium reactors will have to work overtime to meet this kind of schedule."

Commissioner Strauss was consulting a small notebook. "Greenhouse is currently set up for four test shots now. Dog, Easy, George and Item are the shot names. Dog is scheduled for January at Eniwetok. On the normal testing cycle, these R-T devices would have to be ready for transport by the end of March, next year."

Ranier, mindful of Paul Craft's deadline, urged speed. "We are already working overtime at my shop." That earned a raised eyebrow from Carson Mark, head of T Division. Ranier ignored him. "If we can arrange for special shipment with the Navy, I can have test-ready core material, with initiators, tampers, detonators, fuses and casings available to be shipped in two weeks."

It was an outrageous statement, Ranier knew, and the reaction was predictably skeptical, but he had little choice. Craft had told them he needed weaponized devices--aircraft-ready--by the end of December. MacArthur had been promised that. If Craft was right--Ranier believed he was right--lives depended on making that deadline. He felt his stomach twisting in knots, fending off the criticism, knowing full well he couldn't tell them why speed was so vital.

Oppenheimer, always the great arbitrator, saw a way out. "Perhaps, more resources could be made available at Los Alamos, to expedite the designs. Although I must confess, Albert, I don't understand why we must rush this test of yours. We can easily tack the tests on to the end of the existing shots."

Ranier shrugged, making something up. "I was just anticipating the military's concerns. Plans have to be made, you understand."

"Of course, Albert. General Bradley will appreciate that."

Discussion continued for awhile on the merits of the R-T method. At length, citing the time--it was early afternoon--Oppenheimer recommended a short break for lunch. He cautioned the attendees to be back by two, as the generals would be on hand to hear their recommendations.

Ranier and Tolkach stayed in the conference room, which they soon had to themselves.

"Albert, we have a lot of work to do," Tolkach worried. "Is there time? Is there any way?"

Ranier was grim. "You heard General Craft. We don't have any choice now. We're committed, we're part of the mission now. Lives depend on us." He closed up his notes, stuffing them back in his briefcase. "And I'm glad of it. At least, we are doing something. Hundreds die every day in Korea, Edvard. It's a privilege to help them."

"You really think you can make this work--altering calibration instruments, radiographic assays, documents? Before today, I guess I thought all this was just an academic exercise. A theoretical problem, as Bethe calls them. Now--"

"Now we graduate, Edvard. We're at war with the Communists and you and I are soldiers. We have a mission. We have to do it."

Tolkach was shaking his head. He got up, paced the empty conference room, idly re-arranging piles of papers across the table. Disorder offended him. "I thought we were through with war. We beat Hitler. We crushed the Nazis. Didn't we win, Albert? What kind of war is this, when we have to resort to tricks to fight? It troubles me--"

"It troubles me too...everyday," Ranier admitted. "Americans are rich and powerful but they're also children in this world. They don't understand Communists. They don't see them as enemies, just misguided neighbors, maybe. But they will. Korea's already changing that. You know there's talk that Truman will reinstate the draft, mobilize a large army for Korea."

"I heard that. You think he'll really do something like that? It would be terribly unpopular."

"That's why we resort to tricks, Edvard. Because Americans don't do what they must, only what is popular, what's easiest. It took Pearl Harbor before they fought the Japanese. Even Korea hasn't stirred them like Pearl Harbor. So we lead the 'children' to unpleasant but necessary duties and decisions. Just like you take your daughter to the doctor, for her shot. There is pain at first, even tears. But in the end, she's stronger and healthier for it."

Tolkach stared glumly out the Venetian blinds at light snow still blanketing the Mall. To his left, in the fog, a red beacon flashed--the Washington Monument warning aircraft away. "I presume," he said at last, "that you've some idea of how to plant 'evidence' in the inspection records. The test director for Greenhouse--what's his

name--?"

"Bacher. Eugene Bacher, I think."

"Bacher's no fool. You'll have to be just as persuasive at Eniwetok as you were here this morning. Here, you argued for the Ranier-Tolkach method. At the Pacific Proving Grounds, in front of Bacher--"

"I'll be equally convincing," Ranier assured him. "A terrible mistake has been made. We have test devices with impure plutonium cores. Here's the inspection records--see for yourself. The bombs will fizzle."

"And you really believe they'll call off the shots? After all the effort to add them to the test in the first place?"

"They'll have no choice. The inspection records will show impure plutonium. Non-critical, non-reacting, full of mistakes in centrifuging and precipitating, contaminants showing up--I don't know how it could have happened. Dr. Bacher, I'm sorry to report the RT devices are fatally flawed. Perhaps, a saboteur at Hanford, or perhaps simple carelessness. Who can say?"

"Albert, you're no actor."

"No." Ranier conceded the truth of that. "But I am a soldier. I will get five Mark VI atom bombs shipped out to Eniwetok, Edvard, so help me. After that, I can do no more. It's up to General Craft's people."

"What will you tell General Bradley this afternoon?"

"The simple truth: America needs more atomic bombs. And the layer-cake method can improve explosive yields. No one can deny those facts, not even Teller. I'll even tell the General I'm going to Hanford Works tomorrow night to see to it. All true."

"To start the trickery."

"To 'adjust' some of the calibration and test equipment at T Plant. Shelby Winters will understand. If I bring inspection data from Los Alamos and request a chance to check their equipment, make sure we are measuring the same things the same way, how can Winters argue with me? T Plant has to give us plutonium of required purity. How can he deny Los Alamos the very thing it needs to do its mission? It's a matter of national security."

"Albert, I was wrong. Maybe you are an actor."

The two physicists chatted for a few minutes more. Ranier admitted to being a bit hungry.

"There's a commissary downstairs. We could go for coffee and sandwiches."

Ranier was agreeable. "Let's get a bite and get back before the military comes."

"Indeed, a talent like yours needs nourishment.".

They headed downstairs.

Two floors above them, AEC Commissioner Lewis Strauss was also in a hurry. After Oppenheimer had dismissed everyone to lunch, Strauss had bolted upstairs to his fifth floor office. A millionaire investment banker and an Admiral in the U.S. Navy Reserve, Strauss was also a copious note-taker. The morning's deliberations had left him with pages of indecipherable hand scribblings. With the Army and the Air Force showing up in a few hours, he wanted a typed transcription of the conference proceedings to give to the Generals. You didn't make major decisions on matters like atom bombs if you didn't have all the facts.

Truman may have appointed him to the Atomic Energy Commission back in '46 but Lewis Strauss hadn't made millions on Wall Street by being less than thoroughly prepared. He burst into the office and quickly spotted his staff assistant Allen Kingsley, patiently marking up a physics textbook with a red pen, a job Strauss had given him to make it easier for the Commissioner to speak the same language as the oddball physicists he had to deal with.

"Allen, this is hot. Get over to the typewriter and type these pages up right away. I need 'em in an hour, less if possible."

Kingsley, who looked like a younger version of Strauss himself with his owlish glasses, snapped the textbook shut and took the sheaf of notes.

"Sure thing, Mr. Strauss. Letterhead or white bond?"

"I don't care. And have Miss Taylor proof it when she gets back. Make several copies, say three. That should do it."

"Right away, sir. I'll just change the ribbon right now--" he fingered the typewriter case open and unspooled the ribbon. "This one's about shot."

Strauss was already barreling out the door. "Be quick, son. That's for the Joint Chiefs. I'm off to get a bite to eat." He left as quickly as he had appeared.

Kingsley got the ribbon changed and wiped his hands off with napkins by the coffee pot. He sat down to type, straightening the pages.

A quick scan of Strauss's hand notes brought a low whistle to his lips. Kingsley decided he'd better read on before typing.

This was hot.

Ten minutes later, he was done reading. As he pecked over the keyboard, his hands started trembling; he had to stop several times to get control of them. Hydrogen bomb--they were talking about. Megatons. In spite of the wintry weather outside, he started sweating.

No question about it. This was pure dynamite.

Pyotr Nedved had to see this stuff, and soon. Tonight, if possible. He'd make the call right after getting Strauss his pages. Rules of contact be damned.

Moscow Center had to know what the Americans were up to.

Wednesday, November 29, 1950

Washington, D.C.

7:30 p.m.

Kingsley made the call, earning nothing but contempt and spluttered curses from a flustered Pyotr Nedved. After some argument, the 'cultural attache' at the Soviet Embassy on 16th Street finally agreed to a risky face-to-face meeting that night. Where? he had asked Nedved.

"Blackies," came the brusque reply. And the line went dead.

Allen Kingsley was left to ponder the implications of what he had just done.

For any deep cover operation, a personal get-together with the operative's handler was reserved for only the most extreme emergencies, life and death matters like extraction from the country. That had been one of the most impregnable rules of contact drilled into him at the NKVD Academy. Did the dynamite in Strauss's notes warrant such a meeting? Nedved obviously didn't think so. But then he hadn't seen the stuff yet.

Kingsley fidgeted in the back seat of the cab, not sure he had done the right thing. But he couldn't very well undo the call now. He was a trained operative and this was duty. Moscow Center would have the final say.

The cab pulled up a block away from Blackies, as Kingsley had requested. He paid the cab fare, then began walking along 22nd Street, away from the restaurant. Years of training in fieldcraft had taught him to be careful about surveillance. The best way to check for a tail was to flush it out in the open.

Kingsley walked two blocks south and bought a newspaper from a newsstand at Washington Circle. He scanned the paper, 'accidentally' dropping one section to let him check for obvious coverage nearby. There...by the hotel entrance. He wasn't sure about the man in the white fedora but it paid to be careful. He folded the paper under his arms and walked on, then caught a bus in front of the George Washington University Hospital. Stepping on, he glanced back again.

No question about it. The same white fedora was still there, now admiring a statue of some famous but forgotten person in the hospital courtyard. He had Bureau counterintelligence written all over him. There was likely another tail across the street. Once aboard the trolley, Kingsley studied the pedestrians on the other side of 22nd Street. He spotted no obvious coverage but just the same, you didn't want to get careless and rush the procedure. Losing a tail was the field operative's version of major heart surgery; you didn't want to hurry it since a mistake could be fatal.

Kingsley settled back in his trolley seat. He counted off three stops--by now, the trolley had taken them all the way down to E Street and Foggy Bottom. Diplomat country, he realized, seeing the massive stone pediments of the State Department building. He got off the trolley, waited five minutes, then boarded another one going north.

Half an hour later, he had exited that trolley and doubled back, walking east toward Lafayette Square, then back west again. Several times, he bought things--little knickknacks, really--to check around him but the white fedora was gone. Kingsley against walked past Blackie's, past its black wrought iron columns, and crossed the street, using the occasion to steal a peek up and down the street. He noticed nothing obvious this time, which meant exactly nothing. The Bureau had grown quite sophisticated in its street operations lately and it was getting harder and harder to shake them.

At last satisfied the tail was gone, Kingsley made his way back to the restaurant. Inside, he checked his overcoat and hat and brushed snow and sleet from his wavy black hair. He went in and found Pyotr Nedved in the agreed-upon booth: back wall by the fireplace. The Russian glowered at him over the rim of a shot glass of vodka as he approached.

"Pyotr Petrovich, I'm sorry for the short notice. I've got critical stuff." Kingsley squeezed into the booth and ordered his own vodka.

Nedved grunted. "For your sake, Alexander Ivanovich, this better be life and death. Any surveillance?"

"Da. Yes," Kingsley replied. His real name was Karytinin, late of a small Urals village called Ulyanovsk, but that was ancient history. Now under deep cover, assigned to the Atomic Energy Commission, he was one of Nedved's more productive, if volatile assets in the U.S. Moscow Center and his bosses at First Chief Directorate knew him only as BLUEJAY.

"You shook them?"

"I believe so, Pyotr Petrovich." Kingsley/Karytinin/BLUEJAY ran a worried hand through his hair. The vodka and the fireplace had made his face flush red. "I followed normal procedure."

"Sometimes, that's not enough. Well, get on with it. What have you got that requires this kind of meeting?"

Kingsley told him about the conference at the AEC that morning. He'd mimeographed the typed notes Strauss had given him and put them in a small envelope. He had the envelope in his coat pocket, inside the lining, but there would be no exchange of documents between the men in public. Kingsley knew Nedved would eventually make a stop in the men's room, and that he would follow, after a decent interval. Only there, away from the restaurant crowd and possible Bureau surveillance, would anything material change hands.

Nedved squinted into his now drained vodka glass. "My guess is that the Instance has no knowledge of this so-called R-T method." The Instance was field code for Soviet leadership. "I'll have to give this to the rezidentura. It'll probably go all the way to Moscow Center tonight."

"What should I do now?" Karytinin took a hit from his own vodka. He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. Why in hell did Nedved choose this booth for conversation?--but of course, he knew why. The fire crackling next to them would mask most of their words, making eavesdropping more difficult.

"You're sure this is a new method of building bombs? Not just some kind of new industrial process the Americans have concocted?"

Karytinin shrugged. "No, I'm not sure. I'm not a physicist. But you gave me orders to send along everything. Look, this committee is made up of all their top scientists: Teller, Oppenheimer, Bethe. All the meetings are classified TOP SECRET or higher. You ordered me to use my own judgement, when Strauss hired me. That's what I'm doing. This is my judgement."

"I know, I know." Nedved held up his hands, surrendering. "You did the right thing. But the Americans are suspicious. Disinformatsiya, Alexander Ivanovich. They could be feeding us this stuff."

"I doubt it. Strauss is a capitalist, a Wall Street man."

On his own, Nedved decided to change BLUEJAY's tasking. He'd clear it with the rezident later.

"Find out as much as you can. I'll get funds for a little trip out west. You may have to take a 'vacation' in New Mexico. You said this meeting had other documents?"

"Hundreds of pages, Pyotr Petrovich. Technical papers, annexes, every scientist made a presentation, from what Strauss said, and they all had copies of their papers distributed."

"Then that is your immediate task. Film these papers. That's what Moscow really wants now. Reports, annexes, descriptions of bomb components, how they process uranium ore, how they separate and refine plutonium. If you can get more technical details on this R-T method, that would be perfect."

Karytinin agreed to do this and they arranged a way to exchange the film rolls, either in one of the dead drop locations around town or, if necessary, in a direct drop, a physical encounter on the street.

"That's a last resort. But we'll use it if we have to. And one more thing: don't call me at my phone ever again. I'm sure the line is bugged. That's a gross violation of the contact rules. You know that. Use the normal procedure, even if it takes longer."

"I'm sorry. I thought this was critical enough--"

"Don't fret so, Alexander Ivanovich. And don't look so pained. Your instincts were sound. Just think next time. Remember your academy training: expect the Americans to be watching you all the time and act accordingly. Suspicion may save your life someday."

"I understand." Karytinin didn't really but he supposed his handler was right. "I'm sure I was followed here. The Bureau's already assigned a tail. I shook them. I'm sure of it."

"Follow procedure. Those are my orders. And get on that new method right away. We need to forward some technical details to Moscow as soon as possible. The USA desk will be foaming at the mouth when they get a taste of this. The rezidentura will doubtless get a blizzard of new task orders. Center may want to assign some of them to New Mexico. Maybe add some coverage of the actual Greenhouse tests in the Pacific. Who can say what Beria will ask for?"

The men talked for a few more minutes. Just after nine, Nedved excused himself to visit the restroom. Karytinin waited fifteen minutes, then paid the bill and made his own trip to the facilities. Inside the fluorescent-lit room, the two Russians occupied themselves with necessary matters, then added a little extra primping at the mirror until a solitary businessman finished his business, washed his hands, and left. The envelope was quickly exchanged and Nedved followed the American out, quickly surveying the restaurant for Bureau types lurking about. A careful scan, as he gathered his overcoat, produced no obvious candidates. The Russian left and decided to walk the six blocks back to the Embassy, going east along M Street. If there was a tail, maybe he could draw some of the attention away from BLUEJAY. Nedved was quite certain he was well enough known to the Bureau's counter-intel teams to warrant a full-time surveillance show, everytime he left the Embassy. He smiled inwardly at the thought--rather like a Bolshoi production, wasn't it?--cinched up his overcoat against the sleet-flecked wind, and crossed the street at New Hampshire, heading east.

Half an hour later, after fortifying himself with another vodka from the bar, Karytinin nee Allen Kingsley exited Blackie's House of Beef. Right away, he spotted the tail again and that made his heart skip a few beats. They weren't even trying to hide it anymore. A bit of pressure sometimes forced mistakes, even from the most experienced operatives, but Karytinin gathered his wits and decided he wasn't going to crack tonight. Too much at stake. Moscow needed facts and he had to get them.

The only question now was: had the Americans connected him with Nedved? There was no way to tell tonight, he figured. Sooner or later, the Bureau would tip its hand.

Pleased with his new found courage, Karytinin hailed a passing cab for the quick ride back to his apartment at DuPont Circle.

Thursday, November 30, 1950

Pyongyang, North Korea

6:30 a.m.

Withdraw when he advances, harass him when he stops, strike him when he is weary, pursue him when he withdraws.

Mao Tse-tung

The low hills overlooking the Pot'ong-Gang River were shrouded in a freezing mist as Marshal Peng Dehuai surveyed the rubble and ruin of Pyongyang before him. Attached to the 38th Field Army of the 13th Army Group, Peng had followed the assault on the North Korean capital with special relish the last few days. A frontal assault on elements of the South Korean (ROK) II Corps, northeast of the city had completely collapsed the enemy's line and both the ROKs and the remnants of the Americans' 24th Infantry were in headlong retreat before the mass wave attacks of the Chinese. Peng was especially pleased that General Lian Xingchu's men would have the honor of liberating the capital city for it had been Lian's hesitation along the Chongchon River several weeks before that had let the ROKs off the hook of a planned pincer movement in the first place.

They had ridden all night from Antung, on the Manchurian border, to witness the final assault on Pyongyang. Liberating the dear comrade Kim il-Sung's capital was a notable achievement for Lian's 38th Army but as far as strategy was concerned, the city could have been bypassed in lieu of continuing attacks against the crumbling western flanks of the Americans' Eighth Army. Peng would have preferred that but politics were a necessary evil in any man's war so the city had to be liberated.

He squatted on top of the front cab of the Russian-made Molotov truck, peering through field glasses as another barrage of 82-mm mortar rounds slammed into the grounds of what the maps called the Wuryun Girls' High School. Now a pile of smoking rubble, the school was a forward pocket of some stubborn American resistance. Lian's infantry battalions in this northwest sector of the city were laying down a screen of artillery and mortar fire before charging across the twisted wreckage of a bridge to secure the south banks of the river.

Peng ducked as American artillery, probably 105s far to the south, let fly a booming volley of counter battery fire. The hills that Peng's headquarters platoon had bivouacked on were exposed as hell but the enemy rounds landed long, sending up geysers of dirt, rock and snow several hundred yards to the rear.

"Shooting blind," Peng muttered. He passed his glasses over to Captain Jiang Chen Li, crouching on the truck cab with him. "Take a look, Captain. Lian's 112th Division is ready to go. Last leg of the assault in this sector. If they can get a couple of regiments across those bridges before sunup, the Americans are finished. We're aiming to reach the Chung Hae Mun-tong Road, in the area of the old Cattle Market, in two hours. Then, we dig in and hold on. The Americans will be sending in their warplanes when there's enough light, trying to blast us out of the city."

Captain Jiang didn't report directly to Peng at all. The slightly-built, crewcutted officer was detailed to the Chinese Peoples Volunteers from his normal billet as intelligence assistant to General Xie Fang, People's Liberation Army General Staff in Peking. He was an experienced and capable field officer in his own right, having served under the legendary General Aung Su-shui in the Campaign of a Thousand Knives, the PLA's penultimate assault on Peking in the Great Civil War. Despite impressive credentials, Peng regarded Jiang as little more than a spy.

Jiang was sensitive to the Marshal's opinion and took pains to be an objective observer of the Second Offensive for Xie and the General Staff. He had awakened just after sundown the day before, sharing a bunk room in the dusty grain hall that served as Peng's Antung command center. As always, Jiang observed, the Marshal did a few minutes' worth of what he called old man's tai chi exercises, before setting off on a brisk, two-kilometer jog around the deserted vendors' stalls of the grain market. He ate a quick meal of tea and spicy rice gruel, then pored over maps of North Korea's shattered road network before setting off on a bone-jarring all-night journey south to the front. The headquarters platoon and its protective shield of infantry traveled always at night, avoiding the incessant aerial attack of American planes. As dawn approached, they had at last reached the outskirts of the North Korean capital. The horizon was black with swollen, low-hanging snow clouds, but flickering orange and red flashes spotlighted the initial artillery and mortar barrage, heralding the final assault into the center of the city.

As Peng and Jiang watched from the hill, the pre-assault bombardment lifted promptly at 0600 hours. To the martial sound of trumpets and bugles, green tracer fire arcing through the night, the forward elements of the 358th Regiment, 112th Division of Lian's army massed at the twin bridges and poured across the wrecked spans in a volley of shouts and curses. Green illumination rounds popped off overhead, their squeaking parachutes a ghastly, nightmarish sentinel for the assault. Small-arms fire crackled through the air and red-orange explosions burst all along the surging front of men--'potato-masher' grenades mowing down anything still living after two hours of shelling.

"Come on!" Peng yelled. He leaped down from the truck cab and made his way, slipping and sliding, down the icy slope of the hill. "Let's go in behind them!"

Alarmed at the Marshal's sudden impulse, Jiang hastened to catch up.

"Comrade Marshal! Comrade Marshal!" A solicitous lieutenant from the headquarters platoon bounded after Peng. "The assault--it's too dangerous! Let our men secure the other bank--Comrade Marshal?!"

"Nonsense!" Peng yelled. He delighted in the feel of it all: the concussion of the booms! the fury of the people's soldiers charging the enemy, the crackle of burp guns, the yelling, the taunts and curses....he loved it! "Let's go, Jiang! We'll fall in right behind the last elements of the regiment!"

At the bridge abutment, Peng stopped to let the infantrymen pass, then crouched and picked his way gingerly across the mangled girders and broken asphalt of the northern bridge span.

Jiang stumbled after him, ducking as a volley of American mortar rounds detonated in the river just to his right. The icy water geysered over the collapsed decking of the bridge, making footing even more treacherous. Jiang fell to his face, covering his head, then shot up again when the debris had settled and raced after Peng.

The assault of the 358th went well enough by Peng's reckoning, though casualties were high. In was a truism around the headquarters platoon that the Americans loved their firepower. As well they should, Peng noted sourly, ducking behind a tree stump on the uprise from the Pot'ong Gang River. They used bullets, bombs, mortars and artillery as if there were no end to their supply chain. Pyongyang itself was vivid testimony to that--the Americans had a penchant for flattening every target before men were expended. The North Korean capital had been utterly devastated and pounded into a bleak wasteland by six months of aerial bombardment and ground war. Nothing taller than the very tree stump he was now using for cover had survived. Even with that, the Americans still depended on their bombs and grenades to cover a ragged withdrawal. They much preferred long-range artillery duels and aerial assault to the kind of ground engagement that actually won battles.

Peng knew all that and he despised the Americans for it. Hadn't he pounded that very point into the faces of his division commanders right after the early November assaults--the First Offensive? Close with the enemy! he had stormed. Engage the Americans at close range! He knew perfectly well they couldn't use their firepower advantage when their soldiers were fighting off bayonet attacks in their own foxholes. That was the real secret to defeating the American Army: don't give them the space to use their bombs and artillery. It had worked well in the frigid mountain passes up north and it would work just as well in the blasted streets of Pyongyang.

A peasant army could indeed take on and defeat the armed forces of the mighty United States. Marshal Peng Dehuai would show them how.

Peng and Jiang followed the trailing elements of the 358th as the assault lodgement opened up and platoon after platoon fanned out through the city's streets. The Americans seemed to be melting away before their very eyes, a frantic, hell-for-leather retreat that their own newspapers were calling the Big Bugout. Peng had nothing but contempt for them; more than once, he witnessed in the split second glare of exploding shellfire, entire squads of American infantry trashing their weapons and fleeing south in terror.

Deep in the center of Pyongyang, Peng and his protective platoon paused amid the wreckage of Sugi Son Park, a snow-covered open field of tree stumps and piles of shell casings. A pair of "deuce and a quarter" trucks burned fiercely by the edge of the park. Beyond the flames stood the smoldering skeleton of a colonnaded building--once the Governor's Residence.

Jiang broke out a rice ball to munch on. Peng bummed a Red Lion smoke off the platoon lieutenant. Smoke and ashes filled the cold air and off to the east, the sky was purpling into dawn.

They rested for a few minutes but the moment's calm was quickly shattered by rifle fire. Rounds spanged off tree stumps and gouged up snow as Peng and the platoon dove for cover.

"Over there!" Jiang pointed at one of the burning trucks. The muzzle flash of a machine gun erupted from underneath the truck. "One...no, two of them! Keep your head down, sir!" He shoved Peng's startled face into a snow drift, as bullets sprayed overhead. Someone was hit--Jiang heard the impact and a harsh grunt, then the soldier's body fell hard, twisting in pain.

A pair of wounded American infantrymen had holed up beneath the rear deck of the truck, oblivious to flames licking around the fuel tank. They let fly another volley.

The lieutenant grunted commands to his men. Chi guo fa--to the right, spread out! Jiang made sure Peng was okay, then grabbed a carbine off the dead soldier and scooted left through some tufts of wiry bush. He slammed home a fresh 10-round clip and waited. The fire team flanking the other side of the truck pushed on a little further, diving headlong into the snow as the Americans opened up again.

Jiang used that same moment to crawl further left, shuffling on his belly with a face full of snow to a point directly in front of the truck cab. If he could just get behind them, while the Americans sighted in on the enveloping squad to their left....

He scooted some more and found himself squatting by a rotted log. The Simonov SKS Type 56 bolt-action carbine weighed exactly 8.8 pounds. Effective range was maybe five hundred yards. Jiang figured he could close to within fifty at best. He waited for the next burst from the machine gun, then crabbed his way up to a snowdrift not ten yards from the truck's front axle. There was motion underneath, indistinct in the faint light, but there nonetheless. He lay the carbine over his left arm, bracing himself for the recoil. An experienced rifleman could squeeze off thirty-five, maybe forty rounds in a good minute.

Jiang knew he wouldn't have that long.

A quick burst from the machine gun fixed his target's location one last time. Jiang closed his eyes, imagining the shot he would take. He took several deep breaths and squeezed.

The first shot struck home. Jiang worked the carbine bolt for another shot and got off several more rounds. The machine gun nest fell silent. Only flames from the burning tires crackled in the early morning frost. Even as he lay there, the flames reached the truck's fuel tank. There was a loud whump!! and tongues of orange flame leaped out from underneath the cab. Dense black smoke enveloped the clearing.

Jiang hustled back to make sure the Marshal was okay. Peng was already being helped up by several men. He retrieved his fur cap and brushed snow from his fatigues.

"Good shooting, Captain." Peng was impressed with the resourcefulness of Jiang. The man had a lot more tactical sense than most of Peking's spies.

"Comrade Marshal, are you hurt? Are you alright?"

Peng waved them off. "Minor scratches." He went over to the soldier who'd taken several rounds in the belly. "Brave soul. What's his name, Lieutenant?"

"Sung, sir. Private Sung Li Chou. One of Colonel Gu's men. I drafted him for duty on the escort platoon when I heard you were coming. Excellent marksman."

Peng understood. "It's too bad. The man deserves a medal. See to it."

Peng, Jiang and the rest of the platoon formed up again and made their way cautiously through a field of burning fires to Zuiki Dori Street. Though still dark, the night sky was lightening up through the grit and pall of smoke that hovered over the city. They marched to an intersection blocked with bombed-out trucks, all burning furiously, and picked through piles of assorted weapons that the ROKs and the Americans had abandoned.

"Incredible." Peng shook his head in disbelief, hoisting up an American M-1 Garand rifle he found in the gutter. "A perfectly good weapon--look: the magazine still has rounds--yet the enemy tosses them away and runs like rabbits. Why don't they fight?"

Jiang stuck his shoe into a pile of rifles--all American--and turned them over, noticing a still serviceable stack of ammunition belts and clips. Grenades and mortar rounds tumbled down the man-made hill. Two BARs had been thrown aside nearby, tripods still attached.

"They must have had orders to smash these," he theorized, "but they didn't."

"It's a hell of a strategy, Captain. If it is a strategy."

"Their Army is collapsing, running away."

"Perhaps." Peng surveyed the desolation of what had once been one of Pyongyang's major thoroughfares. Exhibit halls a block ahead had once showcased the industrial goods of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Now, in every direction, pyres of flame lit up the early morning sky with an infernal orange glow. Soot and ash and the stench of rotting flesh choked the air.

Where had the Americans gone?

Peng stepped gingerly through the wreckage, kicking at the occasional rat out to feed on the dead. It was damned frustrating, these American tactics. What the hell were they up to?

Not forty-eight hours before, he'd stood in the map room of a converted schoolhouse in Antung and laid out his own scheme of maneuver for the upcoming Second Offensive. All his division and group commanders had been there. After the First Offensive, he'd found it necessary to remind them of basic tactics.

"The strategy is simple enough," he had lectured them. "We use the hatchi shiki, what the Americans call a double envelopment. One unit of division size attacks the enemy frontally to hold him in place or to panic him and force him to withdraw. Two additional units then work their way around the enemy's flanks. Their mission is to fold in those flanks, sever supply lines, then isolate and surround the enemy. After that," Peng told them, "it's a simple operation to overwhelm the isolated pieces and destroy them piecemeal.

"As before," he went on. "we attack at night, using our shock tactics. Hit the enemy with everything you have. Probe first, find lines of weakness, then assault frontally in column. Grenades and mortars in the first wave, then fan out with converging fire from your forward teams of machine guns. Fire for effect and close quickly. Mingle with the enemy so he can't use his artillery. All this must be done exactly according to our plan. Remember, too, comrades, to set up at least three assault waves. The enemy is wasteful of ammunition, especially in the early fight. Our casualties will be highest then. But it's vital to press forward, regardless of casualties, to complete the envelopment. The triangle of our hatchi shiki is only as strong as its weakest leg. Make sure your division is not the weakest leg."

Yet for all his carefully planned strategy, its success depended on the Americans' willingness to engage. Their frantic withdrawal from Pyongyang and the western reaches of the Chongchon River had confounded his plans for several days. Peng was by turns angry, relieved and increasingly wary.

He smelled a trap.

The escort platoon eventually made its way to an impassable intersection, blocked by the wreckage of a column of American tanks and trucks.

When a runner appeared on the street with a message pouch, Peng received it and read the dispatch quickly, then consulted with Jiang and the lieutenant.

"Looks like General Wei's setting up his division command post a few blocks to our north, Lieutenant. Changguo Girls School, according to the map. 112th has secured this whole sector, all the way to the Taedong."

"Would Comrade Marshal prefer to head to the command post?"

Peng heard the roar of aircraft overhead, just above the cloud cover and looked up, squinting through flying ash. "It would be a good idea, don't you think? I believe the Americans have finally shown up."

"P-51 Mustangs," Jiang reported. He knew the sound of those Rolls Royce Merlin engines. "Their air force is awake and on the prowl for something to eat."

"Then we'd best be quick." Peng left the intersection and headed north, past a shattered block of low brick shops. Ten minutes' march put them in the rubble-strewn courtyard of a bombed-out shell of a building. The roof had collapsed at one end and opposite the courtyard, a massive rotunda teetered on wobbly columns, looking for all the world like a cracked egg.

From far beyond the concussive thumps of distant bombs exploding, the shrill roar of aircraft engines swept down the street. Jiang whirled about just in time to see a single P-51 streaking down out of a low-hanging cloud, lining them up for a guns pass.

"Look out!" he cried. The Mustang completed its turn and leveled out, just over the skeletal spires of a distant church, then roared down across the open clearing of a livestock lot, the city's old Cattle Market. Less than a hundred feet above the ground, the Mustang raked the courtyard with 50-calibre machine gun fire and the platoon scattered in every direction.

Jiang and the lieutenant both grabbed Marshal Peng and threw him under the rotunda, just as machine-gun rounds stitched twin lines of death behind them. The aircraft roared past, then pitched up and banked hard left to wheel about for another strafing run.

"Into the school!" Jiang dragged Peng, who scrambled to his feet, losing his fur cap in the process. They stumbled and crawled, clawing their way to cover behind the school's shell-pocked front wall.

The Mustang made three passes, then the pilot throttled up to climb back into the clouds, back into formation with his squadron mates. Throughout the city, as dawn broke cold and gray in a pall of smoke, American planes appeared from out of the clouds and lay waste to the Chinese infantry pouring in. For several hours, Marshal Peng and his escort platoon huddled silently in the ruins of the girls' school, hardly daring to move or breathe, while death rained down from the skies on the helpless 112th Division.

Angry at their vulnerability, Peng swore under his breath, coughing in the dust, wishing he could scare up a Shturmovik fighter, even a simple Yak trainer would do, something to put in the air and meet the damned Americans head-on. But that would have to wait. Politics, he spat. Damned politics and no supplies and my men are dying like cattle in the livestock pens.

Jiang heard the Marshal swearing. "I'd sure give an arm for some anti-aircraft cannon right about now, eh Marshal? A couple of nice rounds of 75-mm, right into the belly of that beast. They make a nice big splash when they go down."

Outside the bombed-out school, the Mustangs plastered the street with bombs, rockets and machine gun fire. The ground shook with each explosion.

Peng shook his head and brushed dust and paint chips off his quilted jacket.

"I'd give an arm to have a tenth the bombs the Americans waste every day."

Jiang peered out through a crack in the wall, trying to see if the American planes had left.

"Our supply situation hasn't improved, has it, Comrade Marshal?"

"It's gotten worse. In my last staff meeting at Antung, I told my division and group commanders that Rear Services had drafted a hundred thousand coolies to carry supplies. Where the hell are they? The further south we go, the worse it gets. No army can fight forever on comradely spirit. We need bullets, bombs, rice, we need everything. The damned Americans waste more in one battle than I get in a month."

Jiang sat back against the crumbling masonry wall and unscrewed his canteen top. He took a measured draw of water and grimaced. The water felt good on his parched throat.

"The Americans are poor fighters."

Peng didn't disagree. He studied a map of Pyongyang, squinting in the dim light. "They rely on their vehicles too much, Captain. They're roadbound. Too many tanks, too many trucks. We've managed to flank them repeatedly by staying in the hills and moving at night."

"They own the skies," Jiang observed. Both men ducked as another explosion rattled dust and rubble over their heads.

"That they do," Peng admitted. "And if Headquarters would get off its ass with the Russians, we'd have some air support ourselves. Just enough to contest the skies over the battlefield...that's all I would need."

Jiang was curious. "Headquarters doesn't always agree with your tactics, Marshal. In the staff meetings, I hear talk: 'Peng is too cautious. Peng is slow to react. Peng's not pressing the attack.'"

Bold for a staff assistant. Peng glared back at Jiang, then cracked a half smile. "Armchair generals, Captain. They're safe and well fed in their Peking offices. They'd sing a different song if they were here."

"They have a lot of influence."

"So they do." Peng was growing annoyed with this little staff bird. "How many battles have they fought? How many Nationalists have they killed? What have they done for the Revolution?"

Jiang said, "I'm on your side, Marshal. I just heard--"

"You heard a flock of old crows, that's what you heard. I know what you are, Captain Jiang. A spy for Zhu De." Peng spat in the dirt. "Sent here to report back what I do. The old crows don't even trust their own chain of command. And you know what, Captain?"

"What's that, Comrade Marshal?"

"Neither do I."

The men glared at each other for a few moments. Finally, Jiang broke the icy silence.

"You fought with Mao. During the Long March."

Peng acknowledged the statement. "Some say those were glorious times. They're wrong. We starved. We fought to survive. It was very close, those battles. The Nationalists had weapons, they had the Americans. They lost because they had poor leadership."

"And our leadership?"

Peng scoffed. "Nearly as bad. We were lucky. Mao made mistakes. Lin Piao made mistakes. I made mistakes. It was the corruption that defeated Chiang Kai shek. His men didn't trust him. They didn't trust their commanders. No army can win without trusting its leaders."

"Trust can be a powerful weapon. And revolutionary spirit."

"Now, you sound like Mao. Revolutionary spirit helps. But it's no substitute for bullets. And supplies."

"You think the Great Helmsman is taking China in the right direction...confronting the Americans?"

Peng lit up a Red Lion cigarette. He pulled hard, letting the tobacco smoke fill his lungs. "I can't very well tell you, now can I, Captain? You--a spy for the old crows. What would happen to me?"

"I merely--"

Peng held up a hand. "Not to worry. I don't always agree with Mao's strategy. And the Incomparable Teacher doesn't know beans about field tactics. But he's right about Korea. If we don't kick the Americans out now, they'll be on our Manchurian doorsteps, forever making trouble for the Revolution. Frankly, I'm surprised they haven't dragged Chiang Kai-shek into the war. Opened up a second front to tie down our forces in the south."

"They may yet do that," Jiang said.

The P-51 attack seemed to have let up. The men decided to peek outside and see if they could re-join the line of infantry working its way into Pyongyang.

"Comrade Marshal, it appears the Americans have left."

Peng got up and dusted himself off. The rest of the platoon re-assembled under shouted orders from the lieutenant. "Let's head out," Peng told them. "I want to be with the troops when they reach Government House." The platoon formed up and cautiously emerged from the rubble of the school.

They had gone a few blocks south along the blasted moonscape, arriving at the outer fences of the Pyongyang Central Rail Station, now twisted wreckage burning out of control, when a shout came from one of the men. Peng turned and saw pointing hands. Then he heard it.

A lone aircraft, American P-51, roared by just over the treetops. An instant later, a volley of explosions rocked the railyard and flaming debris arced through the dusty, sooty air. Peng, Jiang and the platoon again dove for cover, scrambling for safety. The roar of the aircraft faded away into the clouds and for a brief moment, Jiang hoped the plane had made its final pass over the city.

But his hopes were shortlived. The roaring came back, reaching a crescendo just as the Mustang burst out of the belly of a black ash cloud, a growling, snorting winged dragon spitting fire from the sky.

Jiang glanced up just in time to see a pair of hundred-pounders slip away from their bomb racks and come cartwheeling to earth, much too close for comfort. He looked ahead, saw how exposed the Marshal was. Instantly, he sprang out of the ditch he had jumped into and clawed toward Peng. He tackled the Marshal and the two of them tumbled toward a gutter, just as one of the bombs detonated directly overhead. The concussion rolled them over like bowling pins and shell fragments slammed into Jiang's body, knocking him unconscious.

The Mustang swept the railyard with .50-caliber machine gun fire for several more passes. Then it streaked skyward, and was gone, the growl of its Packard Rolls Royce engine muffled by the thick clouds.

Peng waited a few more minutes, breathing hard, his ears still roaring from the bomb explosions. Finally, he managed to wriggle out from underneath his human shield. Coughing and bleeding, he thumbed dust from his eyes and was horrified to see that Captain Jiang was mortally wounded, bleeding from deep wounds in the face, neck and chest.

"Lieutenant! Lieutenant...over here...on the double!"

The lieutenant scrambled to his feet and came running, saw Peng cradling the blood-stained head of the captain from the General Staff. "Form a detail at once! Carry this man back to the battalion aid station! Quickly!"

"Yes sir!" The lieutenant gave the orders and the soldiers fashioned a makeshift litter from their own jackets, arms and legs knotted together. Jiang's body was hoisted up and his eyes flickered open for a moment.

"Rest easy, Captain," Peng told him. He brushed soot and dirt from the boy's face. "You're going to the aid station in the rear. Just a few miles from here."

Jiang smiled wanly and Peng ordered the detail to move out. He realized, as Jiang was carried off, that he really did need the intelligence officer, spy or not. The captain was a useful conduit for accurate field intelligence back to the decision-makers on the General Staff. Even more important than that, however, was Jiang's value as a listening post. Peng knew he needed field intelligence of a different kind, a source for what was really happening in the inner circles of the PLA, a source in Peking itself. In that, he knew, Jiang would be most useful. If he lived.

Peng shuddered at the prospect of dealing with the thick-skulled louts through the normal chain of command.

He watched as a line of advancing infantry from Colonel Gu Dehua's 358th Regiment picked and probed through the smoldering ruins of the railyard, looting several American supply trucks in the process.

The Americans and the ROKs had fled the capital and inside of a day, Peng knew he'd be able to turn the city over to the dear comrade brother Kim il-Sung as a gift from the Chinese people.

But then what?

Peng also knew he could ill afford to lose such a valuable asset as Jiang, for all his suspicions. A clear-eyed, plain-spoken communication channel back to Peking was worth a month's supplies, maybe more. Spies could work two ways and Captain Jiang was just what he needed. Such an asset might well be his best, maybe his only chance, to improve an increasingly desperate supply situation. It was shameful that his men had to loot the enemy just to survive in this land of ungrateful garlic-eaters, just to have enough rifles and bullets.

But if they didn't, he feared the Second Offensive would soon stall. That would lead inexorably to two uncomfortable outcomes, both equally disastrous. Mao would be displeased and make trouble for him in the Politburo. And the Americans would have time to re-group and re-arm.

He wasn't sure which was the greater headache.
CHAPTER 5

Friday, December 1, 1950

Yokota Air Base, Japan

6:30 a.m.

Rolling down Runway 17 Right in the jump seat of the Lucky Lucy, Paul Craft had the distinct impression that the RB-29 was little more than a runaway truck. Three days before, Clayton LaSalle had pulled rank on the 31st Strategic Recon Squadron down at Kadena, Okinawa, and left town with an RB-29 Superfort ostensibly belonging to the Twentieth Air Force. Under Top Secret tasking orders forged from the authority of SCAP in Tokyo, LaSalle had piloted the Lucky Lucy on a short hop up to Yokota, twenty-eight miles northwest of Tokyo, to be outfitted for a special reconnaissance mission "requested" by MacArthur himself, so the orders said. That the entire set of orders was merely a fabrication to get the plane for an unauthorized trip up North to scout targets for Gallant Flag was known only to a select few.

And the fewer the better, Craft thought, as LaSalle hauled back the yoke. The Superfort lumbered into a foggy early-morning sky on her four 2200-horsepower Wright Cyclone engines, ignoring the protests both of gravity and a bevy of aggravated Air Force weather men who had insisted that Yokota was well below minimums for any aircraft operations.

Clayton LaSalle had chosen to selectively ignore the briefings on weather. "Clear and cold over the target area," he reminded the meteorology weenies. "That's all I'm interested in." Bomber-rated Air Force generals could say things like that.

Lucky Lucy climbed out through low and chilly scud and at fifteen thousand feet AGL, LaSalle leveled out and swung her around to a more northwesterly heading of two-eight-five degrees. They topped out the heaviest cloud cover at twenty-thousand feet and Craft spied the morning sun glinting off the snow-covered cone top of Fujiyama out the starboard panes of the "bird cage", as LaSalle called the '29's cockpit.

"Beautiful sight," LaSalle's voice crackled over the intercom. "I first saw her in March '45, bombing run to Yokahama and Nagoya. My third mission, that was."

Craft nodded and unbuckled his seat straps to go relieve himself in the plane's chemical head just aft of the navigator's station. Below them, dense white cloud cover seemed to blanket all of central Japan. Craft clutched and clung to handbars as turbulence rocked the plane sideways. LaSalle had told him they'd be in a buffet for a few minutes, but it should clear once they reached the Sea of Japan.

What they were doing was daring, risky in the extreme, and so far beyond FEAF regulations as to defy explanation but Craft tried not to think about that as he peeed in the pot, steadying himself by wedging his head into a corner. LaSalle, at least, was well rated in the '29s. So too was the co-pilot, Captain Ken Chandler, who like the aircraft had been 'purloined" from the 31st shop at Kadena, much to the displeasure of the squadron commander. There were several gunners aboard, as well as a navigator and a small squad of camera operators and photographers.

The flight plan, according to LaSalle's briefing, would take them straight across the Sea of Japan, crossing the North Korean coastline near Wonsan, then up North along a winding route, a mission plan precisely calculated by the General to closely parallel previous recon flights by the 31st, so as to arouse no undue suspicion. North of a mountaintop waypoint called Chinaman's Hat, near the hamlet of Huichon however, LaSalle had indicated on the flight plan, a turn to the east, paralleling the upper reaches of the Chongchon River, ostensibly to hunt for evidence of Red Chinese troop movements in the Tenth Corps sector.

"That route's for the books," LaSalle had explained, and duly filed the routing in the plan for the records. Their real route was charted on a topographical map that LaSalle had deliberately withheld from the Ops office. This route, the one Lucky Lucy would actually fly once she reached Chinaman's Hat, was far beyond the bounds of authorization.

They would turn due north at the Hat, LaSalle had quietly outlined, after losing their fighter escort, and cross the Manchurian border near Ji'an. Then they would fly on a northwesterly heading to the big rail complex at Shenyang, turning north again toward Harbin in central Manchuria, then east over a finger of Soviet territory toward Vladivostok and back to Japan. The purpose of this unauthorized, undocumented leg was quite simple: to add to the intelligence base on possible atom bomb targets for Gallant Flag.

Paul Craft zipped up and climbed back to his perch in the bird cage. Buckling himself back in, he hoped Lucky Lucy would live up to her nickname.

The first few hours of the flight were uneventful. As predicted by LaSalle, the cloud cover socking in Japan began to lift as Lucky Lucy flew west over the Sea of Japan. By the time they went feet dry crossing the North Korean coastline near Wonsan, the clouds had burned off completely and visibility was unlimited. Off the port wing, tall columns of smoke billowed into the cold morning sky.

"Wonsan harbor," called up Lieutenant Ted Koch, the navigator. "Looks like a hot reception for somebody."

The snowy hills surrounding the city were under furious bombardment by Allied aircraft. Black dots filled the skies, swarming all over enemy positions. LaSalle re-tuned the aircraft radio to the squadron tactical frequency, trying several, before settling on 935 megacycles. Static filled Craft's headset, broken by snatches of pilot talk, as wave after wave of P-51s, F-80s, and Navy F4F Banshees circled and dove on the Red strongholds. Even as he watched, Craft saw several orange fireballs erupt--an ammo truck, perhaps, giving heavy black clouds up to the skies.

"Gooks are getting pounded this morning," LaSalle gloated. "Radio's alive with chitchat. Sounds like the 51st, out of K-14 at Kimpo, has arrived. I'd recognize Don Waters' gruff old voice anywhere. He's got his boys stirred up like a hornet's nest today."

"Navy too," Chandler noted. He broke out the binocs, surveying the scene below. "Probably Essex, or Bon Homme Richard. They're assigned to this sector, aren't they?"

"I'd better call in," LaSalle said. He keyed his mike, then called up the squadron commander. "Attack force commander, attack force commander, this is Honeybee. RB-29 out of Yokota, on station awaiting fighter escort. Attack force commander, this is Honeybee. Do you read, over?"

Bursts and chirps of static were quickly followed by a voice thick with a mountain twang. LaSalle grinned hearing Colonel Don Styers, an old acquaintance.

"Honeybee, this is Curtain Call. On station for a ground support mission in this sector. Is that Clayton LaSalle up there in that big bird?"

"Curtain Call, that's affirmative. Honeybee's just waiting for her escorts. Got some pictures to shoot up North."

"Son of a gun. I'm surprised they let an old geezer like you drive that flying barnyard. How come I didn't see anything on the board this morning? Photo shoot, huh?"

LaSalle let Chandler take the yoke, so he could consult a scrap of paper. Before they'd left Yokota, LaSalle had made a few phone calls to FEAF Headquarters in downtown Tokyo, just to get the straight scoop on missions planned for today. With luck, they'd be able to blend into the overall picture of operations being conducted and finesse questions about their own mission. He'd filed a flight plan for the record, even ordering up a four-ship fighter escort for the route over the Taeback Mountains, just as routine procedure called for whenever a Superfort made a recon trip up North. LaSalle was counting on an active flight manifest to provide cover later, when they cut loose the escort and made their little detour. Given what the Reds were doing to the Eighth Army to the west and Tenth Corps to their east, an active flying day was a pretty safe bet. As it was, FEAF planners kept a pretty tight leash on missions routed to within a hundred miles of the Yalu River--that was national policy, after all--so care and caution had to be used. That and a bit of timing.

"That's affirm, Curtain Call. Tasking from Tokyo; you know how that goes. I'm orbiting to pick up my escort. Want a little informal BDA?"

"Sure thing," came the reply. BDA was bomb damage assessment. "But keep your current altitude, Honeybee. Flak's hot and heavy this morning. Gooks've trucked in some kind of big Kahuna triple-A and my boys are taking hits."

"Roger that. We'll stay at angels twenty." LaSalle took back the yoke from Chandler, fiddled a bit with the engine throttles to keep their airspeed pegged at three ten knots. Then he turned Lucky Lucy south in a big sweeping bank, to begin orbiting the outer edge of the battlefield, while crew members spotted and photographed the bomb damage inflicted on Chinese and North Korean positions. The footage was a good idea. It would add to their credibility when they got back to Yokota. Five minutes later, the RB-29 had taken up station in a racetrack pattern at twenty thousand feet, a few miles north of the smoke and flames swirling around a wrecked column of trucks.

They did BDA as a favor to Curtain Call for ten minutes. On the fourth eastbound leg of the racetrack, LaSalle heard another voice crackle out of the static in his headset.

"Honeybee, Honeybee, this is Red Fox Leader. Climbing through sixteen thousand. I'm tallyho'ed on your position. Expect to be on station in two minutes."

About damn time, LaSalle muttered, too low for hearing. "Roger that, Red Fox Leader. Assume standard escort positions. You fully briefed in?"

"Affirmative, sir. Got the whole scoop back at Squadron Ops...K-14."

"Who's your Big Daddy, son?"

"Sixteenth Fighter Intercept, Honeybee."

LaSalle grinned. He knew the C/O from Twentieth Air Force days back at Tinian: Max Schilling. They'd swapped many a beer and tall tale at the Tinian North Field O Club in '44 and '45.

"Understood, Red Fox Leader." And then, just as advertised, a quartet of gleaming silvery Lockheed F-80 Shooting Star interceptors eased into Lucky Lucy's embrace, taking up positions just off her wings, two to a side.

"Well...hell," Ken Chandler positively crowed at the sight. "Lucky Lucy's finally got a date to the dance."

LaSalle checked instruments: airspeed indicated three ten knots; the altimeter read twenty thousand feet. On this leg, they were headed back out to sea.

Time to dance with the devil...

"Red Fox Leader, on my mark, execute left turn to heading two niner five. Five...four...three...two...one...mark!"

As one, the five-ship fleet banked left and turned back inland over North Korean territory.

"Curtain Call, this is Honeybee. We're pulling off BDA for today. We have our kids and we're going to the show."

"Roger that, Honeybee. Thanks for the look-over. I'll pass it along to Group. Good shooting."

You do that, my friend, LaSalle muttered to himself. Make us look all nice and normal and official.

And Lucky Lucy and her brood angled north by northwest, over the forbidding snow-capped peaks of the lower Taeback, toward Indian country and the unknown perils of enemy airspace.

LaSalle settled back, letting Chandler drive the plane for awhile. He uncorked a thermos of hot coffee and poured three fingers worth into the cup, sipping thoughtfully. The whole contact with Curtain Call and the attack force at Wonsan had been a planned "appearance" in the combat theater, an appearance calculated to establish Honeybee as a legitimate reconnaissance mission over North Korea. He consulted the mission plan and realized with a start that their first recon "target" was coming up in ten minutes.

"Better get the camera jocks warmed up," he announced. "We're due to be over the Imjin River at 0830 hours. Our first run is those bridges Eighth Army was supposed to have blown up last week."

Craft eyed the escort fighters uneasily. "What about these guys? When do we lose them?"

LaSalle was studying a terrain map. "We hit the Imjin River bridges in a few minutes. Then I make a big turn over some suspected Red positions at Huichon. Chinaman's Hat is the pivot point for that leg. We may have to make several passes and the gooks are sure to have triple-A all over the place. After that, flight plan says we turn east and check out the First Marine situation around Chosin Reservoir. They're getting hammered by the Reds around Hagaru and G-2 wants pictures of the Red troop buildup in the vicinity. Normal procedure at that point is to kiss our escort goodbye and head for the coast."

"Only we're not heading for the coast, are we?" Craft said.

LaSalle smiled. "There's a rumor to that effect. The only worry is some scattered reports out of G-2 in Tokyo, that the Reds may have a new fighter, a jet fighter up north in Manchuria. Rosie O'Donnell's calling them MiGs, whatever that means. If we head north without escort and get jumped by jets, it could get pretty hairy fast."

"But we have gunners. Top and ball turrets."

"Yeah, and I've got my lucky scarf tied right here to this armrest too. We may need 'em all."

Craft considered that for a few minutes, then decided to go aft to the navigator's station. Lieutenant Koch was down in the bombardier's pit, now rigged up to serve as a photo-navigator's station, plotting a new course on his chart board. Craft bent down by the ladder to the aft compartment tunnel and took a peek out the side window.

The land was forbidding, crumpled, white with snow and ice, and no evident sign of life at all. Might as well be the moon, he thought. Craft swallowed hard. He knew from LaSalle's morning briefing that Lucky Lucy had a bank of six cameras installed behind and below the aft crew compartment.

Just then, LaSalle's voice crackled through his headset.

"First camera run starts in one minute. Navigator, mark your bearings. Camera crew, prepare to shoot on the navigator's mark. Lieutenant Koch, you have the plane."

A separate set of aircraft controls had been rigged up on the side of the Norden bombsight. Immediately, Koch put his fingers on the dials and began making minor adjustments to Lucky Lucy's course. Outside the window, the winding slash of the Imjin River cut a serpentine path through rugged hill country. Lazy puffs of smoke peppered the sky and the aircraft skin and windows rattled with concussive whumps.

"Flak," LaSalle reported to the crew. Even as he spoke, one of the F-80s peeled off and began a steep dive in a tight spiral toward an unseen anti-aircraft artillery position across the river. The pilot salvoed a volley of 3.75-inch rockets, which impacted the ground at a wide bend in the river. Spouts of flame mushroomed into the sky.

"I have the aircraft," Kock reported. "Ten seconds to camera on...on my mark...ten...nine...."

Craft flinched as another triple-A round burst in a cauliflower-shaped explosion right outside the window. Shrapnel tinkled and clinked against the aircraft skin but the window held.

"They're bracketing us...." LaSalle said. He rested his hands lightly on the control column, ready to take back control the moment the camera run was finished.

"...five...four...three...."

"Jesus, that was close!" Chandler cried, as another round off the starboard wing threw shell fragments into the bird cage, cracking a pane.

"...two...one...mark! Commence the run! Cameras on! We'll hold this heading for fifteen seconds!"

And pray like sinners to God Almighty, LaSalle thought. He counted off the seconds under his breath. It seemed like forever.

"End the run! End the run! Cameras off...we're past the grid. General, I'm relinquishing the aircraft...."

"I've got it!" LaSalle reported. "Red Fox Leader, on my mark, execute right turn to heading one one five degrees. Three...two...one...mark!"

LaSalle rotated the control yoke right and Lucky Lucy shuddered through more flak as she banked hard over. At the same time, LaSalle nudged the throttles forward, pushing the huge Wright Cyclone engines harder to get the hell out of the hot zone. "I'm going up to three five oh knots, Red Fox Leader. Let's put some distance between us and those Red bastards."

"Roger that. Three five oh knots," came back Red Fox Leader. The F-80s formed up again into escort formation, chevroned back on either side of Lucky Lucy.

LaSalle allowed himself a deep breath. He felt Craft climbing back into the jump seat. "A little hotter reception that I planned for. Nothing like getting shot at to clear the old cobwebs out. Eighth Army just abandoned this sector last week. Looks like the gooks have moved up in force."

"I'll say." Craft dabbed at some sweat with a handkerchief. "G-2's going to have some explaining to do. Looks like the Reds are moving more than a few scattered regiments in here."

LaSalle checked the chart strapped to his kneepad. "We pick up the Chong'chon River in about twelve minutes, then it's a straight shot into the Chosin Reservoir. One hell of a battle going on down there, from what I'm hearing. First Marine's almost surrounded."

"Clayton, we've got to cut these gook bastards off at the Yalu. Our guys are getting chewed to pieces, all the way across the northern half of the peninsula."

"Amen to that," LaSalle replied. He made a slight course adjustment for wind, reporting it and confirming the move with Red Fox Leader. "Give me a few atom bombs and I'll plug up Manchuria like a potato in a drain pipe."

"I just wish old Give 'em Hell Harry and his lackeys could see what we're seeing. Maybe that would get Washington off its ass."

"Yeah but don't count on it. Politicians aren't like you and me, pal. They're another species altogether. Insect family, I'd say."

The next camera run, over the Reservoir, went smoothly enough. No flak was encountered, though the cloud cover was thickening rapidly as another Siberian cold front came rolling into east Asia. Craft could see the vast bank of clouds advancing from the northwest, like an ocean wave frozen in white. He just hoped they'd have decent photo conditions when they turned north again.

Once more, Lieutenant Koch took control of the aircraft for the run. LaSalle elected to make several passes, each leg offset further to the south of the Reservoir by ten miles, to get a good overlapping snapshot of the tactical picture facing the First Marines. From their altitude of twenty-two thousand feet, Craft could see no visible evidence of the ferocious combat he knew was taking place below them. Just the same, he peered solemnly for many minutes out the navigator's side window, silent and respectful of the life and death struggle he felt but couldn't see.

"Red Fox Leader, that's a wrap. We're about out of film, looks like. I'm going to a new heading of one three five degrees in two minutes. You guys want to take the rest of the day off?"

"Sure thing, Honeybee. We're due back at K-14 in two hours anyway. Gotta gas up and re-arm for some turkey hunting below Pyongyang."

"I hear the gooks have several armies pushing down the west coast pretty far."

"It's true," said Red Fox Leader. "Pyongyang just fell again. Word's out we may even pull out of Kimpo next week."

"Hell of a thing," LaSalle sympathized. The South Korean capital of Seoul had already been abandoned and re-taken once before in the last five months. "Get some gook ass for us, will ya? And thanks for the escort. We'll be heading home in about five."

"Roger that, Honeybee. No sweat. Red Fox Leader to flight. Form up on me. On my mark, come right to new heading one niner five."

Craft watched as the F-80s maneuvered away from Lucky Lucy and smartly formed up in squadron order. One by one, they slipped into place. Then, at Red Fox Leader's mark, the V-formation banked right as one and scooted off to the southwest through tufts of wispy cirrus clouds. They were gone from view in seconds.

"I'll give 'em another five minutes," LaSalle decided. "Then we call in our intentions to sector control and quietly depart the neighborhood. After that, strict radio silence all the way home."

Lucky Lucy came about in a sweeping left bank and LaSalle increased altitude to angels twenty-eight. A stiff headwind slowed them down to just under three hundred knots. Below, the clouds were thickening but LaSalle had private assurances from a met forecaster at Yokota that there would be spotty breaks in the clouds for the next several days.

Hope you're right, buddy, he told himself quietly, popping a stick of gum into his mouth. I'd sure hate to fly into the dragon's mouth and not get a look at those pretty white teeth.

Soon enough, the Yalu River itself slid into view below them, a stark white line of ice, slashing through rocky humps of mountains. A light fog had enveloped the ground and the river marking the border with Red China dimmed in and out of view, a serpent coiled and ready to strike.

The casual chitchat of the cockpit crew soon fell off, replaced by a tense silence, as the river slid behind them. Ahead, white and dark brown, sere and desolate, was Manchuria.

"Indian country," LaSalle muttered. He tightened his grip on the control yoke.

The first photo target in the plan, denoted M-1 on LaSalle's chart, was the troop and supply depot at Shenyang, a hundred and forty nautical miles to the northwest. Directly below them, thin streamers of smoke issued skyward from a rude collection of huts and flat buildings nestled in a steep ravine beyond the river bluffs. Strong, gusty headwinds sheared off each smoke column as it rose, twisting them into fantastic pretzel shapes.

"Must be Ji'an," Chandler mused out loud. "Only town on the border in this sector."

"Yeah, a real resort from the looks of it," LaSalle answered.

"No telling what kind of air defense radars these clowns have around here, is there?"

LaSalle shook his head. "I checked the boards at G-2 before I left, just to see. We have virtually no intel on Chinese air defenses at all, especially Manchuria and the northeast. There are some signals the Navy's picked up that resemble a primitive Top Can radar emitter but nothing else. Russians used to use those around Berlin, so it's a reasonable bet the Chinese have 'em too."

"Great. That'll give Marks something to do." Tech Sergeant Roy Marks was Lucky Lucy's radioman. His station was opposite the navigator's position, by the tunnel.

"I told him to use the ARC-5's for a little radio direction finding. If we get painted, I'd like to know when and from where. We'll need a log of Red defenses when we come back here with an atom bomb."

Lucky Lucy was cruising smoothly at angels twenty-eight through light cirrus clouds over a thicker but broken shield of denser clouds ten thousand feet below. Through breaks in the scud, the Manchurian countryside slipped by, featureless and blanketed with heavy snowfall. LaSalle's terrain map indicated the southern mountains at the border gradually gave way to a rolling plateau of rice paddies, small farms, and birch forests but little of that was visible to the crew. At Chandler's urging, LaSalle finally agreed to unstrap and leave the cockpit for a stretch and a pee.

"What do we know about this place Shenyang?" Craft asked. He sipped at his own thermos of coffee and tried out a bologna sandwich cooked up by the flight kitchen at Yokota.

Chandler shrugged, flexing his cramped neck and shoulder muscles, then scooted his legs over so the navigator Koch could slip by and lower himself back into the bombardier's pit below the front cockpit deck.

"Just checking instrument synch between my panels, fellas. Excuse me a sec."

Chandler had some scribbled notes jammed in his flight jacket. "Not so much, General. Shenyang used to be called Mukden, up until two years ago. Largest city in Manchuria. Birthplace of the Manchu dynasty, if you're into chink history. Japanese built up a lot of industry when they occupied Manchuria. That and the railroad network. Got me an old Jap map of the town right here. There's a river, called the Hun. Koch told me he might use that as a reference on the run in, if we can see it."

Craft studied the old map. The symbols were definitely Japanese kanji allright. "Willoughby at G-2 says there's good evidence the place is a major troop embarkation center, because of the trains. Supplies and weapons too."

"Sounds reasonable to me."

"If he's right, that makes the place a prime target. Vaporize Shenyang and you put one hell of a dent in the Reds' ability to sustain their forces."

"I just wish Washington would let us hit those bridges over the Yalu," Chandler said. "That would slow 'em down."

"Until the river ices over. Which it looks like it already has." Craft noticed something else on the map. There were several X's pencilled in, with one circled in red. "What are these markings?"

"Those are Kochie's. Reference points. Ted, what's the one in red?"

Koch was still buried in calibrating instruments down in the bombardier's pit. His reply was muffled.

"That's new, Captain Chandler. A monument I heard about from some bomber crews that were POW'ed there at the end of the war. Big tall obelisk, like the Washington Monument, with a replica of a Soviet tank on top. I want to look for it on the inbound leg. If I can see it, given the central location, it'd make a hell of a ground zero point."

Chandler shook his head. "One thing you need to know about Kochie, sir, see, is that he's real big into geography and history and stuff. I bet he even knows the population of the place."

"Four million, one hundred thousand," came the muffled reply.

Chandler smirked. "See what I mean?"

At that moment, LaSalle returned to the cockpit and re-seated himself. "We got about ten minutes to first waypoint. How's the weather?"

Chandler and Craft both peered out. "A few breaks, General. Looks like the lower clouds are thinning out a bit. I'm seeing a few houses here and there, or whatever they are. Looks like farm country."

LaSalle looked for himself. "Iowa it ain't, but what the hell. You know, Ken, I took my very first flight as a nine-year old in a stunt plane at an aerial circus outside Chicago. Give me a few whiskeys and I could believe I was right back there now, soaring over the prairies of west Illinois."

Chandler flexed his hand muscles, releasing control of the aircraft to LaSalle. His hands were stiff with tension. "Eerie, isn't it? I'd have thought we'd have seen some flak by now. Maybe they don't know we're up here."

"Maybe." LaSalle didn't want to admit it but the silence bothered him too. It was a cinch they were on somebody's radar screen. The only question was whose and what would they do about it? An uneasy gnawing in his stomach wouldn't go away. He popped some more gum in his mouth and started chewing hard and fast.

"Lieutenant Koch, are you about done down there? We need to get squared away pretty quick. I make the first waypoint to be about five minutes ahead."

"All copacetic, sir. I'm synched in, just watching the ground for references I've marked."

"Very well." LaSalle got on the intercom and alerted the rest of the crew. He settled into his seat, ignoring the stiffness in his back. "Gunners, lets all do a gun check. Clear your weapons. Top turret first, working aft."

One by one, the gunners fired off a few rounds, to work the action of their weapons and check traverse.

"Top gun's okay, sir!"

"Waist gun checks out!"

"Tail gun smooth and easy, sir! I'm green and mean!"

"Very well. Pilot out." LaSalle nudged the yoke to drop them down a few thousand feet. "Vinnie? How's the mixture?"

Tech Sergeant Vincent Pride sat behind Chandler at the flight engineer's station, facing aft. "Just tweaked it, sir. All four running hot and on the curve."

"Navigator to Pilot," Koch called up. "I've got the river in sight. Broken clouds, looks like snow down there but it's got to be the Hun."

"Give me a hack, navigator. And a bearing."

Ahead and below them, Ted Koch lay on his belly, gently dialing in the sight magnification as far as the knob would go. "Ten seconds, sir. On my mark, come right to zero ten zero degrees."

"Got it...."

"Five...four...three...two...one...mark!"

LaSalle rotated the half-wheel yoke to bring Lucky Lucy to her new heading. At the same instant, Vinnie Pride nudged his throttles half an inch, cranking in a few hundred more rpms on the Wright Cyclones, to keep their speed up.

"Railroad line!" Chandler barked out. "Starboard side, going north, looks like. Make that two--no, three, sets of tracks."

"Very well. Camera bay, you men ready to shoot? We've got a few breaks in the clouds but not many."

The intercom crackled. "Warmed up and trigger happy, sir. Just give us the word."

"Very well. Lieutenant Koch, give me the word. She's all yours when you want her."

"Understood, sir...damnation! I don't believe it!. Excuse me, sir. It's the monument...I've got the monument!"

LaSalle lifted his hands clear of the yoke. "She's all yours, Ted, you have the aircraft."

"I have the aircraft, sir. Cameras ready, on my mark. Five...four..."

"Jesus, look at the size of that railyard--" Chandler blurted out.

Craft unbuckled to take a look himself. "Trucks, too, Captain. Must be a million of them."

"Fuckin' Grand Central Station--"

"...two...one...mark! Cameras on!"

A few seconds' pause, then from the camera bay: "Tracking, sir. We're spooling...we're spooling... tape looks good on all instruments."

Twenty-five thousand feet directly below Lucky Lucy, the Fiftieth Field Army of the Thirteenth Army Group of the Chinese Peoples Volunteers, General Zeng Zesheng commanding, had assembled en masse on the track platforms of the Anshan Central State Railway Terminal, to hear the amplified voices of Zeng and his political officers read stern messages of revolutionary exhortation delivered that very morning from the unwavering hand of the Great Helmsman himself.

"Comrade fighters and liberators of the land of the dragon's teeth!" boomed the loudspeakers all across the hundreds of acres of platforms. "Today, the Incomparable Teacher of the Masses sends you off to fight the capitalist toadies and running dogs infesting our borders!" Heavy snow and lowering clouds made the voices echo into incoherence.

Thousands of soldiers bundled in mustard-yellow quilted jackets strained forward to hear more. A fierce wind howled, heralding the area's worst winter storm in a hundred years.

"The enemy threatens our glorious Revolution! He kills and burns and rapes--"

But the words of Zeng could no longer be heard. Anti-aircraft batteries at the perimeter of the railyard had just opened up. The cascading reverberation of the 75-mm guns rolled like distant thunder across the tracks. Excitement erupted in the ranks, cheers and shouts took over and on his speaker's stand by the old cement block stationhouse--still pocked with shell holes from Japanese artillery--General Zeng stopped in mid-sentence, stunned that such undisciplined firing of valuable anti-aircraft shells should dare interrupt the wisdom of the Perfect Communicator.

He immediately issued sharp orders to find out what the hell was going on.

Lucky Lucy rocked back and forth as flak rounds popped and burst in the sky around her.

"Shit, that was close!" Chandler said. "They got the range on us awful quick."

"They must have us on radar," LaSalle said. "Radioman, you got any signals on the ARC-5?"

"Affirmative, sir," Marks came back. "Jesus Christ, I got signals all over the place...half a dozen bands, interference everywhere--"

At that same moment, a staccato double crack followed by an ear-splitting BOOM! rattled the bird cage and hard shrapnel cracked half a dozen window panes.

Chandler was hit, crying out in pain, as debris from the flak burst pelted the cockpit. LaSalle fought the aircraft while Craft tended to the co-pilot.

Craft broke out a first aid kit and helped Chandler out of his seat. He eased the co-pilot to the deck beside the brake handles and turned him on his side. Chandler had bloody lacerations on his face and neck and, as he helped the man struggle out of his flight jacket, Craft found chest wounds as well. He applied compresses to stanch the blood flow.

LaSalle called back to the camera bay. "Photo-techs, five seconds. I'm breaking off the run in five seconds. Wrap up your gear and secure the film. We're in a fucking hornet's nest and I've got to get Lucy the hell out of here."

After counting off five seconds, LaSalle notched up the engine rpms and made a hard right turn to heading zero eight five degrees. Midway through the bank, the control yoke shuddered and momentarily seized.

LaSalle swore and struggled with the controls, as Lucky Lucy skidded through the turn. He spied the turn and slip bubble on his instrument panel yo-yoing back and forth as the aircraft struggled to avoid a stall.

"I've got control problems!" LaSalle announced. "She's tight...hard to bank...." Hydraulic pressure was low on the primary circuit gauge and dropping.

"Losing hydraulic," flight engineer Vinnie Pride confirmed. "Down to less than a hundred pounds."

"Must've taken a hit on a wing somewhere." LaSalle turned in his seat to check the portside wing. Pride did the same for the other side.

"I see it, General," he said. "Starboard wing. Steady stream."

Shit. LaSalle battled the controls to bring Lucky Lucy back to a wings-level position. He did a quick instrument check: course heading...zero six five; airspeed good at three hundred knots; altitude holding for the moment at angels twenty four.

"At least we're still in the air."

Tom Koch climbed up out of the bombardier pit. He too had been cut in the face with flying glass. He let Craft swab an antiseptic stick on his cuts, then climbed into Chandler's seat.

"At least we seem to be out of the flak," Koch said. "That was pretty hairy." He held a rag to his forehead.

LaSalle was just thankful for the cloud cover, the same cloud cover they had cursed for three hours. "Yeah, a face full of 75-mm for breakfast. Great way to start the day. Paul, what's the verdict back there?"

Craft had managed to get the worst of Chandler's lacerations treated. The chest wounds were more worrisome. "He's got shrapnel in the chest, I think. I've got the bleeding slowed down. But I can't seem to stop it." Chandler managed a weak reply.

"I'll live, Skipper. I'll be okay. What's our status?" He struggled, against Craft's warning, to a sitting position on the flight deck.

"Flyable but control's another matter. Roy--?"

Marks shook his head. "No dice, sir. Hydraulic primary just about shot. Down to essentially zilch. You've got pressure holding in the secondary circuit. But that just gives you minimal control."

"A hundred psi system," LaSalle explained to Craft. "Secondary gives me trim control, limited pitch and bank, enough to control her in a landing if the winds aren't too high."

Chandler grimaced as he talked. His breathing was shallow, his voice hoarse. "No combat maneuvers, General, not on secondary."

"I'd probably pop a gasket if I tried," LaSalle admitted.

Craft crouched forward, peering out past Koch's leg through the lower windows of the bird cage. Cold air whistled in through a dozen cracks. Below them, solid cloud cover. Gusty winds rattled the windows, rocking the aircraft, forcing LaSalle to compensate.

"Our next photo target was--?"

"Harbin." LaSalle indicated the central Manchurian city on his kneepad chart. "Four hundred miles northeast of our current position. At this speed, about an hour and a half."

"And you've got limited control of the aircraft?"

"That's being generous. If we get into any more serious triple-A or get jumped by fighters, we're in a world of hurt."

Craft hated to abandon the mission at this point. Gallant Flag needed good pictures, good intel on air defenses, terrain features, winds, and weather. "I hope to hell we got good pictures of Shenyang."

"Me too. Photo-techs seem to think we did. And now that we've flown into and out of the area, we've got experience with approach headings, wind, weather conditions, some idea of their air defenses."

"Yeah," Chandler observed ruefully. "And they painted us with radar that's pretty accurate. Maybe they've made some improvements to the old Soviet Top Can system. Probably tracked us all the way in from the border. Those first flak rounds were right on the money. That was no luck."

"We've got to abort," LaSalle decided. "We won't do anyone any good if we get shot down. Tom, plot me a speed course for the coast. Best cruise. And steer us well away from Soviet territory. No sense tweaking their noses too. I think we've tickled the dragon enough for one day. I--"

LaSalle was interrupted when the intercom crackled to life. It was Perkins, the tail gunner, frantic, stumbling over his words.

"Tail gun--tail gunner to pilot...we got bandits! I mean...Jesus fucking Christ!...they're everywhere...dozens of 'em--" Perkins' excitement was cut off by the sounds of machine gun fire. The tail turret's twin .50 caliber weapons spit fire, stitching a line of tracers across the cloud front.

LaSalle heard them at the very same moment...an angry thunder pealing off the top of the sky, like nothing he had ever heard before. Out the left window, a silvery object flashed by at incredible speed, rocketing past, twisting and turning like a child's toy--

"Jets!" Chandler yelled. "MiGs!"

In seconds, Lucky Lucy found herself engulfed in a furious furball, as no less than twelve MiG-15 jet fighters of the Peoples Liberation Army Air Force 30th Air Regiment materialized out of the clouds and jumped her. One by one, the pig-snouted jets dove on the RB-29 for a screaming guns pass, their twin 23-mm cannon ripping the sky with green tracer fire.

LaSalle stared in horror, unable to react, as three of the jets broke off and wheeled about for another pass. The speed difference was unbelievable. He found himself calculating, estimating the Red jets streaking by at easily two to three hundred miles an hour faster. In the last seconds before each pass, he could easily make out the single red star and stripe insignia on the wings.

"Red Chinese!" he yelled out. He shook himself out of the deep freeze of fear and pushed the control yoke forward, pitching Lucky Lucy down steeply. "I'm heading for the cloud deck!"

Tom Koch, the navigator, was trapped in the co-pilot's seat. Wide-eyed at the spectacle in front of him, he quickly strapped himself in.

Behind them, Lucy's tail and top gunners let fly a volley of .50 caliber fire as one after another, the MiGs screamed past.

The RB-29 plunged down into the clouds at nineteen thousand feet. LaSalle checked his compass. "We gotta juke, boys. We gotta boogie out of here right now!" He wrestled with the yoke, Koch helping out, to swing the aircraft on around to a heading of zero eight five. "Pitch control's getting heavy...give me a hand here...."

Koch and LaSalle pulled with all their might to get her leveled out at angels nineteen. The entire aircraft shuddered and rocked like a boat, then she began a slow roll to port, while the cockpit crew fought with the controls.

"We're hit! We're hit!" came Marks, the radioman. He'd seen the round shred half the port wing's top panels. "I see flames at number three! Inboard fuel leak...!"

"Three spooling down!" LaSalle pulled the throttle back and Vinnie Pride shut off the fuel valves.

"We're losing fuel rapidly, General," Pride announced. "Center tank must have been holed!"

"Holed bad!" Koch discovered. "Fuel's everywhere! We got fire! Fire at number one...fire at number one!"

"Rudder's gone!" LaSalle yelled. "I'm having trouble holding her out of the spin. Shutting off number one...Vinnie get that fuel leak stopped! We got to run with our two starboard engines. Paul, get up here...I need help holding her out of the bank!"

Lucky Lucy rocked back and forth, then slowly, gradually righted herself as LaSalle, Craft and Koch worked trim controls and engine rpms to keep her more or less level. The dive had bottomed out at seventeen thousand feet, just below the cloud deck.

For the moment, they had lost the MiGs.

"Engineer," LaSalle called out. "What's our fuel situation?"

Vinnie Pride studied the gauges. "Down to less than five hundred pounds in the center tank. I can't stop it. Auxiliaries and trim tanks are nominal, several thousand pounds. But I can't pump to the center tank with that leak."

"We need to get the hell out of here. Navigator, you have a speed course to the coast for me?"

"Affirmative, sir," said Ted Koch. He was still strapped into Chandler's co-pilot seat. "Right turn to one oh five degrees. Best cruise altitude is fifteen thousand; with the prevailing winds out of the west, that gives us a few extra knots airspeed."

"Negative," LaSalle replied. He peered out of every window of the bird cage. Lucky Lucy was thick in the middle of the soup, enveloped in dense cloud, slammed with wind gusts that whistled through the broken windows. LaSalle's breath steamed puffs of fog in the cold air. "We need to stay in the clouds for awhile. They can track us on radar but they can't shoot if they can't see us."

Chandler hauled himself off the deck plating and motioned Koch out of the seat. Koch went back to the navigator's station, to work out a course home.

"Can we keep her in the air, skipper?" Chandler asked, buckling in.

LaSalle held a twenty-five degree right bank to steady Lucky Lucy's wings. "Barely. I'm standing on the rudder pedals as it is, but they're sluggish."

"Linkage must be shot," Chandler said. He grimaced as he took control of the yoke, momentarily relieving LaSalle.

"You sure you can handle that, Ken?"

Chandler grunted. "Bleeding's stopped. I can manage."

LaSalle tried to flex the tension out of his hands, neck and shoulders.

"Paul, I don't know if we can make it back. To Yokota, I mean."

"What are you saying?"

"Just that we have several options. Number one priority is getting the hell out of Chinese airspace. At least making it to the Sea of Japan. Navigator--?"

Koch's voice was thin. ""We've got fuel to make the ocean, sir. Just barely. Factoring in the leak rate from the center tank, and running engines two and four for best cruise, I figure we can about push her out to latitude 38 degrees north, longitude 134 degrees west, give or take a few miles. And that's optimistic."

"Which puts us where?"

"Smack in the middle of the Sea of Japan. Two hundred miles southeast of Hungnam."

"Great." LaSalle drummed his fingers on the control yoke. Lucky Lucy shuddered and rattled as another gust nearly upset her precarious stability. "Gentlemen, as I said, two options. We can stay up here in the clouds all the way to the coast, if they stretch that far, and be reasonably safe from another attack by those MiGs. But we may not make the coast because our fuel consumption's high and we're leaking like a sieve. Or we can head for the deck and try to make a break for it at a few hundred feet altitude. That would put us below their radar. That way they couldn't track us."

"But we'd be vulnerable to triple-A, right?" Craft asked.

"Extremely. Hell, some rice farmer could take pot shots at us, if he wanted to."

"And fuel would never hold out," Vinnie Pride chipped in. "We'd be bone dry and gliding long before we saw the ocean."

Craft shivered in the freezing wind whistling through the bird cage. "Hell of a choice."

"You pays your money and you takes your chances."

Chandler was weakening so LaSalle took back the yoke again. "If we have to ditch in the ocean in this weather, it won't be any trip to Tahiti. Survival time in this water's about five minutes. Unless Lucy can float."

Pride swiveled around in his flight engineer's seat, rubbing his hands together to keep warm. "Guess I'd rather ditch and take my chances, sir. Beats rotting in a Commie POW camp."

LaSalle agreed. "That's our best bet. Closest friendly field is probably K-14 at Kimpo and they can't handle '29s. So a dry landing looks to be out of the cards today. If we can make the coast, I'll get Marks to start hailing Air-Sea Rescue. Maybe we'll get lucky, find us a helicopter scow nearby. Co-pilot, you up to this?"

Chandler was in obvious pain. "I think so, sir. It's just my shoulder's real sore."

"Paul, keep an eye on him. I may need a stronger set of hands up here in a few minutes. Radioman--?"

Marks' voice sounded in the headset. "Here, sir."

"Crank up your BC-348. Soon as we clear the coast, start putting out maydays. I don't want to give our position away until then. I'm guessing the gooks'll try to jump us again if they can find us. No sense helping 'em out."

"Understood, sir."

"Engineer, how long can I count on number two and four?"

Pride read the gauges, did a few quick calculations on his circular slide computer. "Center main tank's almost dry. Wing mains, auxiliaries and trim tanks okay and I'm cross-feeding now. I've got the engine mixture dialed back as lean as I can. Anymore and she'll start pinging like a school bell, probably seize up. Best guess on range...maybe six hundred miles, if this tail wind holds up."

"It'll have to do," LaSalle decided. He toggled the intercom switch. "Pilot to crew...listen up. We're shot up bad and losing fuel fast but we're flyable. The mission's officially aborted. I'm flying a speed course to the ocean, trying to shake our pursuit. We'll have to play hide and seek with them in the clouds. If we're lucky and we make it without getting our ass shot off, we'll have to ditch in the Sea of Japan. Sergeant Marks is ready to mayday our position to Air-Sea Rescue soon as we clear the coast. With luck, we'll be able to ditch her in sight of a carrier or something. Get your gear squared away now. Pilot, out."

LaSalle had turn the yoke back over to Chandler. The force needed to hold a twenty-five degree bank against Lucy's feathered portside engines was straining his shoulders. He massaged his wrists and hands.

One thing was for sure, he realized. They'd all die of exposure in minutes if Marks couldn't find an air-sea rescue unit within six hundred miles. Their best bet was to turn south after clearing the coast and head for the waters off Hungnam. Even as he weighed the options, the Navy's Task Force 77 was standing to off the Korean port, ready to evacuate the survivors of the First Marines, if they could fight their way out of entrapment at Chosin. The only problem would be explaining their mission. Honeybee was on the books as a strictly routine recon flight up North. He'd have to think up something fast to explain how they'd wound up in Chinese airspace.

The RB-29 flew east for two and a half hours, encountering no further flak or MiG opposition. The bank of clouds cloaking Manchuria stayed solid and unbroken the whole time. LaSalle even managed to drop them down to twelve thousand feet, flitting in and out of the clouds, to get a little more oxygen into the cockpit. He worried about silhouetting Lucky Lucy against the lower cloud deck but ground visibility was spotty, mostly snowy mountains and the occasional winding frozen river. Tiny hamlets and towns popped in and out of view, their presence marked only by smoke columns from thousands of chimneys. The smoke rose on thin strings into the clouds and LaSalle could, if he closed his eyes, imagine the columns as party streamers dangling like gray ribbons from the undersides of the clouds.

It was the longest six-hundred mile, two-hour stretch he'd ever known.

"Coastline, General," navigator Koch called up. "Dead ahead."

LaSalle shook himself out of a fatigued daydream and stared through the frosty side windows of the bird cage. "Where are we?"

"I make us at twenty miles north of Chong'jin, on the North Korean coast."

"Very well. Radioman, we've got about one hour's flying time left. Start your maydays."

"Yes, sir," Marks replied. He depressed the transmit key on the BC-348 long-range unit and began transmitting in the clear. "Any station, any station...this is Honeybee. Mayday, mayday, mayday...any station, any station--"

Lucky Lucy began broadcasting her presence far and wide.

Five minutes later, Marks had a hit. He heard the unit burp a few words, then fiddled with the dials, slowly bringing the carrier wave in. He pumped his fist in the air and came back to the cockpit on the intercom.

"Contact, sir! I got a contact! It's the Essex, sir. Combat operations. They're requesting our position and verification."

LaSalle looked over at Craft. "Not much choice, old boy. We're going in the drink regardless."

"Agreed." Craft knew they'd have to do some fast talking, if they got fished out of the ocean in time. "We were jumped by MiGs, chased across the border, and the wing damage made the aircraft hard to control."

LaSalle smiled a thin smile. "That's our story and we're sticking to it?"

"Like glue."

"Hope we don't have to answer to Harry Truman. I'll talk to the Essex."

LaSalle let Marks patch the Essex dispatcher through and relayed an abbreviated version of the agreed-upon story. The dispatcher evidenced no interest in anything but getting them down safely.

"On my mark, turn right to heading one seven seven degrees. Three...two...one...mark! Reduce altitude to five thousand. I'll vector Rescue One from Hungnam to a point sixty miles off shore. Here's the coordinates...."

LaSalle followed the Essex dispatcher's instructions. Lucky Lucy banked right, shuddering through the turn, and headed down the North Korean coastline. A pair of helicopter scows attached to Task Force 77 hovered just beyond the horizon from Hungnam, each embarking several Sikorsky H03S-1 helos. Even as Lucky Lucy completed her turn, two of HU-1's choppers spooled up and lifted off toward the rendezvous point.

By the time they reached the coordinates the Essex dispatcher had given them, Lucky Lucy's number four engine was sputtering. Pride feathered the engine and LaSalle eased the aircraft down to just five hundred feet altitude. Below them, the sea was choppy and turbulent, whitecaps foaming under a stiff twenty-knot breeze.

"Won't be long now," LaSalle muttered. The remaining Wright Cyclone engine strained under the load; Pride had revved up rpms almost to the red line limit to get maximum power for airspeed. Still, the RB-29 was steadily losing lift.

"How long to the rendezvous point?"

Koch did a quick calculation. "Six minutes, skipper."

"We may have to glide the rest of the way." LaSalle switched to cabin intercom. "Pilot to crew...listen up. We're at five hundred feet. We're gonna be ditching the aircraft in about five minutes, maybe sooner. Button everything up and secure yourselves for a crash landing. Emergency landing procedures. Once we're down and stopped moving, get the hell out anyway you can. Use the life rafts and jackets. And grab every rescue kit you can find. We'll need 'em. Pilot, out."

Ray Marks called up from the radioman's station. "I have Rescue One, skipper. On three...I'm patching them through."

LaSalle changed frequencies. "Rescue One, Honeybee. I'm down to five hundred feet...heading two one niner. I can't stay in the air much longer. Low on fuel, one good engine, and rudder and wing damage...."

Rescue One was the lead Sikorsky. The voice was dry and gravelly. "Roger that, Honeybee. We have you in sight. Recommend you make a downwind pass to the ocean surface. We're at sea state four today and it'll be less choppy when you hit. Are you secured for ditching?"

"Affirmative. All crewmembers advised and ready."

"How many aboard, Honeybee?"

"Twelve in total, Rescue One. I'm going to try and change our heading now...give me a vector for a downwind approach."

"Roger. Turn right to one five five degrees. We'll orbit behind you. Good luck, Honeybee."

"Thanks." We'll need every bit of it. LaSalle and Chandler manhandled the control yoke and rudder pedals to begin a slow left turn. Lucy was sluggish at low speed; they were barely above stall at one eighty knots. Her port wing finally dipped and the nose eased around to the proper heading.

"Looks like this is it, Ken."

"Now or never, skipper."

"Vinnie...feather number two."

The engineer shut off fuel flow to the remaining engine, their inboard starboard engine. It sputtered and died into silence, smoking badly under the prolonged load. Suddenly, the bird cage was filled with the full sound of wind roaring in through the cracks and missing panes.

Lucky Lucy had become a forty-ton glider. LaSalle eased the control yoke forward and she sank easily toward the rolling waves.

The first impact nearly jarred every filling from LaSalle's teeth. Lucky Lucy hit belly first and briefly caromed upward in an explosion of spray and foam. She glided four hundred feet on the last breath of lift her one hundred and forty one foot wings could generate. Then, she plunged nose first into a crashing wall of water, plowing a deep trough through wave after pounding wave, dissipating forward speed. The second impact stove in part of the bird cage, nearly cutting off LaSalle's knees. The RB-29 bounced and careened several more times across the wavetops. The force of metal impacting water at one hundred eighty knots sheared off both each wings and Lucy's fuselage became an uncontrolled cylinder, slewing and rocking as her forward momentum was steadily cancelled by the crumpling of her inner bulkheads.

After what seemed like an eternity, the cabin and what was left of the aircraft fuselage rolled on its side and began to sink.

The cockpit crew unbuckled and scrambled and sloshed through freezing in-rushing seawater to crank open the flight deck access hatch. The frame had been damaged in landing and it took all the strength of five desperate men to wrench the hatch from its buckled hinges. Stinging cold gray mist and hissing waves greeted them, as one by one, they leaped into the water. Behind them, Lucky Lucy's cockpit was filling rapidly.

Vinnie Pride and Ted Koch were soaked and shivering uncontrollably but they managed to break out the two crew compartment life rafts just after Lucy stopped moving. One at a time, they laboriously hoisted the crewmen floundering in the freezing ocean up and over the sides.

Even as he scrambled to exit the doomed plane, LaSalle heard the welcome whop-whop-whop of Rescue One overhead. The two Sikorskys were closing in fast. LaSalle was relieved to see the aft compartment life raft out and open, bobbing up and down in six foot swells fifty feet behind them. One of the choppers had already lowered a hoist ring to the sea; one of the gunners was slipping it over his head.

Hope they all made it, LaSalle thought. He stepped off the aircraft frame and plunged feet-first into the water, then came up spluttering and shivering as the cold nearly sucked the very life out of him.

Koch and Pride manhandled him into the raft and he squatted there, freezing in the bitterly cold icy spray of a choppy, windswept ocean, as the second chopper circled overhead.

"Whatever happens, boys," LaSalle choked out before the hoist ring came down, "let me do the talking. I'm responsible for what's happened."

Craft was also coughing and spitting out seawater he had swallowed. He gagged and nearly vomited as the raft rode up and down on a passing swell. "We got chased...that's the truth. Chased into Chinese airspace when the MiGs jumped us--"

LaSalle nodded. He didn't have the strength to say anything. Fatigue and seasickness took over and as unknown hands helped him slip the hoist ring over his head, he had only a single final thought before the blessed peace of unconsciousness descended:

There sure would be hell to pay at 31st Strategic Recon if their "story" didn't pass muster.

Sunday, December 2, 1950

Moscow

1:15 a.m.

The Arsenal Building was softly lit with pale yellow and red light, reflecting the day's heavy snowfall, as People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Lavrentii Pavlovich Beria climbed out of the Zhiguli sedan that had just brought him to the Kremlin. Stalin had summoned him from his Gorky Street apartment just before midnight, an urgent summons to the Generalissimo's office-cum-sanctuary on the second floor of the ancient brick crenellated building that had once served as the Czar's armory. He left the stifling warmth of the car and made his way past a line of old cannon captured from Napoleon's army into the ground floor vestibule, where uniformed officers of the Kremlin Guard helped him out of his overcoat and fur shapka. Deliberately, he ignored the elevator, preferring to climb several flights of stairs, so as to have more time to compose his words to Stalin. He clutched a small black leather satchel that contained even more words, in dispatches from America, words that might well infuriate Josef Vissarionovich into a drunken fury.

Beria chewed and worried over the nuances of how best to phrase what could only be regarded as unwelcome, if not altogether unexpected news. Now approaching his seventy-first birthday and filled with suspicion and paranoia, Stalin was increasingly difficult to predict, even for those who knew him well.

The dispatches from BLUEJAY that Beria carried in his satchel were not calculated to bring comfort to the Great Protector of Mother Russia.

Less than two days ago, Beria had received several dispatches marked Extremely Urgent. Decoded in the Lubyanka's second floor crypto section, run by the NKVD's Eighth Chief Directorate for Radio Troops, the dispatches had been sent from the rezidentura at the Washington embassy. New intelligence developed by BLUEJAY pointed toward worrisome developments in American atomic weapons. It now appeared that the Americans had a new fission bomb design, something called an "R-T" bomb. It was to be tested next month in the Pacific, during what the Americans called Operation Greenhouse.

Beria was shown into Stalin's office. The People's Commissar found the Victor of the Great Fatherland War beside a fireplace, staring morosely into its flames, Georgian brandy in one hand, a rolled papirosi cigarette in the other.

Through frosty glass windows beside the fireplace, a fierce snowstorm had begun to rage outside. Stalin moved little, barely acknowledging Beria, and said nothing. Beria stood silently for a moment, until Stalin motioned to the brandy decanter. Beria understood. He poured himself a snifter and sat down in a chair beside the aging dictator.

After a few minutes' silent communion with his old comrade, Josef Vissarionovich Stalin stirred uncomfortably in his seat, absent-mindedly hiding his infirm left arm--the result of a childhood carriage accident--finished off the brandy and slouched deeper in his chair, cigarette ash burning long at the end of the papirosi tube.

Beria gently mentioned the dispatches he had brought and delicately analyzed the import of the news and its impact on the Soviet Union. Stalin grunted and his face, reddened by the fire, grew darker.

"What details do we have on this new design? Any pictures? Any sketches on how it's assembled?"

"None at this time, Comrade Marshal, but BLUEJAY has been given the task of gathering exactly that intelligence. Even now, he's on his way to Los Alamos."

"Los Alamos." Stalin spat into his drained snifter, groped around for the brandy decanter and found it on the carpet. "I've come to hate the very name of that place. Truman tried to play poker-face with me at Potsdam in 1945. As if we didn't know all about their 'gadget', about their Trinity test."

"He's a small man. Just a clerk."

Stalin sniffed. "This 'clerk' now sits in the White House. And who knows how many atom bombs he has." Stalin suddenly sat up, then lifted himself and went to an ornate rosewood desk in the corner. He rummaged in the drawers, finally found a few scraps of paper. Foreign Ministry dispatches, Beria saw. Probably Molotov's ramblings.

Stalin returned to his seat. "We must get the technical details of this new bomb. All of them and quickly. We'll turn them over to Kurchatov, like we did with Klaus Fuchs' material. Igor Vasileyvich is clever...he'll have it duplicated in no time. In fact, I should meet Kurchatov again. We need to talk."

"I'll give the order," Beria promised.

"Kurchatov and his top staff. The whole crew from Arzamas-16, right here in the Kremlin. Next week...let's say Friday evening."

"I'll see they're not a minute late."

The conversation turned to the conflict in Korea. Beria had come prepared. He consulted some notes recently sent from the Vladivostok station. "Shtykov sent me the latest dispatches from the front. Our Chinese comrades are having success in the north. Pyongyang's been liberated. The American Eighth Army has been routed."

That brightened Stalin's mood. "Truman will use the atom bomb in Korea, if necessary. We'd better be prepared."

Beria was skeptical. "That's a big risk. I think he might threaten to use them. But actually use them? What is Korea to the Americans?"

Stalin swirled the brandy in his glass, studied the reflections of the fire's flames. "Truman has already ordered atomic bombs dropped twice before. Have you forgotten Hiroshima and Nagasaki? He'll use the bombs to send a message, just as we would. Now that the Chinese have come in, the military situation's changed. There's not a leader in the world would voluntarily retreat and let himself be humiliated by an army of peasants, when he had the weapon to reverse it. Truman's no fool. I'm telling you, Lavrenti Pavlovich, he's got atom bombs and he'll use them. I'll have to talk with Zhukov. Koniev, too. See what we can do in Europe to discourage Truman from being reckless. Although--" Stalin's face broke into a faint smirk--"if Mao were to suffer a few reverses on the battlefield, that might not be such a bad thing. It might knock his ego down a few notches. And that would be good for us."

Beria reminded the Generalissimo that he was leaving for Vladivostok tomorrow. "I'm meeting with Shtykov and a few generals from the Far Eastern district. They want more weapons. Shtykov has a long shopping list from the Chinese."

"Let's be selective...and deliberate in how we help our Chinese comrades. Let them bleed a little. Them and the Americans. After the Chinese lose a few million peasants, Mao may be a little easier to deal with."

"Something else you should know about, Comrade Marshal. An operation in the works."

"One of your little masterpieces, Lavrenti Pavlovich?"

"Actually, a well-conceived penetration effort. It needs your approval. There's a certain risk involved."

"I suppose you're booby-trapping Truman's glasses or something like that?"

Beria handed over a few sheets from his satchel. "Better than that. Our principal Tokyo agent, WINDWARD, has been given the task of penetrating General MacArthur's headquarters. The Dai Ichi Building. As you can see--" Stalin gruffly scanned the pages, flipping through them impatiently--"the plan calls for WINDWARD to oversee the placement of a very sophisticated listening device inside the War Room at MacArthur's command center."

"And?"

"And this transmitter, if placed properly, should give us a great deal of valuable intelligence on the Americans' strategy. Not only in Korea but throughout the Far East. WINDWARD will be in Vladivostok tomorrow, with Shtykov. I meet them both at noon."

Stalin was intrigued. He rubbed his graying moustache--Beria knew that was a good sign. It meant the Marshal was at least weighing the possibilities. He handed back the papers. "This could help me with Mao. Lavrenti Pavlovich, if I could offer precise military plans and directives, from WINDWARD's transmitter, to Mao, I'd have a lot of influence. Intelligence like that could help secure the revolution in China. And it would get Mao off my back, always asking for more weapons and supplies. That's the tricky part: giving the Chinese enough guns to protect themselves and maybe cause some grief to the Americans. But not enough to make any mischief on our borders."

"WINDWARD has been very productive over the past few years," Beria assured him. "The best we've had since Sorge."

"I like it."

"There is a risk, of course, but if WINDWARD succeeds, the plan offers an intelligence gold mine for us. Even at such a high cost, it's worth pursuing."

"Like reading MacArthur's mind. He's caused us nothing but trouble in Japan. An ego bigger than Mao's. I won't cry if he's cut down to size but we'd better be careful."

"Shall I tell Shtykov and WINDWARD they can proceed?"

"Yes, yes. The operation is approved. Just who is this agent WINDWARD anyway?"

Beria consulted a precis' he had brought along. "His name is Trofimenko, Fyodor Maximovich. Father was a Red Army officer, colonel of artillery. Highly decorated, war veteran. A patriot, so I'm told. A real Octobrist, with blood redder than Lenin."

Stalin snorted. "Lenin was a schoolteacher, nothing more. Real patriots die on the battlefield, not falling down drunk in their study. I want WINDWARD to look specifically for plans, tactical plans, on how MacArthur might use atomic bombs if Truman gives the order. What's up his sleeve? What's he doing to stop the Chinese in Korea? That kind of intelligence can also help me with Mao."

Beria closed up his satchel, pleased Stalin had mellowed some, pleased to have gotten his approval. WINDWARD was a good ticket and the People's Commissar intended to make full use of it. The day was not far off when The Great Protector of Mother Russia would be gone and Beria knew he'd need every weapon he could find to survive in the power struggle that would come.

"Comrade Marshal, what happens if WINDWARD learns the Americans really are planning to use their atomic bombs? What will we do?"

Stalin idly tossed the last drops of his brandy on the fire. The flames flared up for a moment, threatening to consume the curtains.

"We'll get their attention. We'll squeeze them in Europe. Berlin, perhaps. There are a hundred ways to put pressure on Truman."

Monday, December 4, 1950

Pyongyang, North Korea

11:50 a.m.

The old War Ministry building was nothing but a shell-pocked ruin of crumbling brick and cement surrounded by piles of rubble when Marshal Peng Dehuai climbed out of the Russian GAZ truck and began his inspection of the troops. Despite the fierce cold, the sun was out and a remnant honor guard of the In Min Gun, the North Korean Peoples' Army, stood stiffly at attention by the entrance to the building. Their quilted uniforms were torn, dirty, blood-stained but they were proud troops for all that and they held their heads and their Simonov SKS carbines up high. Peng saw that and nodded brusquely as he walked the line, gravely appraising the formation.

What the troops lacked in polish, they made up for in spirit. He could see that in their eyes.

Not bad for a hollow battalion of garlic-eaters.

He reached the end of the inspection line and reached out to shake hands with Kim il-Sung, the stout little premier of the Democratic Peoples Republic. Standing rigidly beside Kim was his chief of staff, General Nam Jong.

Peng had returned to Pyongyang to talk with top officers and commanders about the upcoming campaigns, especially Mao's beloved Third Offensive.

"The Democratic People's republic welcomes you, Comrade Marshal." Kim smiled a toothy politician's smile. "You are a hero to all Koreans today."

Peng and General Nam saluted and also shook hands. "My army is proud to have helped liberate the city," Peng told them.

"A glorious battle," Kim said.

Especially since you didn't lose twenty thousand men, as I did, Peng thought.

"We've re-built our command center inside," Nam said. "It's crude but from there, we can plan the next offensive against the Americans."

"By the spring rice planting," Kim promised, "Korea will be united again. "I've given the people my solemn promise."

Peng bit his lip to keep silent. A Peking whore had more respect for soldiers than this slug. The three of them made their way into the bombed-out War Ministry building. Plywood tables had been set up in a drafty hall; maps had been tacked to them. Nam studied current deployments.

"Comrade Marshal Peng, I've re-built my forces in this sector. I've got three divisions formed up outside Chorwon, more forming near Sariwon. All they need is weapons. Have you heard anything from our Russian friends?"

Peng nodded gravely, his eyes roving the maps, eyeballing UN and Chinese dispositions. The map seemed accurate enough, from what he remembered at the last staff meeting at Andong.

"The General Staff has set December 31 as the invasion date for the Third Offensive. Mao wanted to go earlier. Fortunately, some sanity has prevailed in Peking. How long it will last, I can't say."

"How many divisions will you need?"

Peng thought. "Six, at the minimum. General Nam, you will concentrate your forces along the 38th Parallel, here--" he tapped the map at the Imjin River town of Haeju --" and here. This sector. You will push the enemy back along his western flanks, all the way to the coastal range."

"And liberate Seoul!" Kim announced, clapping with enthusiasm. "A very good plan."

"Seoul will come," Peng reminded him. "In time. In the early stages, though, it's far more important to isolate the enemy forces from any possible reinforcements. We don't want another Inchon behind our backs. It's critical that Chinampo be held and the enemy swept away from any possible amphibious landing sites along the coast."

"I need weapons," Nam reminded him. "And supplies."

"As do we all. I've asked Shtykov and anyone else who will listen for artillery, planes, tanks, ammunition, more food and fuel for trucks. The Russians are stingier than the Rockefellers. But when I left Andong two days ago, there was one Russian air division moving into Harbin. New jet fighters called MiGs. I'm hopeful the logjam has been broken. If we don't get supplies soon, our Third Offensive will bog down in a week."

"And your forces, Marshal Peng? Where do they fit in?"

Peng pulled out a small notebook. "Right now, my Thirteenth and Ninth Army Groups are regrouping." He went on to elaborate the plan of attack; the strategy called for the Chinese to make a full frontal assault along a line from Chorwon south of the Taedong River, to Pyonggang. "But we must consolidate what we have gained first. The men need rest and the supply runners haven't caught up yet."

Kim was visibly impatient. "Tell me, Marshal, how long will it take you to reach Seoul?"

"One month, if we're lucky."

"A month is too long. There's a vacuum down there. You own maps show it. We've got to fill it while there's time."

"Comrade Premier Kim--" this pudgy slug of a politician was becoming exceedingly tiresome--"you don't understand the military situation. If you'll let me--"

Kim exploded. "I understand one thing...Koreans are dying while we debate! Korea must be united! The Americans must be driven out! If I must, I'll go directly to Comrade Mao!"

Peng's face darkened. He wanted to slap the pretentious little snot. His throat tightened and he became very angry. "You should not interfere in things you don't understand. It's enough for now that you have your capital back," he warned. "Thousands of Chinese soldiers have died for it. Be grateful for what we have accomplished."

General Nam diplomatically intervened. "Perhaps, you'd like a tour of our capital, Marshal. I've got a car available. Actually, it's an old Japanese truck."

Kim and Peng muttered agreement and the three of them left the building, boarding Nam's dilapidated half-ton truck for a quick motor tour of the ruins of Pyongyang. Negotiating the rubble and the street barricades proved quite a challenge for the truck; several times, the driver, a beefy sergeant in the In Min Gun, had to coax the transmission into reverse and back them out of cul-de-sacs and barriers made of burning mounds of tires to find new routes around the city.

The motor tour lasted an hour and Nam Jong's driver deposited them back at the War Ministry building. In a freezing, dusty vestibule, Peng made his formal goodbyes, after coordinating signals and cipher codes with Nam, and climbed into the Russian GAZ truck for the two-hour drive up north to the Thirteenth Army Group command post at Sinanju. The ride passed in silence and Peng dozed most of the way. Interludes of sleep were mixed with scenes from Pyongyang--long lines of refugees, blood-soaked soldiers wandering dazed through burning piles of trash and rubble. It was near dusk and snowing heavily when the truck ground to a halt outside a crude but well-defended schoolhouse just outside Sinanju. Peng decamped, straightened himself up by the reflected light of a small fire, then ordered all fires and lights doused so the damned American planes would have no easy targets tonight.

He slipped inside. A staff meeting was hastily convened around a crude map table in the single room of the schoolhouse.

"Show me your plans for the Third Offensive," Peng ordered. Captains and majors bustled about the room unfurling tactical maps and tacking them to the walls. Peng chain-smoked Red Lions restlessly as the room was quickly set up. Two small lanterns shielded with medical gauze were hung on posts about the room, throwing shadowy light on the maps.

"Comrades, I've just come from a meeting with General Nam. In Min Gun has completed their re-grouping. He can give us three divisions. We'll add six of our own and make a frontal assault along this sector of the lines--"he swept his hand across the map on the table--"--a distance of about two hundred kilometers. Shock and mass--these will be our weapons. The enemy is in full retreat. If we hit him hard enough, we can shatter the entire front. The Chairman has given the orders. We attack not later than 31 December. Long live the Peoples Liberation Army."

A captain of the Group staff, Captain Liu, stirred uneasily across the table. "Comrade Marshal, weapons and ammunition are seriously short. Thirteenth Army stocks are depleted, barely adequate to survive in this weather. If the enemy should counterattack--"

Major Gao, another staffer, cut in. "Sir, we need a thousand tons every day. Every soldier needs ten pounds of food alone, every day. The men are starving, without proper winter clothing. Any attack made before stocks are replenished is suicide."

Peng stood in stony silence, arms bracing him as he bent over the map. Wearily, he acknowledged the truth of what they were saying.

"Don't you think I know that? I've got eyes, same as you. I just saw what's left of the 50th division, encamped outside Pyongyang. They were worse off than the civilians." Peng straightened up, and his shoulders seemed to sag under the weight of too many battles, too many campaigns. "The Party wants to advance while the Americans are in disarray. The order has been issued. We'll have to be ready, the best way we can. At least, our Russian friends are beginning to come through. Zhu De has promised more artillery and trucks right away. Convoys are marshaling in Shenyang right now. We'll just have to hold on until they arrive."

Major Gao was slender and nervous, hair cut so close he was effectively bald. His hands toyed with a map, rolling and unrolling it.

"The staff have heard rumors lately, Comrade Marshal."

Peng bristled. "What rumors?"

"There is a rumor that Truman wouldn't rule out using atomic bombs in Korea. A press conference a few days ago, in Washington. How do we fight that, Marshal? What can the Peoples' Volunteers do if the Americans begin using atomic bombs?"

Peng was tired and impatient with speculations. He cut Gao off abruptly with a wave of his hand.

"Major, go outside and see if our supply run has arrived. See to it yourself." Gao paused, then hastily saluted and backed out of the map room.

Peng glared around the table, daring anyone else to speak up.

"Truman is just rattling American sabers," he told them, with more conviction than he felt. "The world would condemn such an attack."

"That is true, Marshal," a single lonely voice pointed out. It was Captain Liu. "But that fact didn't stop Truman from dropping such bombs on the Japanese."

Peng, still red in the face from anger, started to say something but decided against it. Instead, he abruptly walked out of the command post and decided to have another cigarette.

Wednesday, December 13, 1950

Los Alamos

9:45 a.m.

Albert Ranier was certain that Van Winters was easily J-Division's best and most meticulous technician in the production machine shop, especially when it came to shaping the finished plutonium metal parts just shipped from Hanford into bomb cores. Inside the shop building--actually, a woodframe cottage rigged with so much cabling, piping and ductwork you could hardly move inside--Winters was the senior tech and he didn't much fancy having the Czech physicist drooling down his back as he carefully went about the task of machining out thirty-two 45-degree pie-shaped sections of plutonium for the detonation sphere.

"Doc, why don't you go have a smoke or something? A drink...anything. Just give off my back, will ya? Having you around here just isn't safe. You'd make coffee nervous."

Ranier shrugged but Winters was already deep in concentration, focusing all his attention on the silvery-white ingots that had just come in from Hanford in a special shipment. Despite snow and freezing wind outside, sweat had beaded up on his forehead but he couldn't wipe the perspiration off--his hands were inserted into the lead-lined glovebox, manipulating a fist-sized ingot, getting it ready for milling off a few fractions of an inch.

"I'm just concerned, Van, that's all. These plutonium ingots are my babies."

"New design, huh? I heard a little scuttlebutt about that. From what I saw, it looks like the machining specs are the same as before. What's the big difference?"

Ranier patted Van on the shoulder. "Composition is the difference." And you'll just have to believe that. "You form the sections just like any Mark VI detonator. Same jigs, same templates."

Winters nodded, tossing an errant lock of sweaty hair out of his eyes. A downdraft of air from fans overhead helped cool his face, though the fans actually served a completely different purpose: ensuring that a positive air pressure difference surrounded the gloveboxes and their helium-gas atmospheres. No one wanted particles of flammable, toxic and radioactive plutonium floating around the machine shop.

"That I can do," Winters promised. "Practically blindfolded, I imagine."

"Just so you take care, Van. These devices are special to me. And vital to the country."

"I'm sure they are, Dr. Ranier. Just don't pee in your pants, okay? Haven't I always taken care of you?"

"You have, Van. You have. I'm just saying that extra care is needed today. You must be especially precise."

Winters just shook his head. Jesus Christ, the guy just can't take a hint. He tried to ignore the hovering physicist, concentrating instead on the ticklish job ahead.

The detonator sphere would resemble a soccer ball when finally machined and fitted together. Its thirty-two sections were wedge-shaped, machined in a series of steps inside J-Division's production machine shop. All about the four rooms of the bungalow were glovebox stands mounted on benches, each supplied with high-pressure helium gas to reduce the fire hazard. The glove boxes were an assembly line of machining steps, containing lathes, mills, a drill box, a high-precision drill press for fastener holes, cleaning solvents and another drill press. Machining steps that Van and his two fellow techs would follow to shape up the plutonium sections included jig boring, cutting slots and turning threads. All the shop's tools, gauges and fixtures remained inside their glove boxes permanently. They would be removed only for final disposal.

The thirty-two sections of the plutonium sphere would, in the end, be joined under high pressure with their beryllium-polonium initiator core, brazed and compressed for nearly four hours to ensure a proper seal. Then the sphere would be slotted and rigged for attaching the high-explosive lens assemblies. All the sections had to be machined and formed to have precisely equal shapes and masses. Upon actual detonation of the Composition-B lenses, the plutonium wedges would have to compress in on the initiator core within one ten-millionth of a second.

"Van, look out! You're cutting across that ridge!" Ranier wrung his hands in exasperation while Winters swore under his breath and quickly backed the ingot out of the lathe. Turning a thread in plutonium was tricky, even an art, and any slip of the cutter could be disastrous.

"Damn! The sucker just slipped--I don't know what happened. I'm sorry, Doc--"

"Let me see." Ranier bent down to examine the thread and Winters' careless nick. A quarter-inch of material had accidentally been shaved off one turn. "--don't know...turn it around...other side...rotate...again--"

"I think I can bridge the cut, Doc. Build up some material on the other side--"

Edvard Tolkach had seen it too. He came over and examined the mistake, clucking like a mother scolding her child. "May have to be scrapped, Albert."

"It's a thread for a lens," Winters reminded them. "I can smooth it out--"

Ranier was shaking his head. "I don't know. I just don't know."

"For crying out loud, Doc, I'm telling you, I can fix this. Just back off, will you? I do know what I'm doing."

"You should have been more careful--"

"Albert--" Tolkach grabbed Ranier by the elbow. His face was a pained squint. "Albert, leave Van alone. Let's go to the commissary. Have a smoke, some apple pie."

Ranier was shaking his head. "We can't waste any of it, Edvard. We can't scrap it. There's only enough for five bombs."

"I know, I know. Come on. Fresh air will do you good." He firmly steered Ranier out of the shop. They retrieved their coats and hats and trudged out into ankle-deep snow. A stiff wind flung ice flakes in their faces and both bundled up tight, heading for the commissary over on "Broad Street' and Jimenez Lane.

"Albert, get a hold of yourself. You're your own worst enemy. Van knows what he's doing."

Ranier had his head buried deep inside the fleece collar of his jacket. "He should be more careful. You know how expensive plutonium is. And we can't just scrap a piece if he makes a mistake. Hanford's given us exactly enough for five Mark VI bombs, thirty- two pounds a bomb. There's no margin for error."

"I know but we don't need any more attention from Security or the Army than necessary. Albert, face it: you're a skunk around here. People avoid you. When you cry wolf everyday, people lose interest. We're all fighting Communism, same as you."

"There's a difference, Edvard. I've seen the beast. My own flesh and blood have been eaten by the beast. I know what it's like to lose a brother, now a parent, to these monsters. Do you?"

Tolkach didn't reply. They made their way to the commissary and got in line. Ranier selected a coffee and a roll, Tolkach picked the same. They found a table by the window and raised the Venetian blinds to watch the snowfall.

"Like I said, we don't need the Army probing around this little project anymore than necessary. You got Commission approval so don't push your luck any further. Just trumping Teller on the Super--Christ, you've made enough enemies for two lifetimes. These extra bombs for Greenhouse--don't you see it, Albert? They're like honey to a swarm of bees. First, you run around like a loose cannonball, accusing half of T-Division of being Communist. Then you get approval for your own pet theories and extra shots added to Greenhouse to test them. Typhoid Mary had more friends than you. That's why we can't keep stirring things up. Somebody, somewhere's going to sabotage something, just to get even. And it won't be Communist espionage either. Just plain old jealousy and revenge, pure and simple. Albert, not everyone who opposes you is a Red-baiting fellow traveler. You've got to get that through your thick skull."

"I know what's at stake, Edvard. Most of these people around here don't. When the war ended, all sense of discipline broke down. Now the Army's giving up control to this Atomic Energy Commission. What the hell is that? Even if the rest of Los Alamos doesn't know or care that we're in a war, I know--personally--I've seen it with my own eyes--I know what these monsters do. These bombs are my children now. They have a future, a big future and I'll do whatever it takes to make sure they fulfill it."

Tolkach scoffed. "Bah! Melodramatic crap, that's what all that is. You've been hanging around Szilard too much."

"It was Leo Szilard--you might remember--that warned Roosevelt about the Nazis developing the bomb. Leo got Einstein to write the letter. At least, he knows a threat when he sees one."

Tolkach sniffed. "Szilard sees ogres behind every bush. The end of the world is near and all that. Albert--"

The men were silent for several minutes, each staring out at the snow. Finally, Tolkach stirred, sipped some coffee. It was bitter.

"Albert, you'll have your bombs. Van's good."

"And General Craft's deadline is three weeks away. Have you checked the calendar lately, Edvard? Or read the papers? I do, everyday. Last week, nearly two thousand American soldiers were killed or wounded by Communist aggressors. There's much work to be done."

"I know, I know," Tolkach relented. "Surface preparation this afternoon. Inspections."

"And assembly of the critical mass tomorrow morning. The tamper has to be fitted too, don't forget that. The lens assemblies."

Tolkach finished the last scraps of his roll. "At least, the casings are ready. Franks called me an hour ago, before I came over. They're in the vault over at Metallurgy. X-rays were fine."

Ranier was already gathering up his jacket, ready to trek back to the fab shop. "I'll go over to Electrical and check on the fuse harnesses. If Van can slot the sphere for lenses this afternoon, we can get the detonators wired and installed tonight. We should be ready for the casings by mid morning tomorrow."

"Norris still has to do his continuity check, before the fuse boxes are hooked up. Then, you've got the batteries."

"And a fit check with the casing, assembly run-through--"

"--and we pull the sphere and get it ready for shipping. One down, and four more to go." Tolkach held the door for Ranier as the two of them left the commissary. "Albert, you're nuts, you know that? Even Oppie and the others never thought of the Gadget as a child. The night before Trinity, when it was storming and raining out there in the desert, all that lightning, you remember, Oppie told me he didn't really think the thing would go off. It was no child to him, waiting to be born. It was more like a double, an alter ego, evil twin, maybe even a doppelganger. That's what he called it: a doppelganger. Some kind or ur-Oppenheimer, waiting to be set free. And he knew he had the magic spell that could set it loose."

"Oppie the poet." Ranier chuckled. "Always the dreamer." He coughed up spit, then kicked up snow as he trudged across the icy road, through frozen ruts gouged out by Army jeeps. "You know, I've even given names to my devices. They're all different, they have personalities of a sort, like we do. Greta, Henri and Jericho are my favorites. Van was working on Greta this morning."

"Names, Albert?" Tolkach hustled to keep up. "You have lost your mind--that's the proof."

Ranier ignored him. He stalked on toward the fab shop building, a huge black crow fighting the wind, jacket flying askew as he hunkered down against the gathering blizzard.

Tolkach wondered: was he psychotic after all? Border line case, maybe. He'd have a little talk with Zelnick at the infirmary. No, that was out. Zelnick was Army--he couldn't be trusted. But who the hell could be?

He gritted his teeth, squinting in the driving sleet as he slogged after the Czech physicist. The strain of the work, losing his parents in a midnight roundup in Prague, had been a lot for him. For all of them. Tolkach toyed with a thought: shouldn't they just forget this whole Korea business? Let the military fight the war. This Gallant Flag--revenge--patriotic duty to root out Reds everywhere--thing was consuming all of them.

But it was too late for that now. Caesar had found his Rubicon and he was going to either cross it or die trying. Tolkach made a mental note to keep a close watch on Albert Ranier the next few days. There had to be a psychiatrist or something in Albuquerque. Just in case he did something really strange...like suddenly giving up the whole effort.

Tolkach knew, deep down inside, that would never happen.

Thursday, December 14, 1950

Vladivostok, U.S.S.R.

9:00 a.m.

For Fyodor Trofimenko, standing glumly by the windows of the Trans-Amur Line train as it slowly eased its way into the heart of the port city, the sight of the barren snowy hills and the icy black sludge of the Zolotoy Rog--the Golden Horn Bay--brought nothing but despair to a heart already heavy with foreboding. Vladivostok was only a few hundred air miles from Tokyo, but it had none of the visual dazzle of the Japanese capital, nor her nervous antheap energy and certainly none of the other delights he had come to expect and appreciate in his five years posting abroad.

No, it was true and he had to admit it: though he was an agent of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) and sworn on his life to protect and defend the Party's interest with every mortal breath, the sights and sounds and smells of Mother Russia brought no tears of joy or deep yearnings to his soul. Only fear and apprehension filled his mind now, that and a cold trickle of dread, as he waited for the train to groan and jerk its way to a final halt under the pseudo-cathedral latticework roof of the Posyetskaya Street rail station.

A final hiss of her air brakes brought the train to a complete stop at Platform 1 and Trofimenko was rudely jostled by a steady stream of disembarking passengers, all trying to exit the doorway at once.

He had been summoned to a meeting, a conference with Ambassador Shtykov, from the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea and word was that even Beria himself would be there. The very name of the People's Commissar chilled him as he stepped off onto the platform, onto Russian soil for the first time in five years. He felt no need to kneel and kiss the ground. Instead, he hoisted up his bag and trudged into the terminal, intending to blend in with the crowd as much as possible, for as long as possible--maybe have a smoke, eat a fish sandwich, have a beer in the grimy restaurant.

But his 'contacts' spotted him right away and Trofimenko did none of that. He felt only the apprehension of the condemned as the two fur-hatted men from Seventh Directorate shunted him off to a black sedan waiting at the curb.

NKVD local headquarters was a short ten-minute ride up Posyetskaya Street, ignoring all traffic signs and signals as 'special service' cars were allowed to do--then right onto Leninskaya at the old wooden beam and iron roofed Moranban Restaurant. A five minute ride east put the Volga sedan at 66 Pushkin Square: a cement block monstrosity topped with spires and heroic battlements like a medieval fortress. A lone red star winked on and off atop the tallest spire. Across Leninskaya, jetties and breakwaters blunted the heavy black waters of the bay.

Trofimenko and his escorts got out and made their way inside, to a rickety elevator cage at one end of the dingy tiled lobby. The tortuous climb to the sixth floor took forever. Trofimenko shut his eyes, trying to reconstruct a memory of every stop and turn they had made on the drive up from the rail station. If he was slapped in prison here, he knew at least he could find his way back. Assuming he could escape captivity at all. Assuming he wasn't marched straight away into the courtyard and shot.

He tried but never quite succeeded in quashing thoughts like that.

Trofimenko had just arrived on an overnight train from Shenyang, the huge Chinese military supply center in Manchuria. He'd made a few notes, talked with officers at several posts, and inspected the situation as instructed, figuring he'd have to give a full accounting of what he had seen and heard to Shtykov.

The Soviet Ambassador greeted him gruffly as he was shown into a simple office, adorned only with a battered pine desk, two chairs and a portrait of Stalin on the wall.

Shtykov was corpulent, florid, sweating in the stifling steam heat of the room, with doughy cheeks and slit eyes.

"Fyodor Maximovich, comrade, come in, come in." Shtykov beckoned him to one of the chairs. He sat in his own squeaking chair behind the desk. "Your trip from Tokyo went well? I hope you've got plenty to tell me about Shenyang and Tientsin."

"I do, Comrade Ambassador." Trofimenko extracted some handwritten notes he'd compiled on the train. "My observations are all there...troop strength, equipment, ammunition stocks, rations, all that I saw."

Shtykov studied the notes, squinting at them as he did so. "The damned Chinese are always asking for more, more guns, more bullets, more bombs, even tanks. Can you believe it? What was it like? Are they really that desperate?"

"Terenty Sergeyevich, it's all there in my notes. I recorded everything I saw and heard, just as you instructed."

Shtykov was already folding up the notes, stuffing them into a folder. "Save the details for later. There's a new assignment for you, very critical, very important, so Moscow Center tells me."

Trofimenko finally dared to breathe. He was grateful for any kind of future. He had slept not at all on the train up from Shenyang, plagued by grisly images of Gulags and worse.

"What kind of assignment, Comrade Ambassador?"

Shtykov was already on his feet. "Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria can tell you himself. Come on. You have a meeting."

Shtykov led Trofimenko down the hall to an office suite at the end. They entered an outer room manned by uniformed NKVD officers. Their royal blue uniform piping, collar tabs and shoulderboards said Ninth Directorate to Trofimenko--guardians of the highest echelons of Party and government leaders. Evidently, they were expected. One of the officers sprang to his feet and opened a double set of paneled doors, into a broad, sunlit office with a panoramic view of Golden Horn Bay and the dockyards.

Beria was at the window, hands clasped behind his back, lost in thought. He seemed to be studying the ship movements. He remained at the window, acknowledging nothing, for a full minute.

Finally, he abruptly wheeled about and came over to his desk. Chandelier light reflected off his pince-nez glasses, offering no clue to his eyes. His face was impassive.

"Sit, Fyodor Maximovich, sit. Let's you and I talk." With a barely perceptible nod, he dismissed Shtykov, who hastened out of the office. Beria sat down, hunching forward over a desk devoid of papers--just a few pens and a portrait frame Trofimenko couldn't make out. And the telephone.

Beria steepled his fingers, resting his chin in them.

"Terenty Sergeyevich tells me you've been quite an asset to the State's interests since you were posted to Tokyo. In Moscow, we know all about WINDWARD. Even Comrade Stalin reads your dispatches."

Trofimenko's mouth was dry. "I've always tried to serve the State to the best of my ability." Just how much did they know? Did Stalin know about Fumei An? The Happy Rose Petal?

Beria merely stared at him, a predator's stare. "How long have you been posted to Tokyo?"

"Almost five years now, Comrade Commissar."

"I see. In that time, you've produced quite a haul of intelligence, much of it, shall we say, unique? Terenty Sergeyevich tells me you've managed to insinuate yourself into a bordello of sorts. A whorehouse used by American servicemen."

Trofimenko's shoulders slumped. Beria knew everything. "That's true, Lavrenti Pavlovich. It's a geisha house, actually. I'm running several operatives there. They have relations with a number of officers in the SCAP organization."

Beria merely nodded. "Relations, indeed. These operatives...they work at the geisha house?"

"Yes, Comrade. The girls have been quite, uh, intimate over the last several years with a number of officers. The house is supposed to be off-limits to Americans. But the girls are quite alluring. And the price is good. Americans can't seem to resist."

Beria smirked. "And what of you, Fyodor Maximovich? Do you resist?"

Trofimenko knew he was trapped. How the hell do you answer that? "Comrade, I do what must be done for our country. My reports have always been complete in every detail."

Beria couldn't resist a smile. "Not in every detail, my friend."

Trofimenko felt his life slipping away. "Com-comrade Commissar, I assure you that--"

Beria held up a hand. "Fyodor Maximovich, you're a man. A man has appetites. You think I don't know that. Josef Vissarionovich enjoys reading your dispatches. And lately, we've begun to see real details in them. You gave us good background on American foreign policy when that State Department inspector availed himself of the services of your geisha house. Eyes were raised at some of the things he said. Your work has been quite satisfactory. Your 'sources'--can they be persuaded to do even more?

Trofimenko felt relieved, but he regarded Beria warily. Was this a trap? No, the room was empty save for them. No guards had slipped in, ready to drag him away to the basement.

"Comrade Commissar, I have been working these sources for almost two years now. At first, the proprietress of the house was reluctant to have her clients 'used' in this way. But after we talked, after an appropriate measure of gifts, and some cash, she allowed me to bug some of her rooms and record selected 'encounters'. Her name is Fumei An."

Beria fiddled with a pen on his desk. "This Fumei An--you have a relationship with her, don't you?"

Trofimenko was adamant. "Strictly business, Lavrenti Pavlovich. Strictly business. Last year, after this recording had gone on for six months, I managed to coax her into letting me coach some of the girls into learning how to ask prompting questions of some of their American customers, to get more specific intelligence data. That was when the Embassy told me Moscow Center wanted data on specific weapons and which Army units were to remain stationed in Japan. It was one these girls--her name was Sasumi--that spent time with the State Department inspector."

"You are resourceful, at least," Beria admitted. "I wanted to meet WINDWARD in person, to see the face behind such titillating intelligence. At times, our Tokyo rezidentura sends dispatches that read like an erotic novel. Stalin enjoys them immensely."

Trofimenko was cautious. "I send only what is transcribed from the recordings."

"No matter. State Security has a new assignment for you, Fyodor Maximovich. I wanted to know a little more about your sources, their reliability, their 'persuadability.' This is a new mission, direct from Stalin himself."

Trofimenko wanted to kiss the Commissar. At least, it sounded like he'd be allowed to return to Tokyo. "I'm proud to serve my country. Good intelligence is vital to defeating the capitalists. What is this new mission, Commissar?"

Beria removed his pince-nez glasses and wiped them down. His eyes were tiny, mole-like. "A covert penetration. Inside MacArthur's headquarters in Tokyo. Our leadership wants to know what plans America has for continuing the war in Korea, and specifically, what Truman and MacArthur will do if the Soviet Union enters the war. We need this intelligence to make decisions very soon, decisions on how and at what level to support China and North Korea. In addition, some disturbing news has come from another operative, based in Washington."

Trofimenko listened carefully, noting Beria's words, his manner, tone of voice, was there anything there that was bad, that would keep him from leaving Mother Russia and returning to Japan? He couldn't find anything. Yet worry nagged him nonetheless. A faint premonition of a trap being laid....

"Comrade Commissar, tell me what I must look for."

Beria was mindful of the dispatches he'd gone over with Stalin last week, the dispatches from BLUEJAY. "We need information on the disposition of American atomic bombs in the Far East. What plans do the Americans have for using them? How many are there? What model? What yield? How would they be delivered? What are the likely targets? Are we targets?" Beria asked rhetorically. "We need to know, and soon."

Though amazed at the audacity of the mission, Trofimenko was practically breathless, silly with relief, that at least he was not going to be shot, at least not yet. Then, like a thunderclap, the difficulty of the mission hit him.

"How is this penetration to be done, Commissar? Will I have technical support from Department 8?"

Beria brushed off further questions. "Check with Shtykov and the technical departments on the details. It's all been worked out." He buzzed the intercom, summoning the Ambassador, who re-appeared in seconds.

Beria stood behind the desk, hands clasped as if in prayer. "Terenty Sergeyevich, I've given WINDWARD the new mission. Take him down to Department 8 for the technical briefings. He needs to see the new recording devices they've developed. One final thing, Fyodor Maximovich--"

"Yes, Commissar?"

"Time is critical. You must have your intercepts in place and ready to produce information by the end of the year. December 31. The Americans are up to something...we just don't know what. But whatever it is, they're desperate. They may try to widen the war, engage others, open up another front. Our Chinese sources think

MacArthur will try to get Chiang Kai-shek involved. The Leadership needs this intelligence. Decisions have to be made, troops may have to be mobilized, aircraft made ready. We have to know what the Americans are planning. Stalin's counting on these intercepts. Don't fail."

Trofimenko and Shtykov left the office and went two floors down to the technical shops of Department 8, the signals and intercepts office. Nominally part of the NKVD's 8th Chief Directorate, Department 8 was a massive organization, with offices and shops throughout the Soviet Union. The Directorate as a whole was responsible for intercepting and analyzing foreign radio and other signals, designing codes and ciphers to safeguard Soviet communications and running the special 'V-Ch' high-frequency telephone system used by the upper echelons of the Party and the NKVD itself. Department 8 had the specific responsibility of designing and testing equipment to support these efforts worldwide.

Shtykov brought Trofimenko over to a table strewn with boxes and wires and vacuum tubes. Two technicians were delicately soldering wire connections inside a tiny thumb-sized disk.

"Meet Canary One," Shtykov said. "A sound recording device with short-range radio transmission capability. It has a range of about half a mile. It records and stores about six hours of any sounds made within a twenty-five foot radius. When a signal is sent via high frequency radio from a control station half a mile away, Canary One transmits the contents of its recording and clears itself for another six hours of recording. There's a very tiny vinyl tape inside, spooled very tightly, that's read by a stylus."

Trofimenko picked up one of the devices that had already been wired. "Like a tiny record player. How is it powered?"

"Battery," explained one of the technicians. "The bottom cover of the disk is actually a dry cell, capable of holding a charge and powering the player inside for two months."

Shtykov gave Trofimenko a small cigarette lighter. "It's your 'book', Fyodor Maximovich. Underneath the wick--here, click sideways--" he showed Trofimenko how to thumb the friction wheel a certain way and as he did so, the bottom of the lighter case popped open. Shtykov fingered inside the tiny chamber and withdrew a tightly scrolled piece of paper. "You'll pick this up at the Embassy in Tokyo, along with Canary One. This list will name two contacts, your dead drop locations for this assignment, other procedures to follow in getting the tapes to your handler. The rezident himself will have your targets, specific intelligence targets and the order by which they are to be addressed. You heard Lavrenti Pavlovich. We don't have much time."

Trofimenko was almost overwhelmed by it all. By all accounts, Beria and the Party thought him successful, even reliable. So they had rewarded him with a critical assignment. But could he do it? Could he get them the intelligence they wanted, in time? It was a long way from sweet-talking Fumei An's girls into revealing casual pillow-talk inside the Happy Rose Petal. MacArthur's headquarters was a well-guarded military station, not a Tokyo whorehouse. The cozy and comfortable well-ordered life he'd made for himself in the Japanese capital the last five years seemed to be evaporating before his eyes. Now they really would be scrutinizing everything he did.

"Terenty Sergeyevich, I don't know about all this. Getting inside the Dai Ichi--that's different from running sources out of Fumei An's place. Don't they realize that? You can't just walk in."

Shtykov smiled. "The price of success. Beria likes you. For the moment."

"Thanks. I don't feel any better."

"Here's something else that won't help you sleep any better: keep your eyes out for the Kempai Tai. Japanese Secret Service. Before I left, we got word that General Whitney, SCAP Government Section, has started another campaign to root out Red spies and sympathizers in Tokyo. Kempai Tai are working hand in glove with the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division, shaking every tree they can, hoping spies fall out like cockroaches. And then there's this new agency...Central Intelligence Agency, from America. They're new and they're hungry to make their mark. Be wary of these dogs. Here--" Shtykov reached into his pocket and pulled out a several small capsules. He reached for Trofimenko's hand, firmly placed the capsules in it.

"You're not to be captured alive. Use these if you're caught. And under no circumstances are you to allow yourself to be interrogated. You've reached the center ring of the circus now, Fyodor Maximovich. From now on, you're vital State property. Beria's going to be watching closely."

"Wonderful. I presume this is not Ukrainian brandy."

"Come on," Shtykov wrapped an arm around his shoulders. "Let's go for a walk. Cold air will do you good."

They left 66 Pushkin Square and headed along the Zolotoy Rog, stepping briskly through a strong icy breeze atop the breakwater. For ten minutes, they walked, saying nothing, letting ice crystals sting their faces. They passed an onion-domed cathedral, now a palace of culture. From somewhere out in the foggy harbor, a ship's horn bellowed.

Shtykov looked like a greasy black bear in his heavy coat and fur shapka, his dark beard flecked salt and pepper with ice. "Fyodor Maximovich, have you got any ideas how to go about penetrating MacArthur's headquarters?"

Trofimenko, mindful of the charms of Fumei An's girls, replied, "Yes, as a matter of fact. I was just thinking. There are several possibilities."

"A hell of a lot of the Dai Ichi staff seem to wind up in the whorehouses around there. I have an idea that's why the Americans and the Kempai Tai are cracking down. Hard to run a military headquarters when your staff's in bed with the local prostitutes."

Trofimenko shook his head. "Geishas aren't prostitutes, Terenty Sergeyevich. They're called Karyukai, 'willows and flowers.' Actually, entertainers, skilled in many arts."

"I'm sure they are."

By the time the two of them had reached Okeansky Street and the fish market, Trofimenko had already concocted the basic elements of his plan.
CHAPTER 6

The United States and its Allies stood on the abyss of disaster. The Chinese Communists, pouring across the Manchurian border in vast formations, had smashed the U.N. Army...caught in the desperate retreat were 140,000 American troops, the flower of the U.S. Army--almost the whole effective Army the U.S. had....

It was defeat--the worst defeat the United States had ever suffered. If this defeat were allowed to stand, it would mean the loss of Asia to Communism.

TIME

11 December 1950

Friday, November 15, 1950

Near Seoul, South Korea

11:30 a.m.

It was snowing hard out of the mountains north of Uijongbu when General Walton H. "Johnnie" Walker arrived in the jeep from the Eighth Army command post. Just after sunup that morning, orders had come up from Colonel Rice, Walker's principal staff aide, to have the Grasshopper ready for flight at 1030 hours. Major Don Gresham, assigned to liaison duty with Eighth's headquarters company from his normal billet out of K-14 Kimpo field north of Seoul, had spent the last several hours supervising a temporary fix to the L-2A's 63-horsepower Continental engine. The carburetor float was freezing up again in this damnable Korean weather.

Gresham wanted everything working just right when the Commanding General of Eighth Army showed up.

Walker arrived right on time, bouncing out of his jeep and fixing his field cap. He was a squat, pugnacious bulldog of a fighting general, a commander who idolized George Patton, whom he had served under in Europe just five years before. Walker came up to the aircraft.

"Major, let's get this bird flying. I got a daylong trip to scout fallback positions north of Seoul." He clenched an unlit cigar in his teeth and scanned the skies. "Weather's not gonna get any better than this. You ready?"

Gresham and his mechanic were still greasy from their carburetor work, which they had just finished. "Yes, sir. Let me clean up and we'll be airborne right away."

Several box lunches and canteens and Thermos jugs of water and coffee were packed aboard. Gresham threw in a few extra blankets as well, since the plane's heater often had trouble coping with the conditions. Walker often liked to open the cabin doors and lean out on the wing struts, yelling at his surprised soldiers below. Gresham had flown inspection missions for Walker before, so he knew the kind of flight profile the General wanted.

It never hurt to have a few extra blankets and jackets in this kind of weather.

The two men buckled in and Gresham turned over the engine, letting it warm up in the subfreezing weather. The tiny dirt airstrip next to Walker's field headquarters was little more than a rutted cowpath, straightened and leveled by Army engineers, barely a thousand feet long. Even with a twenty-knot wind out of the west, he figured they'd need every foot of it to clear the rugged hills surrounding the headquarters company encampment.

Five minutes later, they were airborne, climbing through choppy light clouds at a thousand feet, on their way to an initial cruising altitude of five thousand feet. On a good cool day, the Grasshopper could make ten thousand feet and crank it up to all of 92 miles per hour. Gresham had no intention of pushing the envelope today. Not when they'd be spending a good part of the day dodging in and out of enemy positions, often times low enough that a soldier with a handgun could do some real damage.

At altitude, the L-2A settled into a loud drone and Gresham checked again with the General on the route he wanted to take.

"Go northwest, Major. Toward the lines south of Kaesong. I want to see how 2nd Division's doing today. They got the snot kicked out of them yesterday on the road to Panmumjon. I want to see if Harris has been able to hold his line any better."

Gresham and Walker consulted a field map and after a few minutes' study, Gresham adjusted their heading ten degrees west. The land below was bare and rocky, with each village made visible in the light snow showers by a characteristic column of smoke from its chimneys. Every road for miles around was jammed with thousands of civilian refugees, fleeing south, fleeing the Chinese juggernaut from the north.

"Jesus H. Christ," Walker muttered at the scene. "Like rats before the flood."

Gresham sensed that the General was more upset than usual this morning, even a bit distraught. He kept his own eyes on his instruments, noting the distance remaining to the presumed front lines at Kaesong. They'd both have to be alert over Red positions and Gresham knew they'd be over Indian country before long, a shifting, fluid, ever-changing frontier that seemed to be collapsing southward everyday. He saw General Walker out of the corner of his eye, shaking his head, fists clenched tight, yet unable to strike out, unable to stop what some of the war correspondents were already calling the Great Bugout.

A near total rout of the Eighth Army since the Thanksgiving Day Red offensive had made "Johnnie" Walker hell to be around. In truth, he was not a man given to much sentiment. Reticent in manner, short of speech in public, he wasn't especially popular with the troops anyway. And the flamboyant majesty of Douglas MacArthur, as Far Eastern Commander, only emphasized Walker's lack of political skills.

The Red offensive had hit him hard.

In the two weeks since elements of the Red Chinese 38th and 42nd Field Armies had smashed the U.S. First Cavalry at Sunchon and forced a general retreat toward the 38th Parallel, Walker had been increasingly fatalistic and morose, seemingly powerless to do anything to stem the tide. He'd been unable to instill any discipline or do anything to boost morale for his beleaguered troops.

Part of the problem, he was sure, was GHQ Tokyo. MacArthur and his staff, especially that first-class idiot at G-2, Major General Willoughby, still refused to recognize the full nature of the Chinese threat, not seeming to realize that the Reds had jumped into the war with both feet, throwing nearly 300,000 men across the Yalu frontier.

"Hell, Willoughby wouldn't know a Red Chinese division if it bit him in the ass," Walker grumbled.

He was just heartsick at the headlong retreat he saw everyday below them. Gresham had made three flights with the General across the UN positions in the last seven days. From Ongjin on the Yellow Sea in the west all the way across the peninsula to Kansong on the Sea of Japan, the scene had been essentially the same everywhere. Retreat in all sectors. Civilians, pack animals, ROK troops, even scattered American GI's, disorganized rabble who'd thrown down their M-1s and fled in terror before the Red hordes--Walker didn't understand it and he had grown sick and tired of the same view every day.

Today, as they crossed over the Panmumjon Road in the general vicinity of what had been 2nd Division sector, the picture below was the same as before.

Walker flung off his field cap angrily. "Goddamn it! Look at that, will you?" A long column of two and half ton trucks, shepherded by dismounted infantry, snaked slowly down the icy road, mingling with scattered villagers and refugees, each one bent over from carrying heavy A-frames and baskets.

"I've had enough! Major, drop down. A hundred feet over their heads, fifty if you can manage it. And chop the motor."

Gresham hated this maneuver, even though he'd done it enough times the last week or so. It was becoming a Walker specialty, but it was dangerous and just asking for trouble.

He'd become religious about keeping ice and dirt out of the little Continental engine's carburetor and keeping her spark plugs clean and up to spec, just in case.

"General, it's awfully risky today, don't you think? We got strong crosswinds at all levels, even down low. If I can't restart her, I'm not sure I can clear that column of troops. Shouldn't we--"

"No, goddamn it! Just do it, Major! If we have to die, let it be here and now."

So Gresham performed the Walker wiggle, as he'd come to call it, several times. Each pass was pretty much the same. Chop the motor and let the prop feather down, then pitch forward into a shallow dive, more or less parallel with the road. At a hundred feet altitude, with his airspeed hopefully up to a hundred miles an hour, the L-2A floated like an awkward glider for a few precious seconds--twenty seconds was the most he had ever dared--right over the heads of the retreating troops, while Walker bellowed exhortations and damnations and commands at the top of his lungs. Then a slight pull up and restart the engine, praying to God the little 4-cylinder job would catch before they stalled out and pancaked into the ground.

It didn't get any easier with practice.

Down they plunged, an icy wind whipping Walker's coat collars, as the little Texan cocked open the side door and leaned way out, holding on for dear life to a wing strut.

"HOLD THE LINE, MEN! HOLD THE LINE DOWN THERE! THIS IS WALKER! I'M TELLING YOU, GODDAMN IT...HOLD THE LINE RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE!" Walker stepped out further as Gresham leveled out of the dive, fighting against the General's weight as the Grasshopper wanted to veer right. Walker's burly frame didn't help their aerodynamics much either. They wouldn't have twenty seconds over the troops if he kept up this kind of stunt. Gresham muttered a silent prayer under his breath.

"STOP WHERE YOU ARE! STIFFEN UP, YOU LOUSY BASTARDS...."

Eighty five feet below the plane, the remnants of 2nd Platoon, Fox Company, U.S. 24th Infantry, trudged on through ice and frozen mud. Two corporals in the understrength unit, decimated two days before in night action near Kunu-ri, looked oddly at each other, then snorted in disgust.

"You think that's really Johnnie Walker up there? Or just some nutcase?"

The other corporal shrugged. "Could even be a Red fake, for all I know."

"Hell, that ain't no damn Red. It's probably some drunk officer, off on a dare or a lark."

"No way I'm sticking around this place," the first corporal admitted.

"Amen to that. Problem is, unit leadership in this here Army basically stinks."

"Yeah, what good is a Lieutenant who gets himself killed in the first Red human wave assault?"

"Then there's Dugout Doug MacArthur...totally worthless. Completely out of touch."

"Those Kilroys can't tell a Chinaman from an acorn and there's about as many of one as there is of the other."

Both corporals laughed cynically and kept on slogging down the muddy road, south, ever south, toward Seoul and the fallback line.

Overhead, an Air Force L-2 plane circled for a few more minutes, then disappeared into the clouds.

Friday, December 15, 1950

Washington, D.C.

1:30 p.m.

The wind was cold and blustery, sending hot dog wrappers and snow swirling along Pennsylvania Avenue as the meeting finally got underway. Harry Truman was grim and tight-lipped as he welcomed the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense into the ground floor dining room at Blair House, across the street from the White House, still undergoing the most extensive renovation in its one hundred and fifty-year history.

Truman had helped clean up the remnants of the beef stew lunch he had just finished, with Bess and a few friends, even going so far as to help stack dishes in the sink, much to the chagrin of Luis and Tommie, their Puerto Rican kitchen staff. But they knew the President was like that--as likely to mop up a kitchen floor as he was to send men off to war.

The dining room was small and cramped, full of Victorian highboys and other period furniture, with a view out the slightly fogged windows of the White House west wing and light traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue. Each of the service chiefs had brought briefcases and map folders, and the next few minutes were spent setting up charts for the briefing.

Truman stood by the window, pensively sipping a watered-down bourbon, as the officers scurried about the room, arranging maps and easels.

"Gentlemen, let's begin. I don't expect this will be much fun. George and General Bradley, why don't you start? Give us the current situation." Truman took his place at the head of the table. Behind him was an oil portrait of the first resident at Blair House--Dr. Joseph Lovell, first Surgeon General of the United States.

General George Marshall was the new SecDef. He nodded to Omar Bradley, five-star General of the Army, now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. "General, give us a rundown on Eighth Army and Tenth Corps."

Bradley shifted uneasily, then stood rigidly, indicating a map of the northern half of Korea, mounted on a stand next to an ornate breakfront full of china.

"Mr. President, I have to report that both Eighth Army and Tenth Corps are in full retreat. As you can see by these lines--" he pointed out colored marks on the map--"fallback line B, from the ROK 1st Corps here at Hongch'on to U.S. 2nd Division positions along the Imjin River south of Kaesong, could not be held yesterday. Overnight, I've received word from Far Eastern Command that 2nd Division, 7th Cav, and other elements of the Eighth that have been in action on the western front since the day after Thanksgiving, are already pulling out of the sector. Walker's intent is to fall back to this line--Line C--and try to hold from Hongch'on to the north banks of the Han River."

Truman's face was dark. "North of Seoul? Can we keep the Reds out of Seoul this time?"

Bradley glanced over at Lawton Collins, Army chief of staff. "Joe, your call here."

"Lightning Joe" Collins had commanded the Army's VII Corps at Normandy only six years before. He knew a few things about holding onto precarious positions. "General, Mr. President. I've got a bad feeling about Line C. With all due respects, sir, I'd give the Reds Seoul--again--if that's what it took to save Eighth Army from destruction. Look at the terrain here--" Collins got up and went to the map. "South of the Han, we got all these hills, valleys, better roads. Much more defensible terrain. Plus we let the Reds extend their supply lines that much further, and we have a better shot at cutting them off."

"I'll second that," said General Hoyt Vandenberg, Air Force chief of staff. "Stretch out their lines and my fighter-bomber groups can chop 'em up piecemeal."

"What about Tenth Corps?" Truman asked.

"We finally got the First Marines out of their predicament," Bradley explained. "Damn near disaster there at Chosin. Evacuation's completed, as of 10 December, and the Navy's pretty well pulverized the docks and the waterfront at Hungnam."

"They're still embarked for now," said Admiral Forrest Sherman, Chief of Naval Operations. "Task Force Seven's steaming for Sasebo. Due in port this afternoon, in fact."

"We're pulling back ROK 1st Corps and the U.S. 3rd and 7th Marines along this phase line," Bradley went on. "Staged withdrawal under pretty heavy fire, from what I'm told. The line now runs from Oro-ri down here to Yanp'o. We'll get 'em out. I'm sure of that much, thanks to the Navy, and re-deploy closer to the 38th Parallel...probably Wonsan."

Collins chipped in, "MacArthur thinks we can hold better across the narrowest part of Korea. Walker's not so sure. Almond agrees with MacArthur."

Truman snorted at that. "He's MacArthur's boy all right. Hell of a thing, isn't it? A brass hat like General MacArthur ought to have seen this coming. Hell, he told me in person at Wake Island, not six weeks ago, the Chinese would never get into the war. Pooh-poohed the whole idea. Said they'd be slaughtered if they did." Truman banged the empty bourbon glass down on the oak dining table, shaking his head. "Now who's being slaughtered?"

"Mr. President, we've inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy all across the front," Collins said.

"Never would have happened if MacArthur had stayed away from the Yalu River, like I told him. Chinese got antsy, that's what happened. I can almost understand it. Mr. Prima Donna Commander got too close to Manchuria and Chairman Mao got nervous. If you ask me, General, MacArthur's recklessness runs a real risk of widening this whole 'police action,' maybe even starting World War III."

Bradley moved on to another chart, this one showing the 38th Parallel zone and the 'waistline' sectors of the Korean peninsula.

"Mr. President, we have several options at this point."

"I'm all ears, General."

"Option one is to hold at or around the 38th Parallel, reinforcing if we have to from the States, and try to negotiate our way out of this. The downside to this option is that General Walker doesn't think he can hold north of Seoul. He wants permission to fall back further south, at least to Suwon. And as for reinforcements, we're stretched pretty thin. We've got substantial forces in Germany--XVIII Airborne and VII Corps--holding the line against the Soviets there. We may need to consider reinstating a limited draft."

Truman nodded gravely. "George and I have already been discussing that. Country's not going to like it but I'll order it if I have to. Other options?"

Bradley seemed uncomfortable. "Mr. President, given the forces we have or can bring to bear, the only other basic option is to fall back further after some delaying actions at the parallel, all the way to Pusan. And then consider mustering enough ships for a complete evacuation of all UN forces...back to Japan. Walker thinks he can probably hold out indefinitely at Pusan, given replacements for normal attrition. I guess the question at this point is: is Pusan a good strategy? Are we achieving our aims if we pull back to Pusan and fight an attrition campaign to keep a foothold on the peninsula?"

"My gut feeling on that, Mr. President, is no." Marshall's voice was gravelly and weak, from a bad cold. "Politically, it's suicide. It means we've lost South Korea, a year after China fell to the Reds. And a lot of men died for nothing."

"But Europe's still the main show," Bradley countered. "Nobody knows what the hell the Russians are going to do."

"I agree," Truman said. "We've got to keep our eyes on the ball. Korea's a diversion. I don't want to abandon her any more than you do. But we can't weaken ourselves fighting a big war in the Far East and let Mr. Stalin make mischief in central Europe. He just got his fingers rapped in Berlin--we beat him with an airlift. Thank God for the Air Force. He's got to be itching to turn the tables. We can't give him the chance."

"Mr. President," Bradley said, "all the Chiefs are in agreement. We are recommending a limited reinstatement of the draft."

Truman squinted at the thought, sank back in his chair and regarded the empty bourbon glass coldly. "We are in a national emergency. Anybody can see that. Better safe than sorry, that's my thought. I'm going to approve it. A limited mobilization of manpower and resources. I'll have to explain it, address the nation. But I can see we need to send more men to Korea, much as I hate the thought. We have to beef up the Eighth Army and the Marines. I want to see us stick with option one. I want us to hold the damn Reds at the 38th Parallel. Status quo ante and all that. Then we can talk. But we've got to stop running," Truman sat up abruptly, fists clenched. "We've got to stand and fight."

There was silence in the dining room for half a minute. Truman glared at each of his generals in turn, then called out for his personal secretary.

"Rose, can you come in here for a second?"

"Mr. President, I'll draw up the necessary orders for a limited mobilization," Marshall offered. He scribbled a few notes on a pad. "I can have them ready for your signature by five this afternoon."

Truman nodded. "Good. Thanks, George. You and Rose can help me hash out a statement. I'm already giving a press briefing here at Blair House at four. That might be the time to break the bad news. Gentlemen, I want your honest opinion here: what about MacArthur's field commanders? Walker, Almond, Smith, these guys. Have we got our best men over there?"

The Chiefs stoutly defended their men in the field, Bradley adding, "Far Eastern Command doesn't seem to get or analyze field intelligence very well. Willoughby's a good man, but we've all seen better work out of G-2."

"MacArthur's ego, that's the problem," Truman said. "A real brass hat, prima donna, that's what he is. He ought to be removed." But that line of thinking went nowhere. Truman dropped the matter.

The President called the meeting to a close.

"Gentlemen, I need options. I want all of you to come up with proposals for me to consider. Let's have a followup meeting next Tuesday and we'll talk about them. We've got to find a way of stabilizing the situation in Korea without jeopardizing our position in Europe. I'm gonna need your help."

"You'll have it, Mr. President," said SecDef Marshall.

The meeting was interrupted at the end by Rose Conway, the President's secretary. She was an efficient dark-haired woman in a print dress and beige sweater.

"Mr. President, Admiral Leahy wants a quick word with you on your press statement this afternoon. He's across the street. Will two-thirty be okay?"

Truman took off his glasses and wiped the lenses down with a tissue. "Fine, Rose. That'll be fine."

Conway departed as quickly as she had appeared. Truman re-adjusted his glasses. "Damn, I hate these press conferences. I expect the war news will dominate all the questions too. And I have little else I can tell them, except we're studying the situation. Damn it!" He banged the table. "I need options. Options to win the war or end the war. We're losing a thousand American boys a week over there. That can't keep on."

Marshall took that as a cue and signaled for the Chiefs to begin gathering up their charts.

"Mr. President, if it would help, I'll stay around for awhile. I can work with Bill Leahy, maybe craft a few words you could use in your conference. We have a pretty good idea what questions will be asked."

Truman smiled ruefully, got up and headed into the kitchen, for more coffee and maybe a bit more bourbon. He glared out through a window at snow falling gently over leaf piles in the rear courtyard. A pair of uniformed White House Secret Service agents huddled miserably under a temporary shelter.

"Thanks, George. That would be mighty nice of you. I don't mind telling you this war's got me pretty down. The elections hurt us a few weeks ago. Bess and I snipe at each other every night. Even my piano playing's no good...not that it ever was."

Marshall was sympathetic. "The country doesn't understand this kind of war, Mr. President. After what it took to beat the Nazis and the Japs, this idea of 'limited war' and 'police action' doesn't sit too well with the average American. They're not sure what we're fighting for."

Truman fumed, just shaking his head. "That's MacArthur's doing, thank you very much. He's a better politician than he is a general. I guess I'd better be glad he's ten thousand miles away. He's got everybody stirred up, thinking Washington's tying his hands, keeping him from winning the war. He knows damn good and well why we've had to push a leash on him. My only fear, George, is this: what the hell do I do if some day MacArthur goes too far? What happens if I give a direct order to His Majesty and he refuses to obey? Which one of us will blink first? Will the country stand behind me? Or will MacArthur storm the White House and have us all arrested?"

Marshall said nothing. Moments later, Admiral William Leahy, the President's own chief of staff, appeared in the kitchen doorway, brushing snow off his field jacket. Truman was relieved to see him.

The three of them then requisitioned a table and got down to business, trying to think up every troublesome question the press corps could ask.

The press conference convened promptly at 4 p.m., in the tiny parquet-floored lobby and vestibule of Blair House's ground floor. Some fifteen correspondents managed to squeeze themselves into the space, made even stuffier by a clanking steam radiator behind the door.

As expected, the very first question--this from a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter--concerned MacArthur and Korea and the nation's strategy for winning the war.

Truman stood awkwardly before the lectern, mentally rehearsing the answers he and Marshall and Leahy had developed. "It's true we're doing a high-level review of our strategy right now," he admitted. "We've got some hard decisions to make in the next week or so. General MacArthur's fighting the best war he can right now but the situation has changed with the Chinese."

"Mr. President--?"

"Mr. President--?"

Truman hunted for a friendly face. He found none and decided to call on a young reporter up front.

"Mr. President...Ed Niles, Chicago Tribune. Sir, could you expound a little more on your statement of several weeks ago--where you refused to rule out the use of atomic bombs in Korea."

Truman smiled faintly amid a scattering of chuckles. That miscue had made headlines around the world. Even Clement Atlee, the nervous nellie British Prime Minister had nearly had a heart attack over the report. Truman was wary and cautious about making another misstatement.

"Gentlemen, I've been burned before on this. Let me speak very carefully. I believe the statements made after my press conference on November 30 speak for themselves. We do not anticipate ever using atomic bombs in Korea. And that decision is mine and mine alone. The President has sole responsibility on this."

The reporter persisted. "You mean to say, Mr. President, if I understand you correctly, that no one in the Far Eastern Command or in the Korean theater, can independently make the decision to drop the bomb?"

"That is correct."

"Even General MacArthur?"

"Even the good General himself is subject to the President's authority on this."

Friday, December 15, 1950

Tokyo

5:15 p.m.

For sensuality and delicate hands, there was no doubt Fumei An was the best of them all. Fyodor Trofimenko relaxed even deeper in the steaming lilac-scented water of the furo, and let the proprietress of the Happy Rose Petal work her magic. For any man, surely, this was as close to heaven as it was possible to get. By training, Trofimenko was officially an atheist. But after a solid hour of Fumei An massaging his back, neck, shoulders and head, and her 'dear little willow' accomplice Sasumi in the water with the Russian man, massaging his groin, his manhood and anything else she could find, Trofimenko figured he knew a thing or two about paradise. He closed his eyes and let earthly cares melt away into the water.

"Why you so interested, Trofi-san, in other customers?" Fumei An spoke passable English, though no Russian. Trofimenko's Japanese was laughable. By agreement, they were left with American English. Fumei An had even picked up a smattering of GI slang.

"Actually, I have a little proposition to make, Fumei. I've got a job and I need your help."

Fumei An splashed more water on his shoulders and ran the sponge around his neck. "You need more relax, soldier. That's what you need. Why you so tense today?"

Trofimenko shrugged, shifting slightly to let Sasumi get a better grip on him. He shivered under her delicate but knowing touch, then beamed over at the 'dear little willow.'

"Work. Always work. Look, Fumei, you and I both know you've got a lot of GI customers. I'm interested in contacting one of them. Kind of quietly, no big fuss, nothing official. I need some information."

"What you want me to do? I'm just a business person."

Trofimenko chuckled at that one. "And a very good one, Fumei. But we both know the Tokko and the American MPs have been eating into your business lately." Tokko was a special anti-vice bureau of the Tokyo Police Department. "Even the Red Spiders can't protect you from the police forever. Torijima's just like the water in Tokyo Bay...whichever way the wind blows, that's the way he goes."

"So what you saying to me, Trofi-san?"

"I'm saying I can help you. If you help me."

Fumei An was squatting on her knees beside the bath. She dropped the sponge for a moment and sat back. She was a delicate ivory figurine of a woman, barely five feet tall, with elaborately coiffed black hair and exquisitely tiny yet strong hands. She wiped perspiration off her brow with a forearm and sighed, thinking.

"What kind of help?"

Trofimenko was expansive. "It's simple. Best way I know to get the American police off your back. Give them something else to investigate. They're like a pack of dogs. Throw them a new bone and they'll follow it."

"Trofi-san, you not so mysterious to me. You want me to spy on Americans, no? I know that. All men are open books. I can read. And I'm no spy. Americans serious about Communist spies. I run a nice business here."

Trofimenko sat up straight, splashing water, momentarily shooing off Sasumi, who pouted, then got out of the furo altogether.

"No spying, Fumei. Honest. Just a little scandal is all. Just enough to throw up some dirt around a certain officer. Remember: dogs love to dig in the dirt."

Fumei An made a face. "No spying? I don't believe that. You spy." She rubbed his back down with more soap, kneading her fingertips into his neck and shoulder muscles. "What is this scandal you tell me about?"

Trofimenko winced. The woman has sharp claws and a sharp tongue too. "I help you. You help me. Agree?"

Fumei An huffed and fumed for a few moments, then muttered, "Agree."

"Very wise. I know you're a good business person." He let her dig into his shoulders. His nerve ends burned like fire from her expert touch.

"You know Arlen Keith? Colonel Arlen Keith?"

Fumei An thought for a moment, biting her lips. "I think so. He works at Dai Ichi. Works for General Makassar."

"That's right. Keith is the one I want to know more about."

Fumei An made a face. "I'm not spy, I tell you this. Too dangerous--"

"Fumei, I'm not asking you to spy. All I need is your cooperation on a little plan of mine."

"What kind of plan?"

"I want to get Colonel Keith in trouble with the American authorities. He's not even supposed to be coming here. You know the law. Places like this are off-limits to GIs, especially officers. If the authorities knew Keith was a frequent customer, he'd be arrested, maybe even court-martialed. At the very least, the American Army would probably ship him out."

"Why make this trouble, Trofi-san? I have many customers. My customers happy, I make happy."

"Look," Trofimenko stood up in the pool, and then stepped out. He snatched a towel off the tile floor and began toweling himself dry. Fumei An, at first startled, stood up too and joined in, massaging the Russian's hairy legs and thighs. "Think of this as a business proposition. It's a scheme and if it works, I'll get what I want and you'll get what you want."

"And what do you want, Trofi-san?"

"I told you...just some information. And you want the Tokko off your back. I'm offering a way for us both to get what we want. The essence of business."

Fumei An smirked as she found the Russian's manhood and manipulated it with the practiced strokes of a First Rank Comfort Girl of the Imperial Shantung Army, which she had once been, so many years before in Manchuria.

"This is business, my dear Trofi-san. A happy customer. All my customers are happy. Are you not happy?"

Trofimenko savored the pleasure of the moment, then wrapped his waist with the towel and bent over, kissing Fumei An gently on the forehead. "Very happy, my little willow. Very happy. Can we talk somewhere?"

Fumei An knelt down on the tile floor of the furo and surrounded his love with her mouth. Trofimenko had no choice but to lie back on the towel stack, shivering deliciously, moving his thighs around to help her out. Fumei An soon perched herself completely on top of his belly and satisfied him even more.

When they were done, Fumei An dressed him in a silk robe and led the Russian into her tiny office, just off the entrance hall of the Happy Rose Petal. Once a parlor, the room was now decorated with delicate shoji screens and an ornate rosewood writing table. She switched on a lamp; the lamp base was shaped like a horse's head. A large leather-bound book lay open on the table. Trofimenko saw columns of numbers in among the kanji script.

Accounts receivable, he realized. Even as she sipped at a tiny cup of green tea, she was totaling up the bill.

"Fumei, my proposition could be worth a thousand American dollars to you. Half now, half at the end."

The serene willow and Comfort Girl First Rank stopped writing with the quill pen and stared for a moment at the ledger book. Slowly, she looked up. The ivory figurine was now hard-edged bone, deeply shadowed by the paper lantern screen.

"A thousand dollars."

"You heard me. Can we do business?"

A quick furtive smile. "We already have. You owe me one hundred American dollar now."

Trofimenko smiled back. "How often does Colonel Keith come by the Rose Petal?"

"That's none of your business."

"Not even for a thousand dollars."

"How does a girl know you have that kind of money?"

Trofimenko bowed slightly in her direction. "A fair question. May I retrieve my things?"

Fumei An nodded silently, then rapped on a bell on the writing table. Seconds later, a kimono-clad girl appeared in the doorway and bowed deeply.

Fumei An reeled off a string of guttural Japanese and the girl vanished, returning half a minute later with the Russian's trousers, shirt, shoes and jacket. She laid them carefully before Trofimenko, then backed out.

Trofimenko rifled through his jacket pocket, eventually producing a small folder. He opened it, and Fumei An saw several envelopes inside. The Russian handed her one. She slit it open with an opener and grew wide-eyed at what was inside. She pulled the crisp American bills out and quickly counted them out.

"Five hundred dollar. This is my tip?"

"If you want to think of it that way. I asked you a question."

Fumei An fondled the C-notes with the same loving caress she had once reserved for making customers happy. Trofimenko found himself squirming in the seat, remembering, in spite of himself. Fumei An smiled at that.

"Colonel Keith has been coming every Saturday. Very good customer. He likes Sasumi, especially."

"I can't imagine why. He spends well?"

Fumei An sat comfortably back in her chair, staring up at the shoji screen beside the desk. It was black, lacquered, scenes from an ancient Kabuki play. "Ah, that is so. He spends quite well, yes, Trofi-san."

"Fumei An, listen to me. You can keep that five hundred dollars. There's five hundred more waiting. All I want is this: next time Colonel Keith comes to the Happy Rose Petal, and he asks for Sasumi, you tell him she's pregnant. She's become...what's the phrase?"

"We say ninshin shite iru...but why should Sasumi do that, Trofi-san?"

"Because she's disgraced. Colonel Keith has dishonored her by getting her pregnant, or so you make him think. And to make it more serious, tell Keith that because Sasumi's disgraced, she'll have to be fired. You're so 'upset', losing one of your best employees, that you're going to file a formal complaint with the American Army, or maybe the Tokko. If you don't get satisfaction, some kind of compensation, you'll take it all the way to General Makassar himself. That ought to get the Colonel's attention."

Fumei An just shook her head sadly. "I cannot do this thing. I can't do something that would hurt the Happy Rose Petal."

"You won't have to do anything, Fumei. You just have to make him think Sasumi's pregnant and you're going to complain about it to the authorities. Believe me, the Americans will take it from there. If word got out that a high-ranking officer on MacArthur's staff got a Tokyo prostitute pregnant, he'd be shipped out on the very next boat to the States, and probably court-martialed to boot."

"Sasumi will be upset by this."

"That's the beauty of my proposal. There's a way for Keith to make amends. A way for Sasumi to save face. You let Colonel Keith stew in that pot for awhile then offer a way out and he'll jump at the chance."

Fumei An shut her ledger book with a thump. "Trofi-san, you are worse than the shoguns. Always plotting, always scheming to make bad things happen. If the Americans knew that a spy was a guest of the Happy Rose Petal--no, a roshia no spy--I would be arrested that very moment as a Communist and we would be shut down. What is this plot you have thought up, for Sasumi to make believe ninshin shite iru and then have her honor restored?"

"I need your help to make it work. Tell Colonel Keith there is an old Japanese custom. There are special flowers, which if taken and planted in the right place, a place of great solemnity and honor and dignity, where important decisions are made, a place where truth is held in highest regard, above even life itself...if he plants these sacred flowers there, Sasumi's honor will be restored. She will save face, keep her job, and the spirits are appeased."

For a long moment, the Comfort Girl First Rank just glared with a mixture of horror and embarrassment at the Russian, then, in fits and starts, she burst out giggling.

"Trofi-san, truly, this is absurd. There is no such custom. You are sadly ignorant of Nihon, ignorant of what we value and believe."

Trofimenko chuckled with her. "Of that, my little willow, I'm quite sure. But the important thing is that Arlen Keith is not. Throw him this liferaft, while he's drowning with self-pity and fear and he'll grab it, I'm sure of that."

Fumei An couldn't keep from laughing, covering her mouth with her hands. "And just what are these sacred flowers, with such magical powers?"

"Why not lilacs? Japanese lilacs. Have Keith take a bouquet of them--there has to be an elaborate ceremony, with Sasumi there, too, so they're ready, shall we say, prepared to atone for the great dishonor he's done her. Tell him, after the ceremony, he has to take the bouquet and place them in this Room of Great Dignity--MacArthur's war room on the sixth floor of the Dai Ichi would be perfect--and leave them there for at least several weeks. There, the lilacs will do their work...and, as the custom goes, Sasumi's honor is restored. You don't have to make a complaint to the Americans. Everything is back to normal." And Canary One will be singing songs of American military plans back to my receiver outside, he didn't need to add.

Fumei An had finally stopped laughing, though tears had streaked her makeup. She examined her face in a tiny mirror and dabbed at the streaks. "There, Trofi-san, see what you've done? How can I meet customers looking like this?" She spent a few minutes fixing her makeup again. "This is an insane plan. This is a plot for the Kabuki. Have you seen "The 47 Ronin" yet? No? It's a story about clans, revenge, and murder. Very confusing plots and plans and betrayals and that sort of thing. You have missed your true purpose, Trofi-san. You could be an actor in Kabuki."

"Fumei, there's no sense me trying to fool you. I have my job. You know what my job is. I'm offering a way for me to do my job and you to gain something too. A thousand dollars and a little less pressure from the Tokko. That's worth something, isn't it?"

"Actually," she admitted, "it's worth a lot."

Trofimenko reached across the writing table and took her delicate hands, feeling the tiny bones. He kissed them several times. "You are an intelligent woman, Fumei An. Intelligent and beautiful. In Russia, that's a dangerous combination."

"You left out something."

"What's that?"

Fumei An was all steel now. "Intelligent and beautiful and ambitious as well. This place is my life. I have to succeed."

"Understood. And you shall, I'm sure of it. Can I count on you? I've been truthful. And have I not been a loyal customer?"

Fumei An nodded, ever so slightly. She removed her hands from Trofimenko's, then folded then demurely in her lap. Her eyes never left the opened envelope of American bills on the desk.

"Good. Good, I'll make this worth your time and effort. Now, to business, eh? When do you expect Colonel Keith next?"

"Tomorrow morning. Just before noon."

"Perfect. How long does he usually stay?"

"Sometimes two or three hours. Sasumi gives him a bath, sometimes a massage, sometimes...more."

"Then I'll come by later, say about four o'clock. You meet Keith tomorrow afternoon, do it yourself, and be angry with him. Tell him he's disgraced poor Sasumi."

"I'll have to let Sasumi know about this too."

Trofimenko was already rising, slipping into his jacket. "This is important, Fumei. Vitally important. When I know Keith's taken the bait, and you've got the 'sacred flowers' ready, I'll have the rest of your money. If this works out, there could even be more."

Fumei An rose and went with him through the maze of screens to the Petal's front door. He kissed her gently on the forehead.

"Thanks, Fumei An. This will be good for you, for both of us." He opened the carved wooden door and slipped out onto a busy sidewalk, leading down to the Chui Dori. It was a chilly, wet and gray afternoon in the Ginza, but the Friday afternoon crowds were thick and building as the week's work wound down and commuters headed home.

"Gaijin," she muttered behind him, as the Russian disappeared into the mass of window-shoppers flowing along the street, their furoshiki scarves out, already bulging with produce for the evening meal. "Foreigners. I do not understand. Nihon changes too much for a mere comfort girl to keep up with."

She shut the door and latched it, then headed back to the furo to check on her remaining customers.

Trofimenko waited impatiently for a taxi, feeling better about the assignment Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria had just laid in his lap. Now, he had only to retrieve the Canary One disk from the rezident's technical stores room at the Embassy and put it in place. With any luck, Colonel Arlen Keith, U.S. Army, would become the perfect pipeline into MacArthur's war room in the Dai Ichi and inside of week, there would be a box of tapes full of recorded briefings on its way to Moscow Center. Shtykov had said SCAP liked to start every day with a tactical overview of the situation in Korea, at 0800 hours sharp.

They'd soon know for sure what tricks the Americans had up their sleeves

Friday, December 15, 1950

Anjin, Manchuria, People's Republic of China

11:45 p.m.

As soon as Benecky and Skiles saw the watchtowers of Camp Seven, four miles northeast of the town of Anjin, they knew they had reached their final destination. The death march from the battlefield at Hill 1282 near Yudam-ni had lasted almost three weeks. Well over half of the column of prisoners had fallen out, dead from frostbite and exposure, dead from Chinese bullets, dead from slipping on icy mountain passes and falling hundreds of feet into ravines.

Those remaining were dead too, Benecky figured. They just didn't know it yet.

Somehow, someway, unaccountably, they had survived it all. Benecky had prayed every morning, when the guards made them lie down in the scrawny bushes and packed them in with snow to conceal the column from aerial reconnaissance, prayed that Death would take him and deliver him from the ordeal. But every night, after shivering in forty-mile an hour winds, and swirling blizzards, he rose at bayonet point just after dusk, took his meal of watered-down gruel and stale bread, and marched on throughout the night, slogging up and down icy hills, across frozen ride paddies, slogging, trudging and finally the last week limping on swollen and numb feet, north, ever north toward the Yalu River valley and the border.

Benecky was certain as he could be that he knew what Hell was and he told himself he didn't need any sing-song preacher from the backwoods of Alabama to explain the concept.

Just let the motherfucker come here to Korea and he'll see Hell for good and sure.

Camp Seven was officially known as Prisoner Re-education and Corrective Labor Camp Number Seven, administered by Unit 681 of the Fiftieth Field Army of the Chinese Peoples Volunteers. For all the grandiose administrative title, it was a spartan rectangle of huts and barracks-style wooden beam buildings, arrayed in concentric squares, surrounded by three rows of barbed-wire fence, overlooked by thirty-foot high trusswork watchtowers at opposite ends of the main rectangle. There were two squares of barracks abutting each other, inside a quadrangle stockade, surrounded by the camp administration hut and guards barracks, themselves inside another perimeter of wire and icy ditches, all well open and crisscrossed with excellent fields of fire from the watchtowers.

Benecky glanced silently over at Sergeant Ray Skiles, of Bravo Two-Five, Second Mortar Platoon, and both men shook their heads silently. They had marched nearly two hundred miles in three weeks through the icy and frigid wasteland of North Korea's Taebeck Mountains, and this was the Shangri-La they'd been marching for.

"Ain't no friggin' Waldorf-Astoria, pal," Skiles muttered under his breath. Shouts cut through the air and the column stopped in place, while the wooden and wire gates were swung open.

"No? Could have fooled me."

Shouts and curses again, and Benecky felt the tip of a bayonet in his side. He turned and saw a teen-aged Chinese soldier, face wreathed in icicles, gesturing them both forward. They marched into the camp and fell into formation in the center of the prisoners' quadrangle.

A small Chinese officer screamed at them in something like English gibberish from atop a wooden crate while the formation stood at attention in ragged rows. Benecky could barely see the officer from the back of the unit. He seemed unusually small for such a loud bellowing guttural voice, stuffed like a child's doll into his heavy mustard-yellow quilted uniform. A faded red stripe ran down his trousers leg, and his fur hat had an elaborate insignia adorning the usual Chinese red star. Otherwise, he was indistinguishable from the camp guards and other Red soldiers around the grounds.

The officer harangued them for ten minutes, then the formation was split apart and the men assigned to their barracks. Skiles and Benecky found themselves rudely shuffled off to a bare and chilly wooden beam building toward one end of the quadrangle, They ducked inside through a flimsy plywood door, draped with rat-eaten cloth and found themselves surrounded by a grim, sullen group of fellow prisoners, all of them listless, staring back at the two Marines with dulled, unblinking eyes.

An Army puke, Noland stitched on a half-torn off chest pocket of his uniform, shifted and grunted a greetings.

"This here's your Charlie Barracks, boys. Make yourself at home."

With a good deal of shuffling, and groaning and griping, room was made for the Marines in a cul-de-sac of the room, a sort of bay window-like protrusion of one wall. Here a few ratty sheets and quilt patches were coughed up and Skiles and Benecky made themselves a sort of bunk. Not that it would have passed any DI's inspection back at Pendleton.

"Always glad for company, boys," Noland muttered. He wore only a sergeant's stripes, but he seemed to be in charge. "Guards usually bring us some hot food when we have guests. The men are looking forward to it."

Benecky stuck out a hand. "Tony Benecky, U.S. Marines. Bravo Two-Five, First Rifle. This here's Ray Skiles, Second Mortar."

Noland shook both their hands. His eyes were quick and wary, darting from one man to the other. His hand grip was surprisingly strong. "Staff Sergeant Luke Noland, U.S. Eighth Army, Fifth Cav. Where'd you boys get picked up anyway?"

"Yudam-ni. We were rear guard for the battalion, while they pushed on south to Hagaru. Reds jumped us and we got cut off."

Noland nodded understanding. "Same here. Reds flanked my unit south of Uijongbu. We fought 'em for awhile, but there was just too many. Lot of the men just gave up."

"Yeah, we heard there was a lot of that going around."

Benecky looked around at the prisoners stuffed into every corner of Charlie Barracks. All were chilled, feverish, sick, stricken with dysentery, frostbite, in some cases, untreated combat wounds. Every bunk and chair, every available square foot of floor space, even the two rough-hewn wooden tables were taken up with men and their quilts, ponchos, shoe-pacs and all manner of frozen, blood-stained rags and cloths. Steam drifted up from an iron pot of hot water on one table, where several prisoners, Marines from the look of them, nursed a badly wounded Corsair pilot. The pilot groaned in a constant low moan, writhing slowly on the floor. His attendants glared at Benecky and Skiles for a few moments, then went back to wiping up bloody vomit from the pilot's mouth.

"Lieutenant Goggins, boys. Shot down near the Chosin Reservoir. Broken neck, back too, most likely. He pukes his guts up several times a day. Paralyzed from the waist down."

Benecky went over to the pilot. His face was swollen and black in patches. His fingers were purplish, gangrenous, already dead from frostbite.

"Call the guards," Benecky said. He lifted up the pilot's left eyelid, saw phlegm and puss. Life was oozing out of the man right before them. "This man needs immediate attention. He ought to be in a hospital."

Noland propped himself against one of the tables and somehow found a mug of something steaming. He sipped thoughtfully at the liquid. It smelled like soup.

"Where the hell do you think you are, pal? This ain't no fuckin' resort, you know."

"To hell with that..."Benecky kicked angrily at a table leg. The table collapsed, and with it, two prisoners who had been leaning against it. They fell to the floor hard, grunting. Sullen anger filled the room, but no one moved. Noland never lifted a finger to help either of them. Benecky pulled the fallen soldiers up to a sitting position, apologizing. "What the hell's wrong with you? Ask the guards for help."

"Don't you think we have, you jarhead prick? We've asked everyday for medicine, morphine, aspirin, bandages, splints, antiseptic, alcohol, you name it. We've asked, and begged for the camp commander to take our wounded and injured into the town or to their own aid stations and care for them."

"And?"

Noland, for once, didn't seem so sure of himself. He looked down. "Oh, they took 'em all right. And they cared for them all right."

"And how are they doing? Where'd they take them?"

Noland gestured with his head, wanting Benecky to come over to the window. He pulled back the flap of cloth that had been tacked over the opening in the beams.

"See those mounds over there."

Benecky peered out and saw a small field of mounds in the center of the prisoners' barracks. Each mound was topped with a crude wooden cross.

"I see 'em."

"That's what the stinkin' Red Chinese do to our sick and injured. Every last one of them...shot in the head."

Benecky was silent. His stomach churned and his eyes burned. Noland closed the flap and tacked it back over the opening. Wind howled in around the edges.

"So now you know, Sergeant Benecky. We ain't dealing with no Salvation Army here. Camp commander's a sadistic bastard named Liu or something like that. The short little runt that addressed you when you got here. The Reds interrogate the POWs who can walk and talk. They shoot the ones who can't."

"How you figure on caring for your own?" Skiles asked. "No medicine, no bandages, what the hell are you going to do...talk 'em back to health?"

"Mister, that's about all--

Noland started after Skiles but Benecky intercepted him. "Hey, hey, hey! That's enough, that's enough! We don't need any more injured than we already have, for crying out loud. Sergeant Skiles, just cool it, already!"

Noland backed down, but his fists remained clenched. "Sorry...it's just I don't much cotton to newcomers coming in here and tramping all over us. Especially jarheads like you guys. We try and we survive, that's all I can tell you."

Benecky said, "Ain't no Marines or doggies here, pal. Just Americans. We got to stick together if we're going to get out of this. At least, we have to survive, so the world can be told what happened here. That much we got to do."

Noland was still smoldering. "Just so you know what the situation is. We tried to keep a chain of command for awhile, but the Reds shot most of our officers. Now it's just who's healthy and who's not. Those of us who aren't sick or injured help those that are. That's kind of like the way we run this place."

The final hours of the day were spent getting settled and meeting the rest of the men in the barracks. To Benecky's surprise, only a few of the prisoners were Marines: most from the Bravo Two and Bravo Three, units that had been flanked by huge Red Chinese armies in the mountains around the Reservoir. The majority of the men were Eighth Army, infantrymen, mortarmen, a few artillerymen and one medic. The pilot was a Marine: Lieutenant Chet Goggins. South Carolina boy. He'd been assigned to VMF-6, flying close air support off the Bon Homme Richard, when his F4U Corsair took a hail of anti-aircraft rounds over Sudam-ni, trying to hold off the Red hordes while Bravo Two skedaddled through the Toktong Pass. Goggins had been badly injured when the Corsair smashed into the side of a mountain. He'd been lucky just to survive the crash.

Then again, Benecky thought, maybe the dead were the lucky ones.

Dinner, when it came, was a bowl of tepid water with stringy beef strips, all two of them, and a stale piece of bread harder than rock. It was only the meal of the day, Noland told them. The beef strips were a surprise.

"We're lucky to get meat once every two weeks," Noland explained. He pressed his face close to his bowl, trying to soak up what little warmth there was, cupping his cheeks around the bowl. "I'm sure it's just the scraps the guards don't want. About every third day, we get this kind of rice porridge thing, godawful shit and cold usually, and more bread."

After they had eaten, Benecky hunkered down in the folds of the quilt and cloth he'd made a nest of and tried to sleep but it was too cold. He tossed, shivering, inching closer to Skiles, who didn't seem to mind. Social niceties be damned, he thought. We need to share warmth. Inside of two hours, the two Marines were huddled together like brothers.

The morning came, cold and gray, and a loud knocking stirred the prisoners. Three Red guards appeared in the door way. One of them, senior in rank, shuffled through the night's snowfall into the barracks and glared around at the men. He shuffled some more, kicking at a few bodies, until he came to the tiny alcove where Benecky and Skiles lay entwined.

"Ka!" he barked. "Ka hu tsien...zomo, zomo!" His buddies bent down and hoisted Benecky up by the arms. The Marine, still groggy, staggered to his feet, but the guards didn't give him time to stand upright. They dragged him anyway, feet scrambling to keep up, out the door, into the snow, then jerked him fully upright and marched him off to the inner quadrangle gate. The gate creaked open and the guards, Benecky carried along like an unwilling dog, passed through.

Noland had seen it all. Skiles, dragged himself up and stood beside the doggie sergeant, bleary-eyed, shivering in the chill wind, as they peered out the flap-window.

"What the hell--where they taking Benecky?"

"City Hall," Noland said in a low voice. "Bad news for your pal."

"City Hall?"

"That's what we call the camp administration building. You can just see it through the gate...that building with the chimney. Only chimney in the whole fuckin' camp."

Skiles' blood ran cold. "Interrogation?"

"Yep." Noland shut the flap and went back to some whittling he had been working on, some kind of wood carving he was fashioning with a shaved-down belt buckle off someone's uniform. "Looks like the 'Mayor' has taken an interest in our new visitors."

Skiles just stared at him.

Lieutenant Liu Si-lingh was the strangest 'mayor' Sergeant Tony Benecky had ever laid eyes on. He had a pig's face, with an upturned nose and narrow eyes, and a smidgen of black moustache that looked for all the world like a grease stain. In fact, in different circumstances, Benecky might even have laughed at the Red lieutenant's appearance. He looked like some kind of Three Stooges version of a Chinese laundryman, the very kind of soldier that Tenth Corps C/O General Ned Almond had said Americans shouldn't be running from at all, only a few weeks before.

The camp guards had dragged Benecky into a small room furnished with a stool and a table and chair arrangement. Benecky stood before the table, more or less at attention, while Liu handwrote some kind of order on a piece of paper. He tore of an edge of the paper, where he had been writing, and handed it to one of the guards. Then he motioned for Benecky to sit on the stool. When he didn't budge, Liu looked up, his eyes hardening. He glowered coldly at the American, then gestured again. This time, Benecky was assisted by the guards, who rammed his butt down onto the stool like he was a pile driver. The stool wobbled a moment. Benecky found himself sitting below the table, staring up at the Mayor of Camp Seven.

"Your name, please?" Liu spoke passable English, accented but with some kind of strange twang that reminded Benecky of a Kentucky mountain man.

"Benecky, Anthony LaRue. Sergeant, United States Marines. Serial number one-seven-six-three-oh--" he grunted as a rifle butt slammed into the side of his face, knocking him off the stool and onto the hard wooden floor. The guards held his head down for a minute and Benecky got a splinter up his nose.

"Don't play games with me, Yankee soldier." Liu hissed. He rose behind his table. "One simple rule here...I ask, you answer. You answer exactly. You tell the truth." He nodded to the guards, who jerked him upright, and plopped him on the stool again.

"Okay, American soldier, let us try this again. "Where are you from?"

Benecky just glared at the Chinaman. After a few moments' pause, Liu nodded ever so slightly to the guards. In the back of his mind, the Marine had already labeled them Moe and Curly. Another rifle butt to the head sent Benecky flying to the floor, this time with a bloody nose.

"I asked a question, American. You do not understand the rules? It's time for a lesson."

At that, Moe and Curly began kicking Benecky in the ribs, kicking him in the head, slamming the butts of their rifles into the small of his back. He bit his tongue to keep from screaming, but pain won out and he cried in agony, then curled into a fetal position as the kicks rained down on him. This went on for five minutes.

Liu had his goons hoist the Marine back up and plop him on the stool. He wobbled, dizzy, for a moment.

"Again, Sergeant. Where are you from?"

This time, Benecky mumbled, "Chicago."

"That's better. You're family is a rich American family?"

Benecky stared sullenly. Liu's moustache twitched like a mouse. It was a signal. The blows came again, again to the head and back. The room spun around and the floorboards rushed up to his face. Benecky found his eyes swollen shut; he could barely squint out through tiny slits. More blows, more kicks, more rifle butts. His body throbbed, begged him....

He was jerked upright, slouching in the guards' grasp, and roughly situated on the stool. They had to steady him to keep him from toppling over.

"What do you think about rich people, Sergeant Benecky? Rich American families are leeches, sucking the life out of the working class. I know you come from a rich family. Do you know what happens to rich people in Korea?"

Benecky just stared.

"Insects, Sergeant. That's what rich people are. We are not kind to insects here. Show him what happens to insects."

Benecky cringed and felt the blow to his head which sent him sprawling to the floor again. Blood spurted and his face fell into a pool of it, his own blood. He groaned and writhed a little, then a bootheel came down hard on his face, grinding his nose and eyes into the boards further, splinters and blood and sawdust and spit scraping his face from chin to forehead.

"Insects are destroyed!" 'Mayor' Liu yelled. The camp commander came around from behind his desk and leaned over Benecky's fallen body, screaming in his ear. "Destroyed mercilessly!" Liu stood up, gestured for the American to be erected again. It was a struggle, as Benecky went limp, barely conscious from repeated head butts.

"Your comrades have given up on you, Sergeant Benecky."

"Wha--?...no....they--"

"Sergeant, you are an insect. American GIs don't like sniveling, rich bastard insects like you. That's why President Truman sent you to Korea. To get rid of you. Eh? You don't believe me--?"

Liu backhanded Benecky in the face, a stinging, blood-flinging slap that burned his eyes. Somewhere in the dim and dark corners of his fading consciousness, Sergeant Anthony Benecky realized the little pig-faced 'Mayor' of Camp Seven had some kind of metal studs on his gloves. He slapped the Marine again, carving up his face into neat rows of bloody gashes.

"You think Truman gives a damn about insects!?" Liu screamed at him. He grabbed the Marine by the chin and jerked Benecky's face up, leering into his purplish eyes, mostly squeezed shut. "Look at me! Your precious President Truman is a liar, a wicked rat of a liar! He sent you here to murder Korean babies! You do murder babies, don't you, Sergeant?"

Benecky mumbled something incoherent, shaking his head groggily. "Nunhhh...." was all he could croak out. His tongue was cut and blood frothed in his throat. He started coughing, spitting up more blood.

Liu backed off, ordering his hands to be tied. Stout cord was produced and Benecky was lifted bodily off the stood, held at attention as his hands were bound tightly behind his back. He felt a hand on his head, forcing him down, forcing him to squat and he complied. But Moe had placed a piece of 2x4 board behind his knees. He was made to squat down in a low crouch, holding the board pinned between his thighs and shins, hands tied behind him.

The guards made sure his hands were extended as far behind him as they would go, pulling so hard, he thought his shoulder would pop out of its socket.

"Now, Sergeant Benecky, that is more like it," Liu cackled. "Now you are not an insect. You are a jet airplane. The jet airplane that kills Korean babies and women. But we have jet airplanes too, you know."

As if on cue, the two guards rammed their knees and bootheels into Benecky's ribs again, then made all kinds of bombing and strafing sounds, firing imaginary machine guns at him as they dove and swooped like birds around the Marine. He fell over at the first blows. It didn't matter. Moe and Curly just put him back in the same position and kept up their blows and jet sounds.

This went on for twelve hours.
CHAPTER 7

Saturday, December 16, 1950

Pyongyang, North Korea

8:00 a.m.

The field hospital was a crude affair, but Jiang Chen Li never complained. He had taken serious shrapnel wounds in the back in the American plane attack, and only the direct orders of a grateful Marshal Peng Dehuai had allowed him to be sent to the battalion aid station that the 38th Army medics had set up in a ruined produce market on the northern outskirts of Pyongyang.

There, Jiang had recuperated and rested and recovered, with the help of penicillin and a few corpsman's kits looted from the fleeing Americans. Pungent herbs from the Yangtze River valley and hot spice tea hadn't hurt either. After several weeks, Jiang felt well enough to get around the market on his own, though his back and neck bandages still made sleeping an ordeal. He was growing restless. Marshal Zhu De and the General Staff had tasked him with reporting back to Peking on the true state of affairs at the front lines of the Glorious Second Offensive against the Capitalist and Hegemonist Powers, as the campaign was officially known. Of late, he had observed little more than the poor state of medical care that the Department of Rear Services inflicted on its steady stream of casualties. After two weeks, Jiang was sure he would be safer and in better hands at the front lines.

He was scribbling a few notes on this very matter in his notebook when he was surprised by a familiar face peeking inside the one-time cabbage and lettuce stall that served as a recovery ward.

It was Marshal Peng himself.

"Comrade, I'm told you are making a full recovery." Peng ushered himself in, despite an orderly's faint protests and found a perch at the end of the cot. He looked tired, to Jiang's eyes, tired and drawn.

Jiang shrugged. "The medics seem to think I'll live. In spite of them."

They both laughed.

Peng removed his fur cap, fiddled with the red star insignia. He regarded Jiang carefully. "The medic told me that you still have metal fragments in your back. Too close to the spine, he said."

Jiang nodded. "And a nice scar. To compliment this one." He fingered an old gash over his right eyebrow, a remnant of a street fight on Shanghai's Bund as a child.

Peng smirked. "A dashing pirate, no doubt. Irresistible to the women, no?"

"Perhaps," Jiang admitted. "Comrade Marshal, the Second Offensive...what's going on? I can't get any news around this filthy place. The military situation--"

"--is favorable to us, Captain. Actually, that's why I came to see you. It turns out that I've got a greater need for you than I realized at first."

Jiang was surprised at that. He felt embarrassed facing the Marshal out of uniform. The medics had insisted he wear a sort of half robe around his trousers, so the bandages could be changed everyday and the shrapnel wounds drained and cleaned.

"I am still a spy, Marshal. I was just working on a report to the General Staff."

"So I see." Peng held out his hand, and Jiang turned the notebook over. He scowled as he read Jiang's scribbling. "Hmm. At least some of the facts are right. Of course, you're way behind...we already liberated Pyongyang. Kaesong's holding out, but the Americans are still retreating, in fact, they're running like dogs."

"I see. And Seoul?"

Peng was forthright. "In sight. If supplies hold out."

"How is the supply situation, Marshal?"

"Improved. But once we make the Han River--" Peng stopped short, and sort of half shrugged. "Hard to say. The Russians are sending us more guns and ammunition. But food, cold weather gear..." Peng just shook his head. "I have to stop my assaults every three days, so my men can loot enough food to go on. It's insane."

"I've said as much in my report."

"Now the Great Helmsman has my staff in a dither over planning a Third Offensive. I've requested that we stop at the Han River and consolidate until spring, until the weather improves. If we reach the Han, we'll have Seoul and the 38th Parallel. We'll have bloodied a few capitalist noses, made Truman and MacArthur take note of us. Pushed them back from Manchuria. We can hold a line around the Han River, maybe a bit further south indefinitely, as long as two things continue."

"Two things, Marshal?"

"We get the food and ammunition my armies need to fight defensive actions, after we dig in. There's good terrain north and east of Seoul...hills, caves, good defilade positions, that sort of thing--that favors a well-supplied defense. Give me guns and bullets and riceballs and I can hold there for a very long time."

"And the other matter?"

Peng stirred uneasily at the end of the wooden slat bed. "It's MacArthur. I don't know what he's up to. But he's capable of surprising me. He did it an Inchon. He could do it again. Frankly, I expect it, I expect something." Peng looked up and met Jiang's eyes. "I just don't know what."

Jiang could see the Marshal wrestling with an idea, some nascent infant of a scheme struggling for acceptance behind eyes hardened to the realities of combat. "MacArthur fancies himself a great strategist, Marshal. In the Japanese War, he constantly outflanked the enemy, leapfrogging from island to island, attacking them where they were weak, where they didn't expect him."

"I know his reputation," Peng said. "That's why I'm convinced he means to open up a second front, some place beyond Korea. Around my staff, I'm the only one who thinks that way."

"Formosa?"

Peng stood up abruptly. "MacArthur went to Taipei last July. He met Chiang Kai-shek. They're good friends. I think he's all but convinced the old dog to send the Kuomintang army across the Straits and make an armed landing on the mainland."

Jiang considered that, idly tugging at a loose bandage strap that had fallen around his waist. "Makes sense. Is there any proof?"

"No," Peng admitted. "That's the problem. As a matter of fact, that's why I came to see you."

Jiang suddenly felt naked, in his bloody tunic, half-robe and bandages. He stood up gingerly, wincing as he straightened up, and attempted a meek salute.

Peng waved him down. "I have a mission in mind for you, Captain Jiang. I've already checked with the medics. They intend to release you to light duty tomorrow. What I have in mind isn't exactly light duty. I need to hear it from you, honestly. It's a little reconnaissance mission."

Jiang would have kissed the Marshal for a chance at a real mission. He restrained himself. "I'm fit for duty, Comrade Marshal. And glad to help out anyway I can. But the General Staff--"

"Leave those old women to me. I'll clear it with Zhu. Look-" Peng pulled out a map from his jacket, smoothed it out on the wooden slats. The view was of all East Asia, eastern China, Japan and Korea. "I need you to go to Formosa. You're perfect for this. You've got a strategy background. I read up on your record while you were here."

Jiang's heart froze. The whole record?

"Don't worry." Peng read his mind. "I know what an ass General Aung could be. I doubt the Campaign of a Thousand Knives will go down in history as anything other than a muddled, confused, half-victory based on luck as much as anything else. We Communists beat Chiang's armies for one reason--better arms and better leadership at the tactical level. And as for Lin Piao--" Peng snorted. "Better men than you and I have

lost their tongues licking his face."

"Comrade Marshal--"

"No, you have the perfect background. You've worked intelligence for years, run small reconnaissance operations behind the lines. Your record says you lead men well, you know what targets are critical, you make good decisions under fire." He added, lowering his voice, "If this goes well, I'll make sure the General Staff pulls you up the ladder a notch or two. How does Major Jiang sound to you?"

Jiang smiled broadly. "Just fine, Comrade Marshal. It sounds just fine."

"Good. Jiang, I want you to go to Formosa. Under cover. Disguised as a refugee, perhaps. You'll land there in a small raft, with a small team. You can help pick the team. Your record says you judge men well too. We'll see. Your mission is straightforward: reconnoiter the island, especially the western coast. Observe and document what you see in the manner of military preparations. Army units, staging bases, landing craft, boats, guns, artillery, troop strength, training and morale. Look for Americans too. They're on the island, even though the Nationalists deny it. I want to know when and how Chiang and MacArthur will move. Where will they strike? Where will they land?"

Peng paused a moment, pulled out a Red Lion cigarette, then, against all field hospital regulations , shook a smoke out for Jiang too. They both lit up and puffed contentedly.

"I can't get anyone in Peking to believe me," Peng admitted. "Yet I feel such a move is entirely in character for MacArthur. He's publicly advocated it but Washington keeps turning him down, at least publicly. Their politicians must be as bad as ours. I'm sure he's frustrated."

The men discussed the size and makeup and equipment of the team. Jiang told the Marshal he wanted to draw men from the elite Sharp Swords unit, a highly-trained commando team attached to the 38th Field Army.

Peng agreed with the assessment, then noted, "I've got General Lian on a short leash, after he held back at Huichon. He owes me a favor. I'll issue the order this morning to have the Swords assemble at my field headquarters here in Pyongyang tomorrow morning. That way you can interview and select the best of them. You have a team size in mind?"

Jiang's mind was already racing, thinking ahead , planning. "Five is a good number, Comrade Marshal. Large enough to bring different weapons and skills to the task, but easy enough to command. Reconnaissance behind the lines is like a hunt. It's got to be instinctive. The team has to move as one."

Peng leveled a hard gaze at the captain. "Jiang, I won't hide the truth from you. Your unit's been given the code name Brave Wind. You've got to be ready to depart on Wednesday night, twentieth of December. That's not a lot of time for selecting and training."

"I'll make sure they're ready, Comrade Marshal. If I can have my pick of men, training will be easy."

Peng was re-assured. "No word of this to Marshal Zhu, captain. Not a peep to the General Staff. That's an order."

"Understood."

"You're to be dropped off into the waters off Formosa Wednesday night. A plane will carry you and your men and a small raft to the drop point, flying under radar coverage. This plane leaves Shenyang just after sundown. You and your team will have to travel by train from Pyongyang north to Manchuria all Tuesday night and Wednesday. And any equipment you need from around here. I've already requisitioned a special train, with passes. And there is still the risk of air attack from the Americans--don't forget that."

Jiang absentmindedly felt the bandages sticking out of his back. He'd be glad to get rid of those, and back into uniform.

"How can I forget, Marshal? I've thought of little else the last two weeks."

Peng shook hands with the young captain from the waterfront of Shanghai. Jiang saluted, and his robe flopped open. They both laughed.

"Comrade Marshal, I thank you for this. It's an honor to serve the Revolution and contribute to the Offensive against the capitalist dogs."

Peng waved that off. "Well spoken, Captain Jiang. Very well spoken. You sound just like a General Staff anniversary banner. You can serve the Revolution best by doing your duty and bringing me back facts. Tell me what Chiang and MacArthur and the Americans are really up to."

Saturday, December 16, 1950

Aboard NKVD Special Train #1 Pobeda, near the Black Sea coast

5:45 p.m.

Josef Vissarionovich Stalin especially enjoyed Western movies and particularly enjoyed Gary Cooper and John Wayne. He had boarded the special armored train, Unit #1 code-named Pobeda (Victory) at the train station outside Foros, on the Black Sea coast, just after noon. A few days at the seashore, even in the midst of a Russian winter, was always good for the soul. The great Russian Vozhd had eaten a light lunch--herring and blini, washed down with Georgian brandy, slept for three hours and awakened just as the sun was going down over the southern Caucasus and Pobeda was speeding north into the dark Russian night, through tobacco fields and rice paddies, across the broad coastal delta flats of the Don River. Like many predators, it was only at night that Stalin seemed to come alive. His eyes burned a bit brighter, his gestures grew more animated, his voice deepened and the feral leer of a well-honed nocturnal hunter descended over a face pocked and scarred with age and battle scars.

Stalin had settled back, shortly after 5 p.m., brandy and cigars at hand, in his compartment and ordered his valet Dmitri to start up a Russian-subtitled version of the American classic western movie "Fort Apache". He was troubled lately, and needed the distraction. And he also knew that Pobeda would be making a stop shortly at the station in Rostov, where she would board an important passenger bearing vital news for the Generalissimo and Protector of all the Russias. Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria had telephoned him from Vladivostok the day before to request an audience.

"I have good news, Josef Vissarionovich. I must see you at once." So it had been arranged that Beria's aircraft would fly all night and drop off the People's Commissar in Rostov, hard by the black and oily Don River. Pobeda was leaving at noon from the well-guarded dacha compound at Foros. The engineer would make a simple track change west of Krasnodar, and pull into Rostov Station sometime after 8 p.m.

Just enough time for Gaspadeen John Wayne to gun down all the enemies of the state once more, Stalin thought. He settled back in the leather couch, and sipped at the brandy, watching the cavalry officer stalk his Indian prey across some dusty scrubland in the American West.

Stalin had not slept well during the day. He was sorely troubled by Korea and the way events were developing in that distant land at the edge of Russia's Pacific frontier. Though the military situation was favorable--in fact, the Americans and their stooges had been routed and severely mauled by Mao's hordes the last few weeks--Stalin was nonetheless uneasy about the apparent success of the Chinese. Mao was hungry as a rabid dog and Stalin knew well that once the pudgy little Chairman with the callused face got a whiff of victory, he would follow and harass the Americans all the way into the sea, if he could.

There were several problems with that and Stalin found both distasteful. Stalin despised Truman and the Americans but he had a grudging respect for their weapons, especially their atomic weapons. Mao was too blind to see that. You didn't chase a bear through the forest with a knife too small to dispatch the beast. If you succeeded only in wounding a dangerous animal, you made him more dangerous, for everybody. Didn't the damned Chinese see that? Stalin subconsciously tried out a few faces, imitating John Wayne's scowl, setting his shoulders just so, aping the swagger of the Duke stalking his prey.

Then there was the small matter of just how strong and aggressive did he really want the Chinese to be anyway. Mao had millions of soldiers, most of them ragged and undisciplined peasants. While he had sent the obligatory congratulations to Peking after the rout of the Eighth Army and the near smashing of the Marines at Chosin, Stalin knew it was a hollow victory, achieved with mass and little else. The Americans had been overwhelmed by the weight of Chinese numbers. He doubted they would let that happen again. In any case, it would serve Russian interests to keep the Chinese as dependent on the Soviets for weapons and supplies as long as possible.

No sense feeding the dragon anymore than necessary.

Already Mao and his generals were screaming for more weapons and ammunition. Stalin ticked off the risks in supplying them with what they wanted: risks that the Americans might widen the war, that the Chinese would use the weapons for their own purposes, possibly to the detriment of the Soviet Union, risks that the supplies would make no difference in the outcome of the conflict, their loss nonetheless weakening the military capabilities of the Soviet Union.

All very troubling. He wondered how John Wayne would handle such a quandary. Stalin squinted at the Russian subtitles, but they really weren't needed. He knew the story. Strong and successful cavalry officer meets by-the-book newcomer commanding officer, who tries to change a winning formula and screws up everything. Indians attack and the fort is nearly overwhelmed...Stalin soon was engrossed in the battle scenes, seething at the stubbornness of Henry Fonda, embarrassed that the Indians would be allowed to assault the fort like that--wasn't it just the same with Mao and his millions?--give them guns and they'll be marching through Red Square a few years later--and in the end, only a courageous gunfighter like John Wayne, manning the ramparts while all around him cower in fear, saves the day, and beats back the Indian hordes.

Stalin absorbed the lesson and puffed on a black cigar, quite certain that the only way to deal with Mao was to be firm, to be brave and unyielding just like the Duke, and when the Indians tried to storm the fort, stand tall with six-shooters blazing. Strength and determination--that was the lesson. In truth, he thought as Dmitri came in to rewind the film and thread another into the projector, Fort Apache wasn't all that different from the Kremlin itself.

The train had started slowing noticeably as Dmitri worked with the projector, and Stalin parted the curtains to see outside. The land was dark and flat--mostly tobacco country in this part of the Kuban--and Stalin imagined he could smell the pungent aroma of the curing sheds racing by at sixty-five miles an hour. Only a narrow ribbon of light divided the night sky from the dark ground below.

That would be the outskirts of Rostov. Indeed, the phone rang and Stalin snatched it up. Engineer of Railway Troops Colonel Akubanov was on the line.

"Comrade Marshal, we are approaching Rostov. Track sixteen. I'm slowing to allow our escorts time to position themselves in front of us. Troops have already secured the platform. The Commissar is waiting. We should be arriving in about five minutes."

"Very well," Stalin grunted. Dmitri came over and held out a tray of spicy sausages in one hand and two film tapes in the other, awaiting the Generalissimo's choice. Stalin selected several items to eat and chose "Destination Tokyo" for his next movie. "And get me that Ukrainian vodka, Dmitri Yushkevich. The spertsem. Beria likes that crap. May as well feed our puppy what he likes, eh?"

"As you wish, Marshal. Shall I start the movie?"

"Wait until we're moving again. I'll enjoy comparing Cary Grant and Lavrenti Pavlovich tonight."

In time, Pobeda whistled, shrieked and shuddered to a halt at Platform 1, and the People's Commissar was shown aboard. He made his way aft to the Generalissimo's sealed compartment, nodding brusquely to the red-collared troops of the Ninth Guards Directorate stationed in the chilly cupolas between the train cars. Beria found Stalin slouched down in his leather divan testing his newly-poured spertsem and half-watching Cary Grant command a U.S. submarine into Tokyo Bay.

He nodded faintly as Beria came into the compartment and closed the door behind him.

"I have important news, Josef Vissarionovich. From Vladivostok."

Stalin's gray head was enveloped in thick cigar smoke. "Watch this, Beria. The submarine slips right through the nets into Tokyo harbor. Stupid Japanese. Look at that--right off the rudder of that ship. They must have been blind. What is this important news, anyway?"

Beria poured himself a shot of the Ukrainian vodka. He held up the bottle, eyeing the peppers soaking at the bottom with a critical eye. "I've talked with WINDWARD. And Shtykov. We've set up the penetration operation you and I talked about in Moscow. Inside MacArthur's headquarters. It's all arranged."

Stalin's eyebrows lifted. He sat up straighter in the divan and waved a hand in the movie projector beam, indicating that the sound should be turned down. Cary Grant fell silent, still mouthing platitudes at his periscope.

"This operation--you're sure it'll work?"

"It's risky," Beria admitted. "But the rewards are so great. Imagine it: every morning, General MacArthur conducts a staff briefing. If WINDWARD does his job, we'll have recorded transcripts of everything said...strategy and tactics, troop deployments, officer assignments, everything."

Stalin rubbed his chin, glaring at the flickering images on the silent movie screen. "I met with Zhukov and Koniev the other day. We talked strategy. I asked them about MacArthur, Eisenhower, all of them."

"And?"

Stalin lay back in his divan, and propped his head up with folded arms, staring at the ceiling. At length, he parted the curtains. Pobeda had already started moving and both men saw a landscape of grimy factories and oil well heads racing by, as Rostov dropped behind them. Soon, the train was rocking back and forth in a sleepy rhythm, racing at seventy miles an hour north to Moscow and Yaroslavl Station.

"Zhukov doesn't trust MacArthur. Who does? He's sure the Americans are going to goad the Nationalist Chinese into attacking the mainland, opening up a second front. He's sure MacArthur's got some trick he's planning. I'm not so sure. I think Chiang is beaten. This second front is a mirage, I'm convinced of it. Or a screen for something else."

Beria was thinking of the intercepts and dispatches BLUEJAY had sent them from the States. "Atomic bomb, perhaps?"

"Perhaps. But I don't really think so. I don't think Truman has the guts."

"I hear from WINDWARD that MacArthur and Truman don't get along. MacArthur doesn't always listen to his Commander in Chief."

"Really?" Stalin smirked. "Imagine that. Truman and I have something in common. No, I know Truman. I met the man at Potsdam, after the Hitlerist war. He's a clerk, with a sharp tongue. That's all. If he wants to make more trouble for us in Asia, we have the ability to do the same for him in Berlin and elsewhere in Europe."

Stalin suddenly got up and went to a small desk in the corner. By the glow of the movie screen over his head, he hunted for a tablet and a pen.

"Here, I'll put you at ease, Lavrenti Pavlovich. I'll dictate an order for Zhukov right now. Right to his field headquarters. We can transmit it at our next stop...that should probably be Ryazan. I'll order Engineer Colonel Akubanov to stop there and have this order sent off right away, tonight." Stalin sat at the desk and scribbled furiously for a few minutes. "I'm advising the good Marshal to develop a plan for seizing by force all of Berlin. Maybe we'll even bite off a few pieces of this new thing called West Germany for good measure, say around the Fulda Gap." He wrote some more.

"Josef Vissarionovich, don't forget this NATO. The West has armies in Germany too. The Americans alone have several hundred thousand troops. We've got intelligence indicating they've even stationed atomic bombs in Britain."

"Not to worry," Stalin panned the thought. "It's a game Truman and I play, a game of bluff. He tries to bluff me, I bluff back. I'll tell Molotov to let some of this slip

next time he meets Harriman or Kennan." Averill Harriman was the American ambassador in Moscow. "We'll hold this threat over Truman's head to ensure the Americans don't do anything foolish in Korea."

Beria asked. "Will Zhukov be allotted atomic bombs?"

Stalin stroked his gray moustache thoughtfully. "Of course. Why not? We should meet the Americans head on. Threaten like with like. That's how the game is played. We'll see how Mr. Truman likes that medicine."

On the movie screen over the Generalissimo's head, the action had built to a climax. Bright flame and smoke and explosions lit up the darkened compartment. Cary Grant's submarine had just torpedoed a Japanese destroyer.

Saturday, December 16, 1950

Tokyo

11:15 a.m.

The furo that Fumei An had selected for Colonel Arlen Keith, U.S. Army, was an ornate tile and pine bath steaming hot with fragrant blossoms of lilac and coriander draped over delicate carved screens surrounding the pool. She assigned three other girls to the Colonel that Saturday morning: Sasumi, Miyasi, and Daisuko. Sponge baths started promptly at 11:00 and inside half an hour, Keith was luxuriating in the languid waters of the pool, half asleep, his head lolling off to one side as the girls scrubbed and washed the back and shoulders of the big amerikagoshukoku.

Arlen Keith was perfectly well aware of the recent crackdown by SCAP's Government Section and its constipated peacock of a commander General Whitney on where a poor GI could go for a good time. As staff assistant to SCAP's G-3, "Pinky" Wright, Keith figured rank ought to have some privileges, so he hadn't worried a whole lot about the arrests and the late night raids by the MPs and the sweeps of the Ginza and the Chui Dori, all designed mainly (so he calculated) to net the poor scumbags of soldiers and sailors and Marines who had too many dollars in their pockets and nowhere decent to spend it. So much the better, he had told himself, witnessing one such raid two nights ago (the Japanese called them fuhoshinnyu inazuma--"lightning attack") as nearly a hundred unsuspecting and protesting defenders of Western freedom and democracy were rounded up by MPs and Shore Patrol squads and herded off to hastily erected stockades down at Tsukushima docks in the port quarter.

Such sweeps made businesspeople like Fumei An more than a little nervous but that wasn't altogether a bad thing for steady and important customers, Colonel Arlen Keith figured. It was almost predictable that after a night of "lightning attacks" on the off-limits establishments of the Ginza, customer service and prices improved and a really dedicated pleasure-seeker could ferret out enough bargains and deals to make the sharpest-eyed shopper blush with delight. Always the morning after, you could count on special services, sales, drastic price cuts and extra features sprouting like shitake in wet soil.

Which was why Fumei An and her girls were lavishing embarrassing amounts of attention and care on the big, sandy-haired American gaijin soldier.

Arlen Keith had lolled himself nearly to sleep in the pool, his lips moving in time with Daisuko's plaintive plucking of the traditional shamisen harp, when Fumei An realized she had a job to do. She had made a promise to the ruso spy Trofimenko and she needed the money he had offered her. She abruptly stood up and clapped her hands loudly. The claps sounded like gunshots and startled Keith awake. He floundered splashing for a moment.

"Sasumi, Daisuko, Miyasi, leave us now! Quick, quick! Leave us alone. I have business with sumiso san." The three girls fetched up their kimonos and sponges and oil and perfume bottles and scurried out of the furo, trailing lilac and lilly petals.

Keith splashed water petulantly. "What was that all about, Fumei? I was just starting to relax."

Fumei An bustled about the pool, picking up towels and flower stems and petals.

"Hey, what gives? I paid for a full session. It's not even half up yet."

Fumei An stacked her gatherings neatly on a tatami mat and came over to the pool. She folded her hands demurely, smiling ever so enigmatically down at the Colonel.

"I am sorry Colonel Keith-san. Please forgive me. There is business we must discuss. Important business."

Keith's eyes narrowed. What the hell--"You want more money, is that it? I thought twenty dollar was the rate. After the raids last night--"

Fumei An made a face. "No, no, no. Not at all. Other business." She seemed at a loss for words, most unusual for a geisha legendary throughout the Ginza. She plucked impatiently at a dark curl of hair coiling over her forehead. "Serious business. About Sasumi."

"Sasumi?" Keith sat up abruptly, sending a small wave of water over the lip of the pool, dousing Fumei's kimono. She backed away as if stung. "What's wrong with Sasumi?"

Fumei An closed her eyes. This was harder than she imagined. Sasumi was just a child, a harvest girl, really. She'd come to Tokyo a year ago, and straight away gotten in with the wrong crowd, deflowered by the Yakuza, sold like cattle to a cruel but doddering industrialist. Still, the money--

"Sasumi is--how do you say?--ninshin shite iru--with child. She is--" Fumei An stopped, tears filling her eyes. "Embarrassed...yes, that's the word. She doesn't talk about it but--"

"What? With child?" Keith stared at Fumei. "You mean she's pregnant?"

Fumei An could only nod sadly. Truly, this was hard...the hardest thing she had ever done. Her voice was a whisper. "It is so."

"Pregnant."

Fumei An nodded quickly. "For geisha, ninshin is very bad. Geisha cannot have children. It is not permitted. She must leave. Or she must--" and Fumei could not say the word...she didn't know the English for abortion.

Keith just sat in the pool, staring down at the waters. He was stunned, embarrassed, shocked. Lights wisps of steam drifted across the surface. Surely, she doesn't think-- "Sasumi's my favorite. I've always been good to her. I always tip her very well. You know that."

Fumei An let tears roll down her cheeks. "In October, you came to the Happy Rose Petal. Don't you remember? The special night. You and Sasumi and Doi, together in the Chamber of the Willow Trees, in the back. I played your favorite music, then Daisuko played the shamisen. That was to cover the noises. Noises of love...we all heard them. The Rose Petal was most happy that night."

Keith well remembered it. He'd paid extra for Sasumi and Doi's special attentions that night, taking advantage of a weekend offer Fumei An had concocted to improve business. What a time they had had, the three of them. Keith had almost put a bare foot through the walls. Even the Kama Sutra didn't cover half of what they did to him.

"Fumei An, you're not saying--you're not implying--?"

She nodded sadly. "It is so, Keith-san. Sasumi is nishin. You are the only

lover--"

"Well, doesn't she--you know--do something? Take something, or protect herself or something?"

A sad nod. "Geisha not allowed to be ninshin. I can't explain either--Sasumi is your favorite. She loves you too, Keith-san. But she--now, she is disgraced."

"Damn." Keith just couldn't believe it. How on God's green earth had that happened? Well, that was a pretty stupid thing to say. But how--? "Damn. You're saying, when Sasumi and Doi and me all--er, made love--that somehow...some way, she became pregnant. I got her pregnant--that's what you're saying? I want to be clear on this."

"It is so."

Shit. Of all the--Keith could only shake his head. This is just fucking wonderful...me a colonel in the United States Army...chestful of ribbons and now I'm a friggin' daddy to a geisha girl. Of course, the truth was even simpler than that: under Occupation law, an American Army officer caught knocking up a Japanese girl would probably be court-martialed and shipped stateside, if Whitney didn't string him up in the courtyard of the Dai-Ichi first. From the time of the Jap surrender in Tokyo Bay in '45, SCAP had consistently taken a dim view of fraternizing with the natives. Not that anyone ever paid attention.

"Why did you say she is disgraced?"

Fumei An delicately wiped tears away with a tissue. She clutched up her kimono tighter. "Sasumi is in hiding. She may commit seppuku."

"What? What the hell? For God's sake, why?"

"It is geisha tradition. The training is very severe. No one can be in the hanamachi, the district, the--oh, what is the word?...the neighborhood of the geisha, who is with child. The geisha have many skills, as you know. Dance, conversation, serving tea and sake in the o-chaya houses, telling stories...she cannot perform her duties well when she carries a child. That is the rule. Sasumi knows that. Now, she is disgraced, truly Keith-san, she is heartbroken. Sasumi is a simple harvest girl. She was very poor as a child, actually an orphan. She came to the hanamchi to make a better life. And now, when most women would be happy to be ninshin, she must be in hiding. Her life is over."

Keith decided to get out. He climbed out of the pool, took a towel and dried himself off. Fumei An fitted him with the silk robe and slippers, then just bowed her head, shaking it sadly. "Very sad, Keith-san."

Keith cinched up the robe. "Fumei An, I know you too well. And you know me. You're not telling me all this for no reason." He took her tiny head in his hands, kissed her lightly on the forehead. "What's gives? You want something, I can tell."

"Only what is best for Sasumi."

Keith was already groping around for his trousers, hunting for his wallet. "You want money? No problem. I can help there. Here--" he fished out a few tens and pressed them into Fumei An's hands. She didn't resist.

"Money is not going to help, Keith-san."

"No. What then? What the hell do you want me to do? You want me to marry her? You know better than that."

"There is a better way. But with the Tokko and the Army sweeping the Ginza regularly, I must be careful. Happy Rose Petal is my life. I run a good business. Honest business. I don't want Petal to be closed. I don't want trouble for you...or me."

"Then what do you want from me?"

Thinking about the job the ruso spy wanted her to do, she realized that it was mainly a question of timing. Timing and nuance. Something any geisha mastered early on in the schooling of the 'willow girls.' And she certainly knew GIs. She knew Keith-san; he'd been a faithful and profitable customer for several years now. She had pushed him about as far as she dared and when she judged that the anxious colonel was rapidly becoming a pitiable nervous wreck, she finally offered a solution.

"There is a way to help Sasumi, Keith-san. If you are willing. It is not money. You Americans are rich. You solve all problems with money. But some problems cannot be solved with money."

Keith was practically ready to explode. "So tell me, for crying out loud. What do I have to do?" He could already see Courtney Whitney's grinning face in his mind, clucking like a fat schoolteacher while he slipped a noose over Keith's neck.

"It's an old custom in Nihon. For when a woman's honor has been dirtied."

Jesus H. Christ. Keith paced around the tiled floor of the furo like a caged animal. "Do I have to beg you or what?"

Fumei An backed up to a low tile wall, actually a planter filled with ferns and violet and orange flower blossoms. She sat down. "The custom is called kereizuki kaze. It means 'the wind that cleanses.'" She had made that up just this morning and was quite proud of the idea, actually.

Keith rolled the phrase around in his mouth for a moment. "Clean wind. So?"

"If I give you a bouquet of flowers, very special lilacs, and you take these flowers and place them in your apartment or where you work, in a place of great dignity and solemn words--and Keith-san, you must think very hard about this and make the right decision--the flowers which have been blessed by our god Amaterasu, patron of the geisha, will clean the air that has been dirtied by the disgraceful act of the bearer. The air and the soul of the disgraced will be as new, just like the morning air is fresh with sunshine, and the flower bearer will be forgiven and made clean again. That is the custom. That is the kereizuki kaze."

Keith was squinting at her, trying to follow the story, the reasoning. "I don't get it...a bouquet of flowers. A pot of flowers? And I put it in my quarters...and then, poof, overnight, the world's okay?"

Fumei An hoped she hadn't embellished the story too much. For just an instant, she wasn't sure Keith-san would buy it. "The flowers must be blessed in a ceremony. A simple ceremony where the god Amaterasu prepares the flowers for their sacred duty. After that, I arrange the flowers in the prescribed way, just so, in uekibachi, as it is called, and give them to you. And this is most important, Keith-san...where is the one place you go, that is most solemn, most dignified, where words are spoken and decisions are made that have great importance. The one place?"

Keith had to think about that. He'd been raised Roman Catholic but he hadn't attended a Mass in years. There was a chapel down at Atsugi Field, maybe that would do.

"Do I have to go to this place regularly?"

Fumei An was trying to delicately guide him to naming the right place, making the right decision. Trofimenko was insistent on MacArthur's war room. "Yes, it would be better. Is there a room where you work...in the Dai Ichi?"

"The Dai Ichi?" He hadn't even considered that. "My office, I suppose. But that's just a cubicle with a beat-up metal desk. I'm not even there that often. Not real dignified, either. There's coffee stains and cigarette butts all over the place."

"Perhaps, elsewhere in Dai Ichi."

Keith pondered the matter. "The most solemn place would probably the briefing room. Sixth floor. Big decisions are made there. But I don't really work there. Just show up to take notes for General Wright or General Craft."

Bingo! Fumei An loved that GI term. She used it a lot with the girls at the Petal. She wasn't too shabby at the game either. "Perhaps that is the place, Keith-san. Could you place a bouquet of flowers there?"

Keith ran a hand through his sweaty blond hair. "I guess. You can't just walk into the briefing room. And then there's Security...pretty damn tight now. I'd either have to be called to a briefing or have a sixth floor pass." Keith was nervously rubbing his hands, calculating, imagining excuses, conjuring up a plan. "It could probably be done. You're sure this is the only way? I mean, what about a church or a chapel? That's dignified and solemn."

Fumei An had to quash that idea right away. "Dai Ichi is best. You spend a lot of time there. Your spirit--your tamashii, your soul, is strongest there, I'm sure of that."

"And this is the only way?"

"No, Keith-san. It is the best way. I don't want to report this to the authorities, to the Tokko. That's bad for me and for you."

"Amen to that. And I don't want Sasumi going around stabbing herself with a knife either. No suicides, okay Fumei? Promise me that. Not on my watch. Jesus, the place would be overrun with cops and MPs if she did that."

"No seppuku. I promise. But you too must promise. Kereizuki kaze is very serious business. You promise me now, you place the uekibachi flowers where we have discussed. That is the best place."

Keith looked pained at the thought but he finally relented. "I guess that's what I have to do. I'll have to think of way to get in there, without setting off the Security pukes. When can I get these flowers."

Fumei An told him to come Sunday afternoon, late. "They are delicate...the lilacs. They have to picked carefully, washed, blessed at the Yokuba shrine--you know that is just around the corner on Daze Dori--then they are dipped in the oils and fragrances and I arrange the basket. After all this, the uekibachi is kept overnight in Sasumi's room, to absorb the essence of the dishonor you have done to her. Then, you may have the basket. Monday morning, as soon as you can, carry the basket to this very important room." She lowered her face, pressed her hands together as if in prayer. "Keith-san, you must tell me the truth. This room--it is the most important, the most solemn, the most dignified you are in at the Dai Ichi?"

Keith was already thinking ahead. "Oh, no question about it. Very important decisions are made there every day. Makassar--General MacArthur-- runs briefings there. Will that do the job, you think?"

Fumei An offered him an enigmatic smile. "Of course, Colonel Keith-san. Quite nicely."
CHAPTER 8

Monday, December 18, 1950

Yokota Air Base, Japan

8:00 a.m.

"Begging the General's pardon, but bombing missions have to have priority here, sir." Brigadier General Ray Wells just couldn't believe what he was hearing but considering the source, then again, maybe he shouldn't have been so surprised.

General Clayton LaSalle knew he was walking a tightrope. Yokota wasn't even home base for the 31st Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron. The 31st had set up shop down at Kadena, Okinawa, not long after Far Eastern Air Forces Forces (FEAF) Bomber Command had been cobbled together from elements of the 22nd and 92nd Medium Bomb Groups. General "Rosie" O'Donnell was running things for FEAF Bomber Command, and the 31st was part of his shop. Inasmuch as LaSalle's had done a lifetime's worth of fancy explaining to O'Donnell and a skeptical inquiry board after he'd pranged Lucky Lucy into the Sea of Japan, he really didn't find Wells' attitude all that surprising.

Which didn't mean he had to put up with it, either.

Yokota was twenty-eight miles northwest of downtown Tokyo and Wells ran 19th Bombardment Group's three squadrons of B-29s like a well-tuned instrument, sending formations everyday over strategic targets in North Korea and along the southern half of the Yalu River valley, pounding Red troop and supply concentrations, slamming his ammo factories and refineries and generally laying waste to every miserable little hut that even looked like it might harbor gook soldiers and guns. He was a bulldog in the same mold as Patton and "Johnnie" Walker and Curtis LeMay, even down to the unlit cigar clenched between the teeth.

Friggin' dinosaurs, LaSalle thought of them all.

Still, LaSalle could understand Wells's frustrations. 19th was administratively attached to Bomber Command and had been supporting operations in Korea since late July. Wells had been running his own show since then and he'd put his own stamp on the way things were done around the base. That morning, LaSalle had hopped in an Air Force sedan in Tokyo and made the ride out to Yokota ostensibly to make an operational readiness inspection for SCAP himself. At least, that's what the orders said; Wells inspected the papers carefully, squinting up at LaSalle like a school principal dubious over a kid's hall pass.

The real reason LaSalle had come was rather more complicated and he was damned if he was going to get into a pissing match with a nominally junior officer over the details.

Wells sat up straight and hunched over the beat-up metal desk that served as his workspace in the Group Commander's office. "Just what the hell is this 'special mission authorized by SCAP anyway?'"

LaSalle started to reply but stopped as a Superfort out on the Runway 18 Right revved up her Wright Cyclones to take-off power. For a long moment, the aircraft just squatted at the end of the runway, gathering power, straining at the leash. At last, when it looked like the thing might blow sky high or shake herself to pieces, the pilot let off the brakes and the bird began rolling, slowly at first, then gathering speed. Somewhere past the 6000-foot mark, the huge Superfort rotated on her rear wheels and staggered into the sky, carrying a full load of 500-pounders westward, toward Korea and her targets, ready to pulverize some unlucky bunch of Red bastards.

Wells waved the orders like a wad of smelly tissue paper. "Says here, General, that SCAP's authorized you to cherry-pick five of my aircraft. I don't mind telling you sir, that we are a combat outfit. I don't have five aircraft to spare for you."

LaSalle wanted to slam a fist in the little pug's face but he swallowed his anger. "I'm sorry about that, Ray, but orders are orders. That's why I'm here. I'm going to make an inspection and see what's serviceable and flyable in the hangar and make a decision this morning. Five of your B-29s will be temporarily assigned to me for special duty. I'm also requisitioning five of your crews. There'll be a briefing over in the mess hall in Hangar Two at 1200 hours. A classified briefing."

Wells's face screwed up into knots. "Well, hell, General, that's just great! How am I supposed to run a war like that? I've got me a target list a mile long and just three squadrons to cover it. Not even full squadrons, mind you, since a third of my birds are in the shop all the time. How can I put ordnance on target if I have to give up five birds just like that?"

LaSalle tried a new approach. "Ray, look, I know how you feel. But this mission's got MacArthur's personal approval." He hadn't wanted to show the authorizing letter, since Paul Craft had forged it on SCAP stationery but that was another matter. Finally, Wells left him no choice. LaSalle pulled out the authorization and shoved across the desk.

Wells read it grimly, frowning deeper and deeper. "I don't know what kind of half-baked, cockamamie scheme is going on here, sir, but I don't like it." Wells figured he knew perfectly well why LaSalle showed up so often at Yokota. The man was a rated B-29 pilot, despite what had happened to Lucky Lucy--and that scuttlebutt was all over the Fifth Air Force now--and he was stationed in Tokyo, near enough to hop a ride out to the base once or twice a month, pull rank and get himself a check ride in a '29, just to keep his hours and his rating up. That was the real answer. He handed the authorizing letter back to LaSalle.

LaSalle said, "You're not required to like it, General Wells. You're only required to assist me. Is that understood?"

Wells glared across the desk at the man who had one more star than he did. He jammed another unlit cigar in his mouth. The divide between them could not have been greater had LaSalle been Pope and Wells the parishioner. "Yes, sir. Shit, General, I'm just saying we got bombing missions to do and I need every plane I can get my hands on. I've already had my hands slapped robbing Superforts from 19th at Andersen-Guam."

"You'll get more than your hands slapped if I don't get my five planes assigned to me today," LaSalle told him. He stood up, followed reluctantly by Wells. "Send for a jeep. I want to ride down the flight line and talk with the crews."

"Yes, sir," Wells snatched up the phone and ordered a jeep and a driver. Escort would be more like it, he thought as he hung up. He'd long made it a standing order that any of MacArthur's spies would be properly escorted everywhere they went on this base. In the end, though, there was precious little Wells could do about the situation. He saluted the Major General from Tokyo and breathed a deep sigh of frustration when LaSalle left with the tech sergeant from Flight Ops. And he made a mental note to himself as the two men sped off in the Jeep that he'd give that tech sergeant the debriefing of his life when LaSalle had finally departed Yokota.

"Special mission, my ass," he muttered. He stalked off to the Flight Ops building himself, intending to run down the list of upcoming missions Bomber Command had sent him, to see which ones could be put off while LaSalle was off flying to God knew where with his commandeered flight of Superforts.

LaSalle ordered Tech Sergeant Delaney to pull over outside Hangar Two, halfway down the flight line. The Jeep braked to a squealing halt and he got out and went in. LaSalle knew from his own experience just which aircraft he wanted. He quickly found three of them, two in the hangar undergoing routine engine maintenance checks and one outside on the tarmac, getting some new nose art and a hydraulic system flush.

LaSalle had a short list of tail numbers and readily confirmed that birds 007665, 8777, and 9854 were listed. Before arriving, he'd studied the reports of maintenance logs and operational histories of these three aircraft and two others--one on a mission up North and one down at Kadena, Okinawa--and decided these were the ones to requisition for Gallant Flag. General Ray Wells was a potential stumbling block and LaSalle would have to watch out for any nosy inquiries around Bomber Command that Wells might put through. He didn't want any more brass snooping around Gallant Flag than necessary. A few pointed questions from Rosie O'Donnell or someone at his level could well smother the whole mission before it got off the ground. They had provisional approval from SCAP, but the mission to deliver atom bombs to Mao's Red hordes for a New Year's holiday was so sensitive that LaSalle doubted MacArthur would ever admit to any such undertaking if it came up in an official inquiry.

LaSalle wandered into the hangar and headed over to the ground crew servicing #7665. She was a beautiful bird, her nose stenciled with a fistful of firecrackers, and underneath in vivid red letters was the ship's name: Hellzapoppin'. Two of her Wright Cyclones had been unzipped and their innards dropped onto wooden dollies, while several pairs of legs dangled out of the engine nacelles, as mechanics worked inside the engine. Big canvas tarps had been spread out on the cement floor of the hangar, and both portside engines had their 4-bladed props detached and laid out for inspection.

"Mornin', General" said one of the mechanics. A quick salute from the maintenance team brought a return from LaSalle.

"What's up, boys? She gonna be fit to fly anytime soon?"

The crew chief was Tech Sergeant Carl Gauss, covered with grease up to his elbows. Gauss nodded proudly. "She will be, General. This here's a real trooper. She just goes out, drops her load, and comes back. All very businesslike."

LaSalle consulted his list. It indicated that the pilot was one Major Chester "Kit" Carson. "Where's the Major today?"

Gauss jerked his thumb up toward the cockpit. "Breathing down my electrician's neck upstairs. He's changing out an altimeter. Spool went bad on the old one."

"I'd like to have a word with him."

"Sure thing, General. Need a boost?" The crew ladder was up in the hatchway.

Gauss made a platform with his hands interlocked and hoisted LaSalle up into the bottom of the bird cage. He pulled himself up into the aircraft, hearing muffled voices overhead, up in the pilot's station.

"Major Carson? You up there?"

A distant voice. "Who's calling?"

"General LaSalle. I need to have a word with you."

There was a commotion. "Ah...yes, sir, right away, sir. Be right down there."

"Don't bother. I'll come up." LaSalle climbed the short stepladder and stuck his head up next to the red brake levers. Carson was sitting in the pilot's seat, a wiring diagram spread across his lap. Under the console, LaSalle saw a man's legs poking out, the electrician Sergeant Gauss had told him about. Carson sat up straighter, half saluting, as LaSalle came up.

"General LaSalle...."

"At ease, men. As you were." He hoisted himself up into the bird cage and plopped down in the co-pilot's seat. "Trouble?"

"Uh, no, sir, we don't think so, sir. I'm having Cookie swap out my altimeter. We ran into some problems on the last trip up North."

Sergeant Stan Cook, the electrician, was just screwing in the instrument and securing it to its mount, from behind the instrument panel. "Be through in a sec, sir."

LaSalle knew "Kit" Carson pretty well from the mission logs and sitreps he'd read in Tokyo. Twenty-eight missions over Korea. Rated in the '29s for the last four years. DFC awarded in September for nursing a badly shot-up Superfort back to Japan after sustaining heavy flak damage over the railhead at Sunchon--two engines, damaged landing gear, wings half shot away and a dead co-pilot--all in all, quite a story. The write-up in Stars and Stripes hadn't remotely done justice to the courage of the man under fire. LaSalle knew and deeply respected the young Kansan. Cool as a cucumber, they called him around the ready rooms. He'd come by his nickname "Kit" after the Sunchon mission.

LaSalle knew something else about the kid as well: like a lot of Bomber Command pilots, he was deeply frustrated with the pace and the conduct of the war. LaSalle sometimes felt like a breeder of prize race horses, all bred for speed, the best training, the best food and the best riders, only the track owner wouldn't let them race over five miles an hour. That was Washington for you. They had the bombs and the planes and the men and the courage to dust up the Reds but good along the Manchurian border. But the great god Policy forbade approaching the border or any targets within ten miles of it. That chafed and LaSalle knew it. He'd gotten royally chewed out for losing a perfectly good Superfort in the Sea of Japan a few weeks ago but Bomber Command didn't know the half of it. He'd managed to nurse a '29 unarmed into Manchurian airspace, fight off a flock of MiGs and make it out alive, but so far, only the surviving members of the crew knew the whole story and he'd sworn them all to absolute secrecy.

If Bomber Command were ever going to be effective at doing its part to roll back Communism, LaSalle was quite certain, missions like Lucky Lucy's would have to happen, policy be damned. The only question was which was worse: Red Chinese flak or Washington politics.

"Major, I was reading the latest sitreps from your last mission this morning."

Carson was studying the wiring diagram, but he looked up with a quizzical half-smirk on his face. "Yes, sir, that one was a doozy. Reds plastered the sky with flak. We took a few hits around the tail, cracked a gunner's sight and that was about it."

"Got your bombs on target in good order?"

Carson nodded. "Smashed a railyard to smithereens, General. Got the switchhouse with incendiaries and a few tank cars went off like the Fourth of July. I got oil right on my windscreen, we were flying so low."

"According to the sitrep, you dropped your load and circled around again, diving on the target. You made several passes below five thousand feet. Against mission orders and operational regs."

Carson dropped his head like a naughty boy. "Yes, sir. We had a few special 'cocktails' my boys wanted to drop out of the bomb bays. Special mix of incendiaries--my bombardier cooked 'em up last week. We just wanted to try them out on a rail siding--looked like ammo stored down there, so I went down on the deck for a look-see."

"And?"

Carson was all grin. "Worked like a charm. That ammo train just disintegrated right under our feet."

LaSalle didn't know whether to chew him out or slap him on the back. "You ignored mission orders, requiring you to exit the target zone on a prescribed heading at a prescribed altitude, in formation, after dropping your load."

"Yes, sir." A hang dog face.

"And you carried unauthorized explosives in the bomb bay, along with your 500-pounders? Unauthorized and untested. You deliberately risked the mission, your aircraft and all your crew just to drop a few 'experimental' incendiaries on a target of opportunity?"

"Yes, sir."

"And because you ignored operational orders and made several passes at unauthorized low altitudes, you sustained severe damage to the tailplane and belly turret of your aircraft, injuring the gunner, Airman Stewart, in the process?"

'Yes, sir, that is true, sir."

LaSalle sighed. "I suppose Ops took a piece out of your hide when you got back?"

Carson muttered, "Yes, sir, that they did."

LaSalle said, "Well, I'm not going to. Son, I came up here to shake your hand, not

bite your ass. Well done. In spite of Fifth Air Force and Bomber Command, well done."

Then two men shook hands. Carson's face brightened considerably.

"Major," LaSalle went on., "there's another reason I came out to Yokota. I happen to know a lot of my pilots feel the same way I do. About the war, I mean."

"How's that, General?"

LaSalle rubbed his chin and placed his hands on the half-wheel control yoke, feeling its grip. "None of us are happy with the way this war's being fought. I'm not saying anything that you don't already know about either. We got our hands tied over approaching the Chinese border. We got our hands tied on what targets we can go after. We got operational restrictions from FEAF and Bomber Command, like the altitudes and approaches we can fly, because Curt LeMay doesn't want to lose any of his precious '29s. The Boeing B-29 is the only aircraft rated by Strategic Air Command to carry atomic bombs."

Carson folded up the wiring diagram and started grabbing Sergeant Cook's wire cutters and tools, as the electrician backed out from behind the panel. He practically sat in LaSalle's lap as he emerged.

"Oh, sorry, sir, I didn't know you were in that seat." LaSalle caught Cook by the elbows before he fell down the stepladder. "I'm just finishing up."

"Go right ahead, Sergeant." LaSalle figured what he had to say was for Carson's ears only.

Cook ran a continuity check on the wiring he had just installed. The voltmeter looked good and the electrician smiled, wiping some sweat off his face.

"Looks like that'll do her. Anything else, Major?"

Carson said, "No, thanks Cookie. Why don't you check with the crew chief. There might be some more electrical damage back aft, around that belly turret."

Cook saluted both of them. "Sure thing, Major. General--" He slipped expertly down the ladder and was gone.

"Sure wish I had a few of those atomic bombs," Carson said, when he was sure Cookie was out of hearing. "I'd seal up that border real good. Drop me a few of those bridges into the Yalu River. Incinerate a few million Red bastards in the process."

LaSalle knew he had come to the right place. "Major, what would you say if I told there is way you could do exactly that? A chance to do something about the war, in a way that would probably bring this unpleasantness to a very quick end. Would you be interested in hearing more?"

At first, Carson didn't know if LaSalle was kidding or not. "Sure. You bet I would. Sir."

LaSalle spent the next ten minutes describing in general terms an elite mission, known only as Gallant Flag, authorized by SCAP himself, requiring five B-29s and trained crews but otherwise classified Most Top Secret.

"Even General Wells doesn't have full clearance on this," LaSalle warned him. "What I'm telling you now...you keep it to yourself. Understand?"

"Yes, sir." It was evident that Carson had become an eager puppy again. As the General related the bare details of Gallant Flag, the Major's eyes grew wide and his tongue began exploring the corners of his mouth, as if he were ready to begin salivating at the prospect laid out before him. Holy cow, was all the young Kansan could get out.

"I asked you before, Major Carson, if you wanted to get in on this little raid. I'll ask you again, right now. No prejudice to your ratings, your career. Nothing will happen if you say no, at this point. But once you're in, you're in for good. Can I count on you, son?"

Carson was beaming. "Sir, is the Pope Catholic? You can definitely count on me. And my crew. When do we go?"

"Hold your horses." LaSalle pulled out the list he had brought with him from the FEAF GHQ. "Here, initial this, next to your name. This is officially unofficial, Major. Only MacArthur sees this. Your initials are your word. "

Carson scribbled on the paper, handed it back to LaSalle. The General folded the page and stuffed it in his flight jacket. "What about your crew?"

Carson seemed like a little boy the night before Christmas. "I can speak for them, General. They'll want to be in on this as well."

"Just the same, I better speak with them myself. You'll all have the same briefing together and you'll be asked to sign some more papers. Like I said, officially unofficial. The number of people who know about this mission is restricted, on a need to know basis. You and your crew show up in the Ready Room at Hangar Two at 1200 hours today."

"Yes, sir."

LaSalle was already up and halfway down the stepladder. He had more crews he needed to visit this morning. "Oh, and one more thing, Major."

"Sir?"

"You're authorized to pass the word around the flight line, no details, but anyone else who's interested in coming to this briefing, tell 'em to come. Word of warning though: the briefing is classified. Once it starts, no one leaves without permission. Got that?"

Carson smiled broadly. "Yes, sir, loud and clear."

LaSalle disappeared down the hatch.

Hangar Two's ready room was a small auditorium with metal folding chairs, a platform up front, maps on three walls and a projector stand at the rear. Clayton LaSalle walked up to the lectern as the seven B-29 crews assembled stood at attention, called to order by a sergeant at the door. LaSalle faced the crewmen.

"At ease, men. Take your seats." A general commotion followed as the crowd situated themselves in their chairs. "This briefing is classified. Everything I'm about to tell you is Most Top Secret." As if to reinforce LaSalle's words, a small squad of Air Police armed with sidearms surrounded the back of the room. "Once I start, nobody leaves without permission. Everything discussed in here, stays in here. You guys know the drill. Just don't forget it. I can't emphasize that enough. Korea and Japan are both crawling with Red spies. SCAP has personally promised me that he will eat any violators alive." That brought a few chuckles.

LaSalle went over to a map of Korea and its surroundings. "Gentlemen, I begin this briefing with a question. What would you give, personally, to be able to deliver a real knockout blow to the Reds? To be able to fly the kind of mission we should have been flying for months, and do it with weapons guaranteed to do the job."

A pilot called out, "My left testicle, General."

More laughs. LaSalle smiled. "Not enough."

"His other testicle," someone added. The room dissolved into catcalls and more laughter.

LaSalle knew he had them. "A special mission has been recently developed to do just what I described. Deny the enemy his sanctuary in Manchuria. Pulverize the enemy's troop and weapons and supply concentrations. Bottle the Red bastard up in his own house. Make him worry about the security of his own frontiers, instead of violating someone else's. This mission is known as Gallant Flag. As Far Eastern Command theater commander, General Douglas MacArthur has recently approved this mission."

LaSalle spent the next few minutes detailing some, but not all of the particulars, of the Gallant Flag concept. For the time being, he did not mention that Gallant Flag would be using atomic bombs. No sense stirring up a hornet's nest just yet, he figured. Besides, the men in the ready room were already calculating fuel loads and approach headings in their minds, he could see it in their faces.

"Gallant Flag is approved for five B-29 crews. The mission is small for security reasons. If we tip our hand here, Red spies may get word back to China. Plus, it's kind of an experiment. We don't know all we want to know about Red air defenses--but we know they got Soviet radar and MiGs galore, he thought ruefully--and SCAP doesn't want to risk a wider world war if we were to send a normal bomber formation, of, say, several squadrons. So we start small, and we work up from there. I can only take five crews with me. After this briefing, I'll be reviewing your fitness reports and personnel folders. If you want to be in, tell me now, before you leave this briefing. If you decide to sit this one out, there's no effect on your career, no prejudice to your ratings or anything like that. But once you're in, you're in. Tell me yes, here and now, and you're mine for the duration."

A hand went up, a young pilot along the side wall. "General, when will we know if we're selected?"

"I'll let you know this week. Several days at the most. I have to go over the personnel records with SCAP." Which was not exactly true but they didn't have to know that.

Knots of crewmen began talking with each other. LaSalle could sense the excitement. Just going North and crossing the Yalu was enough to stir up this bunch, he realized. To a man, they all wanted a crack at Mao's hordes and a chance to put a real dent in the endless waves of troops pouring south. He let the chatter go on for a few more minutes, answering several more questions, deflecting inquiries about the details.

"Gentlemen, the details will come soon enough. For now, all I need is your signature on a sheet of paper. Think hard about it. SCAP will see that signature. If you sign, you're mine."

LaSalle ended the briefing and hopped down off the platform to take a few questions. The crewmen swarmed around him, pens and pencils out, ready to sign up. Kit Carson was there too, in the background. After LaSalle had collected the signatures he needed from five crews, Carson managed to work his way in closer to see the General.

"General, Bomber Command's got Hellzapoppin' assigned to a mission tomorrow morning. Just north of the Imjin River--couple of divisions camped out, supplies and ammo all over the place according to Recon. Would the General care to come along, sort of as an observer? Join the crew the of the best damn B-29 in the whole theater?"

That brought a chorus of groans. LaSalle chuckled. He knew they still needed a lot more intelligence on Red forces and troop deployment patterns. He readily agreed.

Carson said, "I guess General Wells will have to approve any additions to the flight crew of the aircraft."

LaSalle said, "Don't worry about that, Major. You leave General Wells to me."

Tuesday, December 19, 1950

Aboard Hellzapoppin', near Chorwon, North Korea

10:45 a.m.

To Clayton LaSalle, from 25,000 feet, Chorwon looked like a black stain on a white tablecloth. The Imjin River coiled like a defect in the earth's crust, faintly tracing a meandering seam through the indistinct winter haze that always seem to blanket this rough, god-forsaken land. In fact, if you looked at the terrain, you could almost imagine the whole scene as a Thanksgiving Day dinner table setting.

The foothills of the lower Taebeck range were like mashed potatoes, with a few lumps of gravy splashed over them. The scattered villages surrounding the town were chunks of cranberry sauce, picked apart by some giant's fork. Here and there, a few pickles and olives, maybe a fist of stuffing where the river bent around a gathering of snow-covered huts.

Only Chorwon itself marred the peaceful tranquility of the scene, like a smoking blot on the table--some angry child's splat of mincemeat pie soiling the white cloth. Columns of smoke drifted skyward from the few miserable hovels still occupied.

And everywhere, LaSalle grimly realized, the Red Chinese, well camouflaged for they were acknowledged masters at the art of daytime concealment, that much was for certain. On the very eve of Thanksgiving Day, when thousands of shivering GIs and Marines were cramming turkey and trimmings down their throats, the Red bastards had infiltrated over a quarter million men right under the noses of the UN command, filling the steep hillsides and ravines with uncountable battalions and regiments of bugle-blowing, screaming, faceless robots.

Maybe we should have offered them some turkey too, LaSalle thought.

Clayton LaSalle had bumped Hellzapoppin's normal co-pilot, Captain Tom Skeeter, who rode jump seat up in the bird cage, so the General could get his hands on the controls and have a better view. The mission to the Imjin River, grid square 20-25 on the bombardier's maps, tasked out of Bomber Command, Tokyo, to plaster a suspected concentration of Red infantry and supply troops near Chorwon, had formed up over the Sea of Japan from several sources. Four full squadrons had been given the green light, nearly 50 aircraft, and they'd come from Yokota and Kadena and Andersen-Guam, rendezvousing in a giant pinwheel of aircraft flashing bright steel in the cold gray dawnlight, before making the run into the drop zone.

The purpose of the mission, designated Jolly Roger in the mission briefing, was to pulverize the suspected Red garrison points north of the Imjin and relieve some of the pressure on the swiftly retreating 7th Cav, battered and beleaguered for weeks from close engagement with elements of the gook 38th and 42nd Field Armies, and now on a dead run south to the 38th Parallel.

Every aircraft carried up to 20 deadly 500-pounders and some had more, a nice holiday cocktail mix of incendiaries and WP ordnance, the better to ignite fires and cook off racks of enemy ammunition in the target zone. Get a good firestorm going, LaSalle knew, and you could do a lot more damage with flames than the bombs themselves. He'd seen that in person night after night in the hellish skies over Imperial Japan a few years before.

LaSalle could tell Hellzapoppin' was a good ship. The pilot, Major Kit Carsons, was calm and focused, seeming almost nonchalant to the unpracticed eye. He kept good radio discipline, a plus in LaSalle's book. Not a lot of chitchat over the intercom--just cool and businesslike, keep the words to a minimum. The co-pilot, Captain Skeeter, was a likeable Texan, possessed of a horse's face and red hair but otherwise, he seemed competent enough. The bombardier was Kelly, Irish as the whiskey, a laconic, wisecracking Bostonian whose gum smacking, gum popping voice could be heard all over the aircraft, even without the intercom.

The run in to the drop zone had occurred at angels 25, heading 320 degrees, standard five-finger drop formation (minus the thumb, as there were only four squadrons.). The run went okay, but high-altitude winds over the target had scattered the bomb drop and made the run less effective than it could have been.

Carson made sure they got some bomb damage photos, though he knew there was a photo "trailer" at the very back of the formation, then swung Hellzapoppin around to the exit heading of 115 degrees and held 280 knots indicated until they were clear of the Imjin River valley. Flak, what there was of it, was light, mostly desultory, a few rounds puffing up the cold blue sky like the end of a firecracker show, and that was it.

Carson shook his head. "What do you think, Kelly? Winds picked up or what?"

The voice over the intercom crackled, "Yeah, that's my excuse today. Damnation, Major...we had a good run in, nice and steady. I had that bend in the river in my sights, the Norden was working for once. I had it, right there in my hand. I pickled the load and then kablooey! Bombs everywhere."

LaSalle understood the frustration. "Gentlemen, that's what we used to call the Bombers' Lament. You sit on your butts for hours on end in a damn hard seat and at the moment of glory, God, or the weather or fate or whatever, goes south on you. When that happens, you just turn your butt around, pack up and go home for another try. We had hell to pay with the jet stream winds back in '44 and '45. Didn't know what the hell that was. No one had ever heard of the jet stream back then. In the early days of the campaign over Japan, the Twentieth was all over the map with our bomb drops...used to drive LeMay so crazy, he'd literally bite off the end of his cigars. But we learned. We learned and adapted. The ones that made it, that is."

Carson just shook his head. He watched as the rest of Jolly Roger formed up around them, then sounded off on the call-around. The lead-ship was Ace of Spades, two miles ahead of them, and the pilot was Ken Stanton, ordering up an identifying radio check to make sure all the chicks in the flock were headed back to the barn. When Carson had called in, he poked LaSalle on the shoulder, and pointed off portside, at an element of Lockheed P-80s just slid into view off the end of the formation's "pinky finger.'

"Glad we have them for company, eh, General?"

LaSalle agreed. "Definitely improves the neighborhood. I've not heard of any MiGs this far south but its best to take no chances."

Carson was curious. He twisted around in his seat to ease the numbness in his fanny. "General, this Gallant Flag mission. You must have some idea by now of what kind of targets we're dealing with. We're really going across the border--into Chinese airspace."

"Unofficially, that's affirmative, Major. Specifics are still be worked out." LaSalle checked around the bird cage, saw everything was buttoned up for the homeward cruise, then leveled a gaze at Carson. "Maybe we ought to take a little detour on the ride back."

"What kind of detour, sir?"

"Up North. Yalu River valley."

Carson's eyes grew large. He coughed. "Is the General pulling my leg or is this something we definitely need to do?"

LaSalle smiled. "Let's just say a little more recon of the target zone would help our mission planning."

Skeeter was dubious. He hunched forward from his jump seat. "But, sir, that'll put us right in the armpit of MiG Alley. And we can't keep these fellows with us all the way up there. Begging the General's pardon, sir but isn't that a bit dangerous?"

LaSalle thought: Son, you don't know what the half of it. "It is a risk, Captain," he conceded. "In my judgement, an acceptable risk. We lose our fighter escort for awhile, but the Navy boys'll pick us up as we approach the coastline. We got cameras aboard. Shoot and scoot. That's all I'm saying."

"Glad to, General," Carson radioed up to Ace of Spades and got Stanton on the line. He explained what they were going to do. Simultaneously with the call, and Stanton's expletive-filled response, Hellzapoppin dropped down two thousand feet to angels twenty-three, and began a slow bank to port.

Stanton's static improved slightly when he realized he was speaking directly to General Clayton LaSalle, S3 for the Fifth Air Force.

"Sorry, sir, I didn't realize you were on board with Jolly Roger today. It's an honor."

"Thanks, Major. Like Major Carson said, Hellzapoppin's been re-tasked for a little strategic recon mission up North. I'll take full responsibility." And the heat from Rosie O'Donnell when I get back, no doubt.

"Very well, sir. I was just wondering about Standing Order Number 22, sir. The one that says we're not supposed to approach within ten miles of the border."

Get used to it, son. Gallant Flag's going to take us into tighter quarters than that. LaSalle said none of what he was thinking, though he was keenly aware that Carson was hanging on every word. He supposed he wasn't being a very good role model but what the hell.

"For your information, Major Stanton, this aircraft will observe all regulations, mission rules, flight standards and standing orders currently on the boards. Don't worry your pretty little head about it. I plan to get us up there, take a few pictures and skedaddle for the coast. We have no intention of violating national policy or anything else, thank you very much. Proceed with your mission. LaSalle, out."

Stanton was quiet after that. At LaSalle's nod, Carson executed a tighter bank to port and after a few minutes, the Jolly Roger fleet was lost in the late afternoon cirrus streaking the skies over the Sea of Japan.

Hellzapoppin was now utterly alone, headed north by northwest, shorn of her sisters in formation and the comforting proximity of the P-80s and their 20-millimeter cannon, who had to remain with the main body of the fleet, at least out to the coast.

Carson took a deep breath, smiling in spite of himself, and settled in for what promised to be wild ride, he was sure. He knew perfectly well that the General was up to, pulling this little stunt to evaluate him as a pilot for Gallant Flag. He was determined he'd make the cut, one way or another.

Just for comfort, he ordered a guns check all around the aircraft. LaSalle said nothing, preferring to stare out the bird cage windscreen at the snowy landscape below. One by one, each of Hellzapoppin's ten half-inch machine guns and her single 20-millimeter cannon were cleared, ripping the sky with a quick burst of tracer rounds. Carson was still not quite sure what General LaSalle really had in mind, if he really planned to take them up into MiG Alley, but there was no sense in not being ready. He figured that was part of the General's game anyway.

Just go by the book, boy. Easy does it. By the book and by the numbers.

They had reached the vicinity of Chong'ju near the western neckline of the Korean peninsula when an excited voice crackled in the cockpit crew's headsets. It was Clancy, the waist gunner.

"Major, I think we got company. Nine o'clock high, portside, just over that cloud layer. I count six, seven, no...ten, maybe more--"

Carson, LaSalle and Skeeter all craned left to peer out the windscreen. Sure enough, a silvery glint speckled off tiny dots, growing larger by the second, peeking in and out of the growing cloud cover.

"MiGs," LaSalle reported matter-of-factly. "Maneuvering to come in out of the sun."

Carson was suddenly all jitters. Flak he could deal with. But without the P-80s, he felt naked. "I'm not sure what to do, Major. Those buggers are fast!"

LaSalle wanted him to work it out, so long as he didn't wait forever. "This is test day, Major Carson. Time to see if you've done your homework lately."

"How'd they spot us so fast?"

"Top Can. Long-range Soviet air defense radar. Gooks must have some spotted along the border as well further north."

"Further north?"

"Never mind that, Major. As a first step, I'd suggest you head for the deck. Two hundred feet and find some cloud cover, like over there." He pointed to a bank of snow clouds moving onshore from the ocean.

"No sooner said that done, General. I've got the distinct impression you've been up here before." He shoved the yoke forward and the huge '29 plunged earthward. The engineer behind them throttled back the Wright Cyclones to keep the props from being torn off.

"Yeah," LaSalle admitted, "there's a rumor to that effect. Watch your airspeed. These guys love to play chicken with head-on approaches, then turn on their wings and dive from above. They make all their guns passes from above."

Hellzapoppin' dove for the ground, and approaching two hundred feet, Carson hauled back on the yoke. The aircraft shuddered and bucked like a horse in heat, but she leveled out at last and almost immediately, picked up a stiff crosswind, forcing Carson to dial in some yaw to hold the heading. Below them, rocky hills flashed by and soon enough, they were in the soup.

Flying blind through steep hills at two hundred feet indicated altitude was not exactly Major Kit Carson's idea of a grand time. His fingers tightened on the wheel. From behind them, a staccato burst ripped the air and tracers streaked by the bird cage, as the aircraft flitted from cloud to cloud. Skeeter craned around to see out the top of the windscreen.

"Here he comes!--"

Suddenly, they were bracketed by machine gun fire on both sides of the aircraft, and the aircraft's top fuselage opened up like a can opener as the twin MiGs walked a stitch of tracers right across the top of the plane. Something cracked, and Carson had to grab the yoke to keep them from being buffeted right into the ground. Instinctively, he pulled up to gain altitude, but LaSalle yelled out.

"Keep her down! Keep her down! It cuts down on the angle!"

The jet wash of the MiGs slammed into the nose of the '29 and Hellzapoppin' rocked in their wakes, as sheet metal tore off her fuselage. Pieces of perspex tinkled into the bird cage--the waist turret was gone, a broken egg morass of twisted metal, and what was left of Clancy. Carson grimly pressed forward, fighting every impulse to pull her up, struggling with the cross wind, torque on the aircraft from their unzipped fuselage, and drag from the broken waist turret. They plunged on through the clouds, and Carson realized his jaw and teeth ached from clenching them so tightly. If this was a test for Gallant Flag, LaSalle sure was a tougher taskmaster than any schoolteacher he'd ever had.

"I found out that the hard way," LaSalle told him. "Stay low--real low--and you give these bastards less to shoot at. They like to dive but the window to fire is short. Just a little jinking and jiving and they can't get a bead on you."

Carson told Skeeter to head aft and check out the damage. "See how bad it is, Tom. I'm worried about the landing gear and the fuselage panels. This baby's handling like a pig right now. We must have lost half our skin."

Skeeter unbuckled from the jump seat and slipped up the stepladder to the tunnel. Inside, wind swirled snow and dirt and rags and other debris--they'd lost pressure in the aft compartments for sure. Skeeter hunkered down and crawled on his knees to the aft door, shoving it open with his shoulder. The bomb bay doors were still closed but the portside of the fuselage had a line of jagged holes stitched along a thirty foot span. Aft of the impacts, several panels of the '29's aluminum skin had peeled back like an orange and were flapping and banging in the slipstream. Skeeter was amazed to realize he could see right out through the openings, right at the bare gauzy outlines of hills and cliffs, through the intermittent cloud cover. He shuddered, imagining what had happened to poor Clancy.

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph," he muttered. They couldn't be more than a hundred feet off the ground.

Up front, Carson was nervously eyeing his altimeter, hoping to God Sergeant Gauss had installed a good one from Stores this time. "Your call, General. What's our heading?"

LaSalle took a scan all around the bird cage. The clouds were thinning out. Probably they were nearing the ocean. Somehow, they'd crossed the spine of the Taebeck range practically within spitting distance of the mountains and survived.

"Any sign of our friends?"

Carson called around for a look-see, waited a minute. Back they came, rear turret, topside, ball turret below, everyone...all stations reporting negative, no bandits or other aircraft in sight.

"Looks like we're clear for the moment, General."

"Navigator," LaSalle called down to Lieutenant Parks. "best heading to the coast. What's your guess?"

"I don't guess, sir," Parks came back. "I've just about got a solution...one moment." Parks fiddled with his compass, studied the chart and drew in the final leg with his pen. He compared it with the direction finder on his instrument panel. "Steer right, sir. Heading 125 degrees. I make the coastline about eighty, maybe eighty five miles southeast of us."

"Do it," LaSalle commanded. "It'll put us out of the clouds, but we have to know for sure."

"What about my altitude, sir. I'd sure love to pull her up to five or ten thousand feet. Get out of the soup. Might smooth out the ride too."

LaSalle agreed and Carson pitched Hellzapoppin' up ten degrees, requesting more power from the engineer, who fiddled with the mixture knobs and fed the engines a richer mix of fuel. The wounded B-29 groaned and shuddered again, but slowly, ever so slowly, she laboriously gained altitude. For Carson, the altimeter seemed like a slow-motion newsreel, barely unwinding, yet after ten minutes they had managed to stagger up to nearly five thousand feet.

For the first time in many minutes, Kit Carson thumbed a line of sweat off his forehead and took a deep breath. It had been a very close call. He hoped he had passed the General's test.

"Engineer, I'm showing high temps on engine number four. You see anything?

The flight engineer, Sergeant Delaney, studied his gauges. "Probably got some debris from the skin panels. RPMs are kind of shaky, like she's binding, vibrating or something."

"Think we ought to shut her down?"

"Negative, sir. I don't see anything on the board. We got fuel, mixture's good, rpms are holding up. I'll keep an eye on the temp."

"Very well." Carson calculated his next move. "General, our fuel situation's dicey, but if we don't get jumped again, and we can get up into some better winds, we should be able to make Yokota okay."

"Climb to your best altitude," LaSalle ordered. "Have your navigator plot a speed course for the coast line. With any luck, we'll pick some Navy fighter cover around Hungnam."

"Yes, sir." Carson made the necessary course and speed adjustments. Hellzapoppin' climbed higher, out of the lower murk, into cold, bright sunshine. All eyes in the bird cage were peeled for bandits but the MiGs had vanished. Only the sun and a bright white cloak of clouds greeted them when they topped out at angels 25, 25,000 feet above ground level.

Half an hour later, the navigator called up from his plot behind Carson. "Coastline, sir. Dead ahead. I make us at about sixty-five miles south of Hungnam. Smack between Hungnam and Wonsan."

"And I've got Blue Devil Leader on radio, Major," reported Skeeter, from the jump seat. He'd been monitoring air-to-air traffic on the naval bands for the last ten minutes. "F4F Banshees, just forming up off the Oriskany. Assault formation targeted for Eighth Army support around Uijongbu. Closing to starboard, about a hundred miles away."

Carson dialed up the assault force frequency and spoke a few minutes with Blue Devil Leader. He described their run-in with MiGs over the Imjin River valley, their approach heading, strength and tactics.

"We dove for the deck, Blue Devil, just like the book says. They came after us but we lost 'em in the soup--bad shit over the river valley this morning--and then they scattered and high-tailed it back to China. Never seen the bastards that far south of MiG Alley before."

The radio crackled. "Getting bolder, now they've got the Army on the run," Blue Devil came back. "Navy always has to save the Army's butt."

"Affirmative to that. Ten to one, Blue Devil, we got some Russkies in that group too." He and LaSalle had discussed the possibility; the MiGs had shown aggressive tactics no one had ever reported before. "Gooks don't handle aircraft like that."

"Understood," Blue Devil replied. "We'll keep our eyes open."

The strike force signed off. Carson watched the General out of the corner of his eye, as they settled back for the last leg of the trip. A minute course correction to 139 degrees put them on the correct inbound heading into Yokota. So far, the engineer had been right. Their unzipped mid-fuselage panels roared and banged and slammed around in the slipstream like a rabid animal and the aircraft shuddered with every gust. Carson cranked in some extra yaw with his foot pedals and flexed his tense fingers around the yoke, trying to relax.

He had come to regard Clayton LaSalle with increasing respect. "You've been up there before, haven't you, General? Up North, I mean."

LaSalle stared out at the thick white clouds, lost in thought. He admitted to a few unauthorized recon flights, including Lucky Lucy's daring dash across the Manchurian frontier. That lead to some whistles and Jesuses among the cockpit crew.

"I heard some of the scuttlebutt about Lucy, sir, but to be honest, I didn't put a whole lot of stock in it. You really ditched that baby right down there, in the Sea of Japan?"

LaSalle nodded ruefully. "Friggin' cold is what it was, Major. I'm not too keen on doing that again."

"What was it like up there, General? Manchuria, I mean."

LaSalle was thinking ahead, thinking of mission profiles for Gallant Flag, profiles that might have the best chance of success.

"Desolate. Lonely. Until the triple-A opened up on us over Shenyang. And MiGs everywhere, like gnats buzzing around. They'd make a pass, fire and then they'd vanish. It's like their pilots have to work up their courage to make a run, then they shoot the whole wad in one screaming guns pass and then disappear into the sunset. Not well trained, not a lot of discipline. But a lot of 'em. Maybe forty or fifty at a time."

"You think MacArthur will ever really let us go north, over the border in force?"

LaSalle grasped the yoke on his side as well, feeling the backtalk from the controls as Hellzapoppin' clawed her way through the cold air. "I think so, Major. I think MacArthur's tired of taking bullshit from Washington and damn tired of being pushed around by a bunch of Chinese laundrymen, as Ned Almond so elegantly put it. We're going north, one way or another."

Carson thought about that. "God help us. And count me in, sir. I hope I made the grade."

"You have, Major. You have. I like what I've seen today. You got guts, nerve, pilot's eyes and sense enough to know when to fold your hand and get the hell out of Dodge. A combat pilot's got to have a sixth sense about him. You don't survive otherwise. Somewhere in the back of every combat pilot's mind is a little voice saying

what the hell do you think you're doing here--go, man, go! A premonition, sort of. One of my crewman back when I was flying '29s for Curt LeMay over Japan called it your own personal survival cash register. It's like all the close calls are toted up, mission after mission. You only get so many and when you go past the magic number, you go over the edge and you never come back. This little register clinks and clanks in the back of your mind and the best combat pilots can hear it and know how close they are to the magic number. Like blackjack, you call or you play, depending on what you hear in the back of your mind. I'm guessing you hear the same thing."

Carson nodded. "Kind of. Only mine is a woman singing. When she hits the high notes, I know it's time to bail. So far, I haven't heard the top note yet."

"Gallant Flag may change all that, son. For both of us."

"Can you give me any more details, General. Me and the crew, we're dying to know about targets, weapons, tactics, all that good stuff."

"Better for now, Major, if you don't know. You'll be well briefed, rest assured. All I can say for now about Gallant Flag is that it's risky as hell and about as hush-hush as you can get. Below SCAP, knowledge of the mission is 'need to know' only and that includes your wing commanders too. But if it works, it could not only change the whole conduct of the war, it could permanently alter the balance of power in the whole region."

Carson couldn't whistle enough. He was amazed. "General, I want to be your lead man when we launch. What kind of bombs are we using: 500-pounders or the blockbusters we used over Japan?"

LaSalle leveled an even gaze over at the Major. "Bigger than that."

Carson's eyes grew even wider.

Tuesday, December 19, 1950

The Dai Ichi Building, Tokyo

4:40 p.m.

Colonel Arlen Keith was nervous. In fact, he was very nervous. He sat in his tiny cubicle office on the fourth floor of the Dai Ichi Insurance Company building, two floors below the War Room, and studied the extraordinary basket of scented lilacs that he'd just picked up at the Happy Rose Petal. Getting those inside the building had been a major hassle with Security and the MPs. They'd practically taken the damn thing apart, looking for God knew what. Keith had waited impatiently at the table beside the log-in desk, while ham-handed MPs pawed through the delicate arrangement that Fumei An had spent so much time on. His grandfather's bloodhound couldn't have torn the basket up more.

"Sorry, sir," the freckled-faced sergeant had told him, digging through bows and fans and colored ribbons, "orders from General Whitney. Every package gets searched."

"Try to be a little more careful" Keith had asked. "Those are for a friend of mine. I'd like to get 'em back before they're completely destroyed."

And now he had them, more or less intact, right on the floor next to his beat-up metal desk. Fumei An had called the whole business kereizuku kaze, some kind of evil spirit he'd offended, fooling around with Sasumi over at the Petal. It just didn't make any sense...sure they'd made love, but then he'd done that with half a dozen girls at the Petal...he couldn't even remember all their names, except for Sasumi and Daisuko and--well, never mind about that now.

Something about this whole deal just didn't figure but Colonel Arlen Keith, United States Army, couldn't put his finger on it. He'd promised Fumei An he'd go through with the ceremony. What else could he do? If Sasumi was knocked up, he sure as hell didn't want Tokko snooping around asking questions, not to mention Whitney's goons and the damned MPs. That was a quick ticket to the States. No, it was better to play the little game and keep the Army ignorant of the fact that he'd gotten a Japanese geisha girl pregnant and she probably wasn't the only one.

Japs had a peculiar sense of honor, he thought, as he stared down at the basket of flowers. If Fumei An had asked him for more money, saying he'd damaged one of her prize assets, he would have understood. This was business. You broke something, you paid for it. But kereizuku kaze and finding a place of great dignity and solemnity and arranging the lilacs just so in that room, Keith just shook his head.

It didn't make any sense. But he knew what he had to do. Fumei An had made that clear. Drop off the plants or she was going to the Tokko with the news that Colonel Arlen Keith had an active prick and he just couldn't keep it in his pants.

It was extortion, no doubt about it. But it was the damnedest kind of extortion he'd ever heard of.

Keith checked around the bullpen office and found most of the desks and cubicles empty, their occupants having gone off duty half an hour ago. It was Happy Hour in the Ginza and GIs would be filling the bars and parlors and nightclubs faster than a mortar shell could leave its tube. One thing you could count on about SCAP officers and employees: they knew when it was time to leave work and they knew where the cheapest whiskey and prettiest girls hung out.

Keith screwed up his courage and picked up the basket. He felt more than a little foolish wandering across the open office bullpen toward the hall and the elevators. He wasn't sure what he would have said if anyone asked him why he was carrying a basket of lilacs around the Dai Ichi.

Doug MacArthur and I are dating and this is a token of my appreciation...

It wasn't even funny when he thought it up. He punched the elevator button for the sixth floor. He just wanted to get this little Jap game over with and satisfy Fumei An, so she wouldn't go all legal on him and call out the Army.

And next time he went back, he'd have a few choice words for her and Sasumi as well.

The sixth floor was quiet. He stepped off the elevator and right away ran into a manned guard post outside one end of the hall. The War Room with its flags and battle standards lined up like a parade-ground drill stood off to one side. SCAP's office suite was at the end, behind the desk and a hinged wooden gate, like a courtroom.

"Afternoon, Colonel," said the bored sergeant of the detail. His name plate read Gainey. "The General left about an hour ago."

"I just was heading into the war room, Sergeant. General Whitney asked to have some of the plants changed out. Staff's gone so I thought I'd bring it up myself."

Gainey didn't seem especially interested. He turned a log book around and held out a pen. "Suits me, sir. Just sign in here."

Keith wrote down his name, section and time of day. Gainey checked it out, co-signed, and with a nod of his head, motioned the Colonel on in. Keith's heart was beating so hard, he thought it would rip open his chest. He went inside the War Room.

It was a small room, heavy mahogany table in the middle, maps and charts tacked up on all four walls. A window at the far side looked out on the grounds and outer gardens of the Imperial Palace, across a moat filled with leaves speckling the placid waters. On a slight hill beyond the moat, the wood and tile columns of the Nijubashi shrine gleamed in hard shafts of pale afternoon sunlight.

She did say near the window, he remembered. Something to do with his tamashii being strongest there, whatever that meant. There was a credenza below the window. A few ashtrays, already emptied, and a small flag stand with tiny wooden sticks waving all the banners of the UN forces fighting in Korea. That was as good a spot as any.

He placed the basket on the credenza, turning the largest bow so that it faced into the room, as Fumei An had instructed him.

Most important, Keith-san, for the uikebashi to be oriented properly. You must do this with care and concern, so kereizuku kaze can start to work. The elemental spirits will be satisfied and Sasumi can regain her honor.

My ass....he muttered.

What Colonel Arlen Keith didn't know was what was lodged inside the largest bow, just out of sight, mounted at the center of a complex knot and well hidden with tufts of grass and shredded paper, all mounted around the lilac bed inside. The Canary One device Trofi had given her was very tiny, no bigger than a postage stamp, but the roshia-no had been quite specific on how the device was to be placed.

It was vital that Canary One's mounting surface be oriented to the outside window. The receiver side had to face into the room. In his haste, Colonel Keith had actually placed the arrangement closer to one end of the credenza than the other, the end directly opposite the varnished, wooden straight-backed chair used by General Douglas MacArthur. By sheer luck, the device lay hidden no more than three feet from the chair. Trofi had cautioned her that "it was critical the device be near an outside wall." Fumei An had used that knowledge to concoct a story for Keith about satisfying the god Amaterasu and the elements and being in harmony with his own tamashii. Fortunately for her, Keith by that time was a nervous wreck. He had bought into the story, however preposterous, because he valued his skin and had no desire to be court-martialed and shipped Stateside for a long vacation in Leavenworth.

Keith situated the basket the way he thought Fumei An wanted it and realized that he was sweating heavily, despite the cool air in the room. When he was satisfied, he left the room in a hurry, signed-out his name on the log book and turned for the elevator cage.

He ran right into Paul Craft.

"Uh...sorry, sir, I--didn't see you standing there--" Keith hastily saluted.

Craft backed up, snapped off a half salute. He wondered what Keith had been doing in the War Room.

"Anything I can help you with, Colonel?"

Keith heard the blood roaring in his ears. He stammered out, "I w-was looking for something, sir. Some notes--er, notes I made...last Monday. At the briefing. I couldn't find them at my desk--wondered if I might have left them--"

Craft's eyes narrowed. "You on the access list, Colonel? You need a pass to go in there."

"Uh, no sir, not exactly, sir. I was at the Monday briefing, I had slides and charts for General Willoughby. Remember the withdrawal plan for Phase Line C? That was it, sir. I just thought--"

"I see." He didn't really. "Did you find what you were looking for, Colonel?"

"Uh, no sir. I didn't. I must have left them somewhere else."

Craft was instantly alert. He was sure he hadn't left anything about Gallant Flag lying around. But any uncontrolled information in the Dai Ichi was bad news. "That's classified stuff, Colonel. You'd better find it quick. Willoughby and the Old Man don't like that kind of stuff floating around here. Go back to your office and check your files. That kind of material should be in the red files."

"Yes, sir. Right away, sir."

"Specifically, Colonel, what was the nature of these slides and charts?"

Keith had to make something up. He was one of Willoughby's boys, so he knew what was in the air, what was being talked about in the building's halls and offices. "Uh. Eighth Army, sir. Logistics of the withdrawal. Proposed routes and lodgment positions."

"I see," Craft relaxed a bit. "That's not good. You go find your slides right now, Colonel. Don't leave until you can put your hands on them. And when you do, you secure that stuff the way it's supposed to be secured. Understood?"

"Yes, sir."

Craft went on about his business, leaving Arlen Keith to stew in his own juices. Keith took a deep breath, punched the elevator button for the fourth floor and went back to his office. He sat down and moments later, reached into a bottom drawer for a small flask of whiskey. He unscrewed the top and took a swig. It burned like fire and it didn't really help. He took another and put the flask back.

All he needed now was for Craft or some senior officer to catch him making love to a bottle.

He turned to the typewriter. Sometimes just the mechanical hunt and peck of finding and banging keys was calming, taking his mind off things.

He tried to finish up the staff report he had been working on that afternoon. But he just couldn't.

His hands were shaking too much.

Friday, December 22, 1950

Tokyo

8:15 a.m.

The unmarked truck was parked on the northbound side of the Hibiya Dori, right out in front of a noodle and soup shop and across the street from the Nansei Bank. Beyond the bank lay the snow-covered lawns of the Imperial Palace grounds. Behind the paper awnings and neon-tube lighting of the noodle shop lay the Dai Ichi Insurance Company Building, home to Supreme Command Allied Powers.

And home to many secrets ripe for the picking, hoped Fyodor Maximovich Trofimenko. He was crouched inside the cramped rear compartment of the truck along with Lev Davidovich and Andrei Sinoviev, technicians on loan from the Embassy a few miles south of their current location.

Trofimenko wanted to be on hand for the first 'live' broadcast from the American War Room, and now they had it. The sound quality was scratchy--"probably the placement of the device is not quite perfect," Sinoviev had surmised--but even though muffled, the unmistakable baritone of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur issued from the tiny speaker in the receiver-recorder. Davidovich fiddled with the receiver tuning for a moment and intermittently, MacArthur's voice whistled, faded, grew stronger and clearer, then faded again.

"That's about as good as we can do today," Davidovich told them. He leaned forward to peer out of the rear window of the panel truck, judging the distance from the receiver antenna to the sixth-floor room where the transmission originated. "I make the range at about two hundred meters, give or take a few."

"We recording?" Trofimenko asked. He wanted the results of his little scheme on tape for Shtykov and Beria to appreciate. Convincing Fumei An hadn't been easy and it had been expensive. Now, they had but to listen, record, and wait.

"Tape is rolling right now," Sinoviev checked the machine. Each tape had a capacity for about two hours of continuous conversation.

"MacArthur likes to start the day with a briefing on Korea," Trofimenko told them. "Sometimes it's just half an hour. Sometimes longer. Often, he covers the whole American strategic and military posture in the Far East. We could have a valuable intelligence source here, comrades."

Davidovich smoked a cigarette, clenching the butt between his teeth as he strained to make out MacArthur's words. "I can just barely hear it. Canary One's no better than the last bug we used."

"Maybe that whore covered up the soundhead too much with all her damn flowers," said Sinoviev. He was bald and sweating inside the close confines of the truck, though it was cold, gray and rainy outside.

"You have to give it time," Trofimenko told them. "Sources take time. You don't plant a flower and expect it to bud overnight, do you?"

Sinoviev scoffed. "My wife says I'm better at fertilizing than planting."

"Shhh." Trofimenko bent an ear closer to the speaker. MacArthur was speaking slowly, a rich baritone voice, well modulated, rising then falling in inflection. The man was a gifted orator, that much they could tell. He was meeting with several others in the War Room; apparently, the full briefing had already ended. Trofimenko tried to make out their identities. MacArthur referred to one as 'Paul.' The others could not be identified, as the Supreme Commander did the majority of the talking.

After listening to snatches of conversation, filled with eruptions of lengthy MacArthur invective and denunciations, it became apparent to Trofimenko that the Supreme Commander was fully aroused this morning, a lion on his perch, railing against the "nitpicking and incompetence of our so-called leaders in Washington, always tying my hands in prosecuting this war the best way I see fit...."

MacArthur went on at length, with no interruptions from the other participants, about what he would do if Washington would just give him greater support.

Trofimenko listened to the tenor of the man's voice, more so than the words. The others are junior officers, he imagined, scribbling a few notes of his own. Forced to sit and endure lengthy harangues about the thick and vacant skulls of those in upper levels of command. In spite of himself, Trofimenko had to smile. A problem we have in common, my American friend. It was clear that MacArthur was well spoken, a practiced speaker accustomed to occupying center stage, and the War Room was his theater. He couldn't help but feel he was eavesdropping on some operatic performance by the American general, worthy even of the Bolshoi.

Trofimenko had joined Sinoviev and Davidovich in the truck early that morning, to make sure the reception of Canary One's signal was adequate and that the Embassy technicians from 8th Chief Directorate ran the recording machines properly and captured anything said in the War Room on tape. The tapes were vital to Trofimenko. He'd been given the assignment from no less than Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria himself. The tapes were the proof he had accomplished his mission. More to the point, he figured, a steady stream of tapes of War Room activity was his best insurance against being recalled to Mother Russia for 'consultations.' As long as he kept feeding the beast what it wanted, he had told himself, he'd be left alone to savor the fullness of life in Japan.

Perhaps, someday, when the time was right, he'd find a way to make his good fortune more permanent.

The three men agreed that the voice quality wasn't perfect but it was probably acceptable for recording. There was plenty of tape. And, so far, the American MPs patrolling the streets and intersections around Number 22 Hibiya Dori hadn't bothered to

wander over to see just what business the dark blue truck with the stenciled Japanese sign reading CAPITAL SEAFOOD had, parked in front of the Dai Ichi Building.

Trofimenko was greatly relieved. He hadn't slept well, since he'd paid Fumei An to entice the poor American staff officer into placing Canary One in the War Room. He wasn't sure how dedicated the headmistress of the Happy Rose Petal was, though a few more American dollars could usually sway her heart and loyalties. To his immense relief, though, the device really did seem to be working. Better yet, the Americans seemed to be unaware of its existence, though how long that might last, was his biggest worry. If they did regular sweeps, which he had reason to believe they would, the device would probably be located easily.

He figured his best hope lay in the usual overconfidence of the Americans in their own security. If they had no reason to be suspicious, maybe, just maybe, they wouldn't sweep at all.

There was no use in pursuing that line of thinking, Trofimenko told himself. Intelligence work was like that...sources blew up in your face, they turned, they ran, they whined and begged, they connived for more money or a better deal. So far, he had managed to handle all of it, not without a few scars, but at least so that Shtykov and the higher-ups hadn't seen fit to recall him to Russia.

That was a victory of sorts. But Trofimenko knew all too well how quickly that could change. It had cost him many sleepless nights the last few months.

Trofimenko decided to take advantage of a momentary commotion around the truck, evidently a minor accident in the middle of the street--two cars had sideswiped each other and attentions were diverted--to exit the vehicle. MacArthur was still going on and on, in the headphones he had just put down, ranting on about some staff deficiency but Trofimenko had heard enough for the moment. At least, the material was being recorded. He'd come back later in the day to pick up the first set of tapes. Then he'd have the satisfaction of marching right into the 8th Chief Directorate offices at the Embassy and preparing the tapes for the diplomatic pouch himself, right under the jealous eyes of Shtykov and the rest.

He'd already decided that making the deliveries in person, bringing home the top prize of the hunt, as it were, was the best insurance policy he could imagine.

Outside the truck, Trofimenko hunched up his raincoat and pulled the brim of his Homburg down a little tighter against the chill wind. Much honking and yelling occupied the crowd that had gathered around the accident. Trofimenko decided to walk the ten or so blocks south to the Ginza, to the Happy Rose Petal.

He wanted to thank Fumei An personally for her help. Plus he had some money to deliver. And something else too--he smiled stalking off down the Hibiya Dori, anticipating a quick toss in the bed with the headmistress of the 'little willows.'

Five minutes after Trofimenko had left, the tapes recorded that MacArthur ended the briefing. After all but one of the junior officers had departed, only two men remained in the War Room. One was Douglas MacArthur. The other was General Paul Craft.

In the back of the truck, Sinoviev and Davidovich had taken off their headphones and were quietly peering out a small side window at the accident, engrossed in figuring out who had caused the melee. They did not hear the questions MacArthur put to General Craft, though the entire exchange was recorded on tape for later analysis. They did not hear the Supreme Commander ask Craft about 'preparations for the operation.'

Days later, when technicians at Moscow Center examined the quality of the tape recording, some would remark on the significance of a brief stutter and a slight waver that could be heard in the voice of this General Craft, known to the NKVD only as a minor staff aide to General Wright, SCAP's G-3.

MacArthur was firm and direct in his questions. He asked how many 'babies' the operation would produce.

Craft told him 'five.'

'Where are they now?' MacArthur had asked.

'In the hospital,' Craft had replied. 'At Los Alamos.'

It was these two simple words--Los Alamos--when teased out of the tape recording by Trofimenko in a late night listening session later that evening at his tiny third floor walk-up in the Haramachi a few miles away, that would trigger alarms all over Moscow in the weeks ahead.
CHAPTER 9

Saturday, December 23, 1950

Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, San Francisco

7:45 p.m.

"General, a pleasure to see you back here. Can I get you a drink?"

Paul Craft found a perch at the end of the O Club's main bar and signaled the bartender over.

"Whiskey sour, mac. And make it sour, will you?"

Commander John Ward, United States Navy, laughed at that and toasted the general when his drink arrived.

"Nice to know the Army can still take its whiskey like real men. To the holidays, General."

Craft obliged, hoisting up his glass. "And Korea, Commander. No more Christmases in trenches overseas."

"Amen to that."

The men were silent for a few minutes. The O Club was dark and smoky, partially full this Saturday night. A USO troupe was running a raffle and dance in the ballroom next door. Tommy Dorsey tunes drifted in, mixed with radio news. Somewhere, in the distance, H.V. Kaltenborn was whining on about the mess in Washington. At the other end of the bar, a blitzed Marine lieutenant was putting the make on one of the USO girls who had ducked out for some refreshment. She was blond, pretty, a giggling child really. The Marine's face was flushed red from liquor. He wobbled on his barstool like a gyro about to topple over. More giggling--

Craft polished off the whiskey and got another round for the both of them. "Commander, four weeks ago, you and I met over at Squadron. I asked you about a special mission Far Eastern Command was forming up."

"I remember, General. I've been intrigued ever since. You hiring?"

"Sort of. You said you wanted in. I want you in too. But the whole thing would have to be cleared with Seventh Fleet at Pearl."

"I remember that too."

"Good." Craft pulled out an official-looking envelope and dropped it on the bar between them, patting it with his hand. "Welcome to your new life, Commander."

Ward fingered the envelope. "May I?"

Craft nodded. "I'd be disappointed if you didn't." Especially since the whole thing's a forgery... a damn good one too....

Ward opened the envelope and read quickly, his lips moving as he scanned the letter inside. His eyes widened as he read.

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph." He carefully put the letter back in the envelope, after quickly scanning it one last time, and gingerly nudged it back in Craft's direction. "This is for real? On the level?"

"Absolutely, Commander. A special mission, known as Gallant Flag, organized and supported right out of SCAP itself, in Tokyo."

"MacArthur's got balls, I'll say that much for him."

Craft smiled. "I prefer to call it tactical judgment and strategic insight. That's what made Inchon work, when everyone else said it wouldn't."

"I don't suppose you'd like to tell me some of the details."

"I'd love to. But not here." And the truth was, Craft reflected, Ward couldn't know every detail. For the truth was that the fleet auxiliary Chesapeake, hull number AF-18, was expendable. She was going to be sacrificed, crew and all, to ensure that the extra Mark VI devices assigned to Operation Greenhouse could be properly diverted and made to "disappear", without question or trace in the very middle of the Pacific Ocean. Later, the very same Mark VI atomic bombs would turn up in a non-descript warehouse in Kobe, Japan. Then, they would be ferried by inter-island freighter to Mishida Island and made ready for mating with their carrier aircraft.

"What say we take a little walk?" Ward proposed. He finished off his sourmash and gathered up his jacket and cap. "Over to Nimitz Avenue. I've got a little ship I'd like to show you around."

Craft was agreeable. The officers snared a Jeep from the motor pool, got rid of the driver and headed down Spear Avenue to the barrier lane at the very end. Beyond the pylons and wooden gate arm, India Basin and the Bay itself shone with reflected light from warehouses and cranes lining the wharves and docks of the shipyard. Ward turned the Jeep onto Nimitz and parked at the Marine sentry station, controlling access to the wharf itself. Moored in the slip just beyond the bridge cranes and overhead trolleys, fitting out for her next voyage a week hence, Chesapeake gleamed dull gray in the dock lights. Her funnels were cloaked with dense black smoke while welding arcs lit up the night sky with showers of sparks on her stern decks.

"Boiler room test tonight," Ward explained. They saluted their way through the sentry station--Craft logging in by name with a nod from Ward to the sergeant--and went over to the main gangway. "Back aft, I've got a fitter crew installing extra deck plates--we're putting in a new winch and deck stand for loading the bomb parts. I'll show you the shipping hatch we had to cut in the deck, just to get those big suckers down below."

"You've handled atomic payloads before," Craft remembered. "Didn't I see Chesapeake at Bikini back in '46?"

"You sure did, although I was just a lowly sonar officer on a tin can back then. Chesapeake's my first command. She did fleet support duty for Joint Task Force One during Operation Crossroads. July, wasn't it? Or June?"

"Something like that. You're already rigged for Greenhouse, I presume."

"Pretty much. Come on. I'll show you the cargo hold, where we keep the buggers."

They clambered across cabling and loose deck plates, found a downladder and went belowdecks. Chesapeake was a fleet auxiliary and B and C decks were given over exclusively to dry stores and equipment racks. They walked through a small parking lot for vehicles needed during the shots: several bulldozers and graders, a small shovel/backhoe rig, a pair of jeeps and tank trucks, and row after row of secured tools. A small dump truck, sans tires, sat at the very end of the compartment.

"Jesus, you got enough gear here to build a small city."

Ward agreed. "That's just about what we have to do. Each task force that sails to the Pacific Proving Ground takes along everything they could possibly need. All in all, JTF Three floats about forty-two or three ships, nearly twenty thousand men, and everything they could possibly need to live out there for four to six months. Even got the beer and suntan lotion. And the scientists--holy cow--you should see what they bring. Practically the whole damn D deck's crammed with their stuff...most of it I can't even pronounce."

They exited that compartment, and zigzagged through a confusing warren of corridors, many lined with bags of dry stores for the crews' mess--Craft smelled first potatoes in one corridor, then oranges, then bananas--before they stepped through a series of watertight hatches and dropped down one more level of stairs.

"E deck," Ward announced. He rounded a corner and they came again to a Marine sentry station, a serious-looking striped wooden barricade--this one manned with a small squad armed with Colt .45 sidearms. The sergeant of the detail saluted, eyeing Craft's stars with respect.

"Commander, General, if you'll sign the log."

They complied. The sergeant pulled the barricade post back, allowing the officers access to a shielded compartment behind them.

Ward manipulated a heavy locking mechanism and snugged open the hatch. The entire compartment was designed watertight. Inside, fluorescent lights lent harsh shadows to the steel plate and steel wire grating that made up the deck. Metal cradles were spotted about the compartment, with wheeled dollies lashed down at each cradle. A trusswork grid of tracks hung from the ceiling, supporting several small cranes, each secured to the far bulkheads.

"We call it Wonderland," Ward answered Craft's unasked question. "As in Alice in Wonderland. You see the cradles...we're manifested originally for six devices. The casings go there--"he pointed to heavy duty racks along one bulkhead--"and the cores go in these cradles. You can see how heavy they are. That's two-inch thick gauge lead plate around the outside. Look inside--" he motioned Craft over. The thing looked like a baby's crib for some giant infant. Two slots, one round, the other cylindrical, had been machined in the bed of the cradle.

"Are these what I think they are?"

"Yep. Round one's for the core, but without the plug. That's the final piece that's inserted in the device, makes it critical. Active, the scientists say. I love that word, active."

"And the cylinder here?"

"The plug goes there. They're not mated until we get out to Eniwetok. Thank goodness."

Craft studied the layout of the compartment. "You said you're manifested for six devices. But you know there are five more coming. Special design. Ranier-Tolkach devices, they're called."

"So I heard," Ward shook his head. "Boy, was that a headache when we heard about it. Those winches up topside I showed you, the ones aft--that's why we're putting those in. To handle the extra devices. There's no room down here. They're going to be stowed topside, in a special, lead-lined shelter. Makes me nervous, I don't mind telling you. But we have no more room aboard Chesapeake. We couldn't think of another solution that would allow us to make our sailing date."

"They'll be secure up there? From weather and such?"

Ward nodded. "As secure as we can make them. I get the shakes every time we transport these buggers. How is it we had those five extra shots added to the test anyway?"

Craft paced the perimeter of the compartment, studying the locks and seals and the radiation monitors everywhere. "Believe me, you don't want to know." He saw Ward watching him curiously. He knew what the man wanted. "Commander, you got a stateroom aboard ship?"

"B deck. Right below the conn. Follow me."

The officers climbed several gangways and passed through half a dozen watertight doors. Forward, they passed through Officers' Country and a brightly lit wardroom filled with cigarette smoke and strong coffee, before coming to a wood-paneled corridor hung with portrait reproductions. The Battle of Midway was prominent by the stateroom door. Ward unlocked the door and ushered Craft inside.

It was a narrow paneled compartment, bunk on one side, foldout desk and sink and counter opposite. Ward sat on the side of the bunk, and lit a Pall Mall, snorting smoke through his nostrils. Craft took the desk chair.

"About those details, General...."

Craft had known this moment would come. Ward and the Chesapeake were critical to Gallant Flag, even more so that Ward would ever realize. He had to know a lot of the plan. The question was how much. A thin line, Craft realized. Very thin.

"Chesapeake's mission from here to Eniwetok is unchanged, Commander. The five bombs you'll be carrying topside, the special devices you're rigging up for now, are special in more ways than you realize."

"I've heard some scuttlebutt about a new fission method--"

Craft waved that off, accepted a cup of hot coffee poured by Ward, and sipped the steaming liquid. "Forget that. All you need to know, Commander, is that for reasons best left unexplained, those bombs will never be fired at the proving grounds. For security reasons, let me simply say there's a bit of misinformation going on about them. Not long after you arrive at Eniwetok, those bombs will be removed from the shot sequence. They are to be transported intact back to the States--Chesapeake will be tasked for that--but the bombs will never make it. That's where you come in."

"I'm all ears."

"Commander--" Craft had practiced this in his mind countless times--"I don't have to remind you we've had some serious security leaks in our atomic program the last couple of years. SCAP's seen fit to mask the actual end use of these five bombs with a little disinformation campaign. This way, we can get atomic devices into the Far East, and ready them for use in Korea without tipping off the Russians or the Chinese. Frankly, MacArthur's concerned what the enemy might do, in the Far East or in Europe, if we bring atomic bombs in. So we do a little deception on the transport of these five bombs. It's a safe bet the Reds have spies everywhere. We want them to report certain things back to Moscow."

"What kind of things?"

"That the bombs have been lost at sea. In an accident. That's where you come in."

"An accident."

"En route from Eniwetok back to Frisco, Commander, the Chesapeake is going to have a small accident, an engine room casualty. I'll give you the coordinates later. There will be an explosion and the ship will suffer some flooding. For a time, the safety of the ship will seem to be in doubt. At least, that's what you'll radio to Pearl."

Ward's eyes narrowed. "I don't want anyone hurt, General. That's got to be understood."

"Agreed. But the situation has to look dire. The radio traffic has to show an emergency developing. As a result of this emergency, you'll signal Pearl that you're offloading your atomic bombs to another ship in the vicinity, in case Chesapeake goes down."

"General, you're aware these bombs are contained in watertight, flotation rigs?"

"I was aware of that, yes, but in this case, you've got to convince Pearl that Chesapeake won't stay afloat much longer. In your command judgment, a freighter that happens to be about a day's steaming away offers the best chance of clearing your payload and keeping it safe and dry. You're main concern is to get those bombs off before they or your ship suffers any more damage."

Ward whistled. "General, excuse me for saying so, but this is the deception campaign to end all deception campaigns. I may just deceive myself out a career if I do that. You sure all this is legit?"

"To the letter, Commander. Approved by General Douglas MacArthur himself. You've seen the memo."

The Navy officer leaned back against the bunk wall, puffing on his cigarette. "What about this freighter? The Navy doesn't look too kindly on transferring top secret cargo to just any old civilian tub, you know."

"She's called Orient Star. Chartered out of Kobe, Japan. Shipping company called Omisumi. They do a lot of work for SCAP. This ship's already under General MacArthur's authority and is being rigged to carry atomic devices After you make your emergency calls to Pearl, Orient Star will close on your location and hail you. When she arrives in your vicinity, she'll be able to winch the devices off your deck and secure them. After that, you go radio silent for the duration."

Ward seemed puzzled. "Let me see if I've got this straight...I'm just floating around, with a simulated engine room casualty, advising Pearl--no, lying to Fleet Headquarters about my situation--that we're taking on water and we may have to abandon ship--then out of the blue this Jap freighter shows up. I give him my atomic bombs--a top secret national security payload that I've sworn on my oath of office to protect with my life if necessary and then wait for the Navy to come get me. What happens when the Board of Inquiry learns we really didn't have all that serious an emergency? Does Commander John Ward become fodder for a court-martial, or worse?"

Craft smiled faintly. "Absolutely not. You want to know why? Because that Board of Inquiry will get squashed before it ever meets the first time. CINCPAC already has a copy of MacArthur's memo on file, with explanatory information about the whole operation. Gallant Flag is extremely tight, Commander, and 'need to know' is confined to just a handful of people. This is like Silverplate or Ultra or Magic, maybe tighter. It's the Red scare, and the war. MacArthur doesn't trust the chain of command."

"How high does Gallant Flag go? Does he trust the President? Does the President know about this?"

Craft knew he'd have to skirt that one. "The information is sensitive, compartmented. Even I don't know, Commander. All I know is that after you offload your bombs to the Orient Star and the Navy sends out a rescue force, you're authorized to mention the words 'Gallant Flag' at that time. I think you'll see the benefits then. Nobody can lay a hand on you after that."

Ward took a deep breath, stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray. "You're asking me to take a lot on faith, General. Suppose I go to CINCPAC now and ask him about this Gallant Flag. Not that I don't trust MacArthur but just suppose."

Craft shrugged. "He'll probably deny any knowledge. He may not know yet anyway. That's what I mean when I say Gallant Flag is compartmented. Certain elements are activated at certain times. At the right time, CINCPAC is filled in on the details. Right now, he has no more than the same memo you've seen."

Ward was amazed. "Hell of a way to run a war, if you ask me, General. But then, I suppose, this ain't no run-of-the-mill war either."

Craft seized on that. "We have a serious problem with atomic program security. Look at Fuchs, the Rosenbergs. Friggin' spies everywhere. We have a very serious situation in Korea now, maybe Europe too. Who knows? Emergencies require drastic action."

Ward rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "You know what, General? I'm in. I see the memo and I know the score. And I been in this Navy long enough to know one thing else: the first chapter of the Rule Book is all about when you can't go by the rule book. Now you've seen a little of the Chesapeake...think she'll do the job?"

"I'd say she's more than up to the job."

"Super. What say we head back to the O Club? I could use something a little stronger than coffee."

They made their way topside and headed down the gangway. The commandeered jeep was still there and Ward drove them back to the O Club. Ward bought a round for both. Craft took a scotch and soda, doubled. Ward made do with rye and water.

"To Navy regulations," Ward offered a toast. "May they be ever the bedrock of my life." He downed about a third of his drink. "It's a helluva thing, isn't it, General? You have a chain of command in the Air Force, just like we do in the Navy. What's the purpose of a chain of command anyway...to make sure we all screw up the official way. But anytime we really want to get something done--take the Manhattan Project for instance--we go outside the chain of command and set up a special unit. Doesn't that tell you something?"

"It tells me we never learn our lessons." Craft extracted a small memo pad. "There are some codes and ciphers you need to know. The most important is this one..." he showed the page to Ward, who silently mouthed the odd phrase.

A cold winter moon makes our hearts harden.

"Commit that to memory, Commander. Orient Star will radio this phrase in the clear, on a frequency of four hundred oh two megacycles. She'll broadcast when she's about an hour's steaming time away. Here's the response..." he flipped the page, and showed Ward:

Yes, but spring rains can lift our spirits to the heavens.

"When you hear the first phrase, you respond on four hundred ten megacycles with the second phrase. That's the signal to Orient Star that it's all clear to move in and prepare to transfer the bombs."

Ward was thoughtful, sipping at his rye. "What about Pearl? She'll be monitoring radio traffic in the area, especially since I've already issued distress calls."

"You radio to Pearl this message. 'Our last boiler just went offline and we're dead in the water. Listing fifteen degrees to port, down by the stern, preparing to abandon ship.' When the freighter hears that, she'll close and pull alongside of you. Have your winches ready, just in case."

Ward took the pad and flipped the pages back and forth, committing the phrases to memory. He handed the pad back to Craft. "Never thought I'd be doing spy work, when I signed up to see the world. I guess it goes with the times."

"Just you take care that this is closely held, Commander. Gallant Flag is higher than Magic, higher than Purple classification. Word of this gets out to the wrong people and both our asses won't be worth a roll of toilet paper."

Ward seemed determined. "You can count on me, General. Glad to help out. In fact, I'm looking forward to assisting General MacArthur and the war effort anyway I can."

Craft believed him. Behind his scotch and soda, he thought: no one can help more than you're going to, my friend.

Saturday, December 23, 1950

Tokyo

11:30 a.m.

Outside the iron gates of the Soviet Embassy, Azadu district was crowded with GIs and Christmas bunting and Japanese holiday festive flags and candles filled every store window in a riot of colorful displays. The American Club was just two blocks away, always a favorite hangout for officers posted to Tokyo, and the cold gray day seemed to encourage window shopping and souvenir hunting. The unfortunate GIs who couldn't spare leave for a trip back home strolled along the Sakurada Dori in raucous platoons, ogling the girls, buying trinkets for families and children Stateside, chowing down on shiroi noodles, salted fish, sake and Kirin beer. Waves of American soldiers and Japanese housewives and children mixed and surged through the crowded streets and alleys, separate streams sometimes colliding but mostly keeping to themselves. Never certain just how to react to Christmas in Tokyo, American-style, the Japanese were curious but aloof, huddling around their knots of children, anxious but smiling, always smiling, as if GIs were nothing more than big happy pets romping in the streets, creatures to be humored and gotten along with, allowed their playtime, then scooted off for the humans to get on with their business.

Fyodor Trofimenko saw none of this, though he was aware of the season and the heavy crowds outside the Embassy gates. Five floors above streetlevel, Department 8, Section A maintained a secure vault for encoding and decryption of ciphers and handling classified materials. As a handler assigned to the Japanese capital, he had relatively ready access to the code room whenever he needed to assemble the take one of his operatives had dropped off.

Today was no different, though this time, the operative had been none other than one unsuspecting Colonel Arlen Keith, United States Army. The first batch of tapes from Canary One had been finished and the truck had delivered them to the assigned dead drop location inside a fencepost in an alley next to the Chiyoda Life Insurance Company building, in Meguro-ku district a few blocks away. Exactly two hours later, Trofimenko had retrieved the tapes, now bundled in a furoshiki to resemble the shopping bundles so prevalent along the street, and taken them back to the Embassy.

He had spooled the tapes into the playing machine and started listening. In the two hours since he had started, Trofimenko had barely dared to breathe at all.

There was no mistaking the voice of MacArthur, deep, stentorian, measured phrases filling the tape as if the General were speaking to a large audience. Other voices filled the tape and Trofimenko took notes, identifying those he could, writing questions around statements made by unknowns. The last fifteen minutes of the very first tape intrigued him the most and he replayed that section several times, trying to catch the words.

There were only two speakers, though Trofimenko had no way of knowing if others were still present. The Canary device muffled the sound at times, perhaps the way it was placed. That could be fixed. The NKVD had long ago penetrated a number of Japanese custodial firms, whose employees ranged far and wide across the capital, and could gain access to some very sensitive places in the course of their janitorial duties. MacArthur asked questions at this point in the tape, and an officer he referred to as 'Paul' responded. Trofimenko wrote down the name, and a question mark. He'd consult with Department 6 later, to identify this 'Paul.'

When the tape voices referred to 'babies' and an 'operation', Trofimenko listened carefully, and his blood ran cold when the words 'Los Alamos' were mentioned. Not once, but several times. 'Los Alamos' could only mean one thing, and when the tape had run out, Trofimenko hadn't at first noticed. His heart was racing. The tape flapped around the end of the spool for several minutes before he realized what had happened. He shut off the machine.

Los Alamos.

Atom bombs.

Somehow, some way, the Americans were preparing to introduce atomic bombs into the Korean conflict.

Pale and nervous, Trofimenko lit a cigarette and puffed. His hands shook uncontrollably. This was extremely sensitive and hot stuff. He sank back in the hard wooden chair and idly rewound the tape, trying to pull meaning from what he remembered...snatches of conversations, inklings, things Fumei An and Sasumi had mentioned...different faces entering and leaving the Dai Ichi at late hours. There was a war on and MacArthur's headquarters was inside the building but there was something different about the traffic into and out of the building...a subtle variation he couldn't quite explain but it had been noticed none the less.

And his operatives, his 'children', nearly a hundred now, scattered around the capital, his eyes and ears had been feeding him tiny nuggets lately as well, things that didn't always make sense. There was plenty of evidence, when you looked at the bigger picture, from port visits by American Navy ships and idle scuttlebutt picked up in dockside bars and highway traffic and informant's mutterings, even Fumei An and her weekly massages had said things that he'd filed away in the back of his mind but paid no attention to at the time. Evidence of special operations being planned by the Americans. Special campaigns to blunt the Chinese entry into the war.

Into this unfolding picture, Trofimenko convinced himself that it made perfect sense for the Americans to bring their atomic bombs into the fight. The wonder was why it hadn't happened sooner.

Even Stykov had mentioned the possibility when the two of them met Beria in Vladivostok. And there were other possibilities too; Chiang Kai-shek's armies opening another front on the mainland, to divert Red forces from Korea. Shtykov was already betting the Americans had in mind a combined operation, atomic bombs up North, and a lightning assault across the Formosa Strait. "It makes sense, tactically and strategically, in a way," he said. "They're desperate. Mao's got them on the run and Truman'll try anything to change the situation on the battlefield."

Now, thought Trofimenko, puffing on his cigarette, there is hard evidence, incontestable evidence. A month ago, Harry Truman had publicly denied the Americans would ever bring atomic weapons into Korea. Yet here was MacArthur's own voice on tape, planning how to use them.

No doubt about it, he told himself, this tape had to go to Beria. That thought alone provoked more nervous fumbling with the playing machine and another cigarette. Trofimenko was alone in the code room and he was glad of it. He didn't need Petrov or any of those slobs barging in, seeing him perspire like a whore in heat. No, this tape was his baby.

He didn't want to go back to Mother Russia anymore than he wanted to cut off an arm but there was no question, he had to go. The tape was a prize catch and he wanted to drop it on Beria's desk in person, if that were possible, just to make sure the People's Commissar understood who had run the operation and done the legwork. Fyodor Trofimenko knew a golden ticket when he saw one. With this kind of catch, Beria would be a fool ever to pull him out of Japan.

Still, with Beria, you could never tell.

He always dreaded leaving Japan, especially for Russia, not knowing when, or if, he would ever be back. With a mixture of fear, dread and anxious hope, he boxed up the tape he'd just rewound for placement in a diplomatic pouch. No sense taking any chances now.

Then he called up Igor Galenko, staff secretary in Section A of Fourth Directorate, to see when the next Russian transport aircraft would be departing from Haneda Airport.

The sooner he got this over with, the better.

Saturday, December 23, 1950

Tokyo

9:25. a.m.

For Ryuki Oshimura, the gaijin had been very good and he appreciated that. It was a truism in Nihon that soldiers of amerika no were loud and rude and smelled funny, but for Oshimura, all that didn't matter. The gods had blessed him with seven daughters and two sons, all quite healthy, and he needed the work, so he didn't complain. He worked for a custodial service--Hitotsubashi Norii was the name--a humble position but in the bleak and dreary and hungry days after the Surrender, any work was honorable and the pay was good. No, Ryuki Oshimura knew he was a fortunate man and as he went about dusting and mopping and straightening up the furniture and polishing the big mahogany table and emptying the ashtrays and the black wastebaskets (he had been trained to strictly ignore the blue classified barrels, should any papers still be in them)--of the sixth-floor War Room at the Dai Ichi, he reflected on his good fortune and the sizeable bonus the ruddy amerika no general Whitney had stuffed in his pocket yesterday afternoon, "a Christmas bonus" was the way MacArthur's chief of staff had grandly put it.

Five large American bills, each denoted as ten dollars, promising unimaginable riches for the Oshimura household in the days ahead. Ryuki Oshimura paused with his mop and pulled out the bills he had folded into the clip in his pocket, studying them with interest. There was a portrait on one side, an American man named Andrew Jackson and a solemn pronouncement "In God We Trust." Oshimura knew nothing of the history of these big, coarse, and occasionally rude people but he figured Jackson an emperor or shogun at the very least, a noblemen filled with courage and spirit, for would the amerika no place the picture of anyone less on their currency?

He had been deeply honored by Whitney's gift and even now, tucking the five bills back into his pocket, decided he would take extra care in his custodial duties this Saturday morning, to ensure that the great general Makassar would have the best possible meeting room for his important conferences next week. Perhaps, in this small way, he could show his gratitude for the generosity of his employers.

For nearly five years, Ryuki Oshimura had been a fixture every evening and early morning at the Dai Ichi, having been employed as part of a janitorial crew assigned to the fifth and sixth floors almost from the day Makassar had landed at Atsugi and assumed leadership of a defeated and prostrate Japan. He had always been much loved, even revered by the officers, staff and inhabitants of the building.

As he continued his mopping of the wooden floors, he came eventually to a new arrangement of flowers by the window facing out onto the Hibiya Dori, an odd but colorful basket of lilacs and ferns, decorated uekibashi fashion, that he had never noticed before. Puzzled, Oshimura put down his mop and moved the basket, so as to dust, then polish the wood surfaces of the credenza on which it lay. Clearly, someone had placed this basket in the War Room recently, though he had never noticed it before. Oshimura was nothing if not thorough, having a deep familiarity with every flower pot, every

vase and cushion and ashtray that occupied the War Room. Years of cleaning this and other offices and meeting rooms on the sixth floor had enabled him to immediately spot changes in the arrangements and furnishings. He was often comforted, in these troubled times, with the routine sameness of the articles of each room, being concerned to leave as little disturbed as possible, so as not to offend any spirits. Whenever anything new was introduced, or anything different about the activities in each room occurred, it was always seen by Ryuki Oshimura at once. For years, he played a game with himself, wondering what such changes might mean about those who inhabited the offices. A spilled ashtray might mean carelessness, for instance, or it might mean something else, anger, or an impassioned argument. He often spent hours debating the subtle nuances of a shifted wastebasket.

It was a way to occupy the nighttime hours.

The basket was definitely new. As Oshimura moved it aside, he heard something thunk onto the floor. Reaching down, he found a small thumbnail-shaped disk had fallen out. Perhaps, it was part of the arrangement. He picked it up, examined it and bounced it in the palm of his hands for a moment. Lightweight, metal in construction, it looked like no decoration he had ever seen before. A button, perhaps, off an officer's jacket? Perhaps, a decorative ribbon or war medal. Many amerika no had uniforms filled with ribbons and medals. He had no idea what the disk was. As he started to replace the disk, peering at the basket of lilacs to find a suitable spot, he heard someone behind him.

It was Onishi Chiyoda, the crew supervisor.

"Isoide! Hurry up! We have many rooms! You're behind as usual."

Oshimura showed him the unusual disk. The supervisor was stout and bald, brusque and cynical. He turned the disk over and over in his hand, squinting at it, sniffing it, even touching it with his tongue.

"What is it?"

"I don't know, Chiyoda-san. It fell from the basket here."

"Imbecile! You knocked it out. Put it back and get moving."

Oshimura was cautious. He didn't like to disturb anything, especially in this room. "I haven't seen this basket before. Lilacs and ferns. Makassar doesn't like flowers, you know. I don't know who put this here."

Chiyoda was already scanning the room, appraising Oshimura's work. "It's not your concern."

"Maybe we should tell the Major Hawley-san. He's on duty this morning."

"Get back to work, old goat. You haven't even finished with the table. And these blinds--look at the dust. Are you blind? Give me your dustpan--I'll do them myself."

Chiyoda attacked the Venetian blinds with a dustbrush and left Oshimura standing with a mop in one hand and the disk in the other.

"Perhaps, to tell Hawley-san would be best."

"Suit yourself. Since I have to do your job, it won't matter."

Oshimura wasn't sure what was eating Chiyoda this morning but he shrugged it off. That was Chiyoda. The crews sometimes called him oushi baka na behind his back.

It meant 'stupid bull.'

Oshimura found Major Steve Hawley in his fourth floor office, reading Stars and Stripes and slurping a lukewarm coffee. Hawley worked for Whitney. As facilities manager for the Dai Ichi, he was sometimes called the Mayor behind his back. He hired and supervised the cleaning contractor and other vendors who supplied food, water, toilet paper, cigarettes and anything else needed by a modern military headquarters operation.

Hawley looked up over the Beetle Bailey comic strip he had been reading and saw Oshimura standing humbly in his doorway.

Oshimura bowed deeply.

"Begging your pardon, Hawley-san, there is something--that is, I have found something--"

"What is it, Oshimura-san?"

"This." He handed the disk to the Major. Hawley frowned, and felt the disk, turning it over with his fingers. His forehead wrinkled and he sat up in his creaky wooden chair with a loud thump.

"Where did this come from?"

Oshimura explained. Hawley peered closely at the device, finally extracting a pen knife from a pocket, and attempting to pry the thing open.

"It is not like any decoration I have ever seen, Hawley-san. I thought it might have fallen from a uniform--"

Hawley grunted. He couldn't prise the damn thing open. But he had an idea of what it was.

"This is no decoration." Hawley checked his watch. He was supposed to have been off-duty at 0800 hours. But the first-shift watch was late--where the hell were they? "How long ago did you find this?"

Oshimura thought. "Maybe half an hour."

"And you haven't noticed it before--you clean up there all the time, don't you?"

Oshimura was proud. "I have been cleaning sixth floor here for almost five years. I haven't noticed this basket of lilacs before. It can't have been there more than a few days."

Hawley questioned him closely. "You clean in the War Room every night, Oshumura-san? This is very important."

Oshimura shook his head. "Not every night. Chiyoda sometimes assigns someone else. But the list is very small. Three men, no more than that."

"And their names will be on file," Hawley was already thinking. He was growing more uneasy every minute. "Okay, Oshimura-san, thanks. That'll be all. I'll keep this. You can return to your duties."

Oshimura bowed deeply and backed out of the Major's office. He went back up to the sixth floor to resume his mopping, wondering what was going on.

Major Steve Hawley's head hurt. He glared down at the disk Oshimura had given him. There was little doubt it was a miniature sound recording device, a bug. And in the War Room, of all places. Hawley swallowed hard. Three years ago, Whitney had assigned security sweeps to the Second CID Detachment, housed on the first floor. Criminal ID had the gear and the training. They did the sweeps at Atsugi and the naval command center at Yokohama. Routine stuff, supposedly, though the Communists had been a bit more aggressive lately. But what the hell had happened?

Now, Hawley realized, they had an extremely serious breach of security on their hands. And there wasn't much doubt about who was behind it. Hawley automatically thought Russians, ten to one. The question was: how did it get into the War Room of Far Eastern Command? And who put it there?

Major Steve Hawley rubbed his eyes wearily. He had been looking forward to light Saturday duty, maybe even getting away a bit early, going over to the Silver Slipper, maybe even Lohmeyers, having a whiskey or three, and sacking out at his bachelor quarters in the Bunka Apartments, maybe some late afternoon poker and a big juicy burger at the American Club.

Now he had a security time bomb on his hands, with no way to ignore it. There was no telling what had been compromised: operational matters, strategic discussions. Oshimura had no idea how long the device had been in the War Room. No question about the next step...he had to inform General Courtney Whitney right away. Then, there would be investigations, interviews, sweeps of every floor and every room and closet in the Dai Ichi, more interviews, statements and sworn testimony...all in all, one helluva a big mess.

Oh well, Hawley muttered. No sense putting off the inevitable. He found an envelope and put the bug inside, sealing it. Then he dialed up Whitney's duty officer on the first floor. Captain Hugh Anderson answered the phone sleepily.

"Yeah, what's up?"

"Captain, this is Major Hawley. Facilities. I need to contact the General right away. Security matter. This is urgent."

"Sorry, Major. The General's away at the moment. I think he went golfing."

In this weather? "Goddamn it, Captain, I don't care if he went to have his nose picked. Send a runner. We got us a major-league security problem and all hell's about to break loose."

Saturday, December 23, 1950

Taipei, Formosa, Shaogun Shipyard

12:15 p.m.

Masuhiro Tetsuko loved ships and shipyards. He stood in a stiff breeze, low clouds scudding across the sky, at the end of Slip Number Ten, watching with his assistant Hiro Osawa, as fitters, welders, machinists and electricians swarmed all over the American submarine once known as Sunfish, repairing her hull and conning tower and making the boat ready for the critical mission to come.

Sunfish, once known to the United States Navy as hull number SS-355, before she had run aground on the muddy flats of Formosa's north beaches at the mouth of the Tanshui River in March 1945, was Tetsuko's biggest project, the one that required the most resources, the most cajoling and horsetrading and dealing and it would surely be the project he would use to extract maximum concessions from the Americans, especially General Paul Craft, when it was finished and delivered as they had agreed on a month ago.

Tetsuko had another project he had to attend to in Formosa, one that had little to do with the restoration of an abandoned American submarine, but one that was every bit as critical to Gallant Flag. It was here, in fact on the very grounds of the Shaogun Shipyard, that his loyal assistant and staff secretary Hiro Osawa would die, most likely in a regrettable but unavoidable accident while pursuing Omisumi's business interests with the Chinese landlords of the yard.

Craft-san had insisted on the strictest possible secrecy in Gallant Flag matters. Eliminating Osawa and all the contractors on the Mishida Island refurbishment project was the best way. The only way.

Tetsuko saw a man approaching along the dockfront. He was slight of build, thick-necked with prominent ears. It was Li Gao Chi, the skipper of the soon-to-be-refurbished Sunfish.

Li bowed on seeing the Japanese industrialist. They shook hands.

"You're trip to Shaogun was a pleasant one, Tetsuko-san?" Li wore a dark blue pea coat with four darker stripes chevroned along the sleeves...captain's stripes. Shoulderboards displayed the sunburst emblem of the Kuomintang Navy, with an anchor and circlet of stars.

Tetsuko nodded. "Pleasant enough, Captain. I came to see how repairs are going. You've only got a few days until launch. Will you be at sea by the fourth of January, as promised? I sent you the schedule for the American ship."

"Not to worry." Li smiled, revealing teeth long stained with cigarettes and coffee, and a huge wad of tobacco. "We've made good progress. Hull patches are mostly done. We won't have time to test them here though. That'll be done on the shakedown. And I've got fitters up forward now, inside bracing the frames that were damaged the worst. She hit the reef pretty hard on her portside bow, apparently stove in several frames. For now, we're using those wooden beams, cutting them to fit." He indicated a pallet of lumber by the dock.

"You're sure they will hold?"

Li spat out a wad of tobacco juice. "Well enough. Shaogun's got the best fitters around. My biggest headache is the hull valves. Complicated buggers, they are. And finicky. Stick like glue sometimes. A lot were damaged beyond repair. Boat had some minor flooding in the torpedo room, too. We spent two weeks just pumping water and scraping mud. Those valves aren't cheap either, Tetsuko-san. You'll get the bill."

Tetsuko snorted. "Of that, I am quite sure. The valves are repaired?"

"They are now." Li was an ex-Imperial Japanese Navy submariner. His real name was Hedeki Osato. "We're cleaning up things now...still got bad corrosion from battery spills that'll take awhile. But she's got a new compass, new radio, new sonar...well, perhaps not new. I should say...salvaged."

Tetsuko didn't care where the gear came from. "Do what is necessary, Captain. The Americans are getting anxious. As long as she's seaworthy by fourth of January, that's all that matters. What's left?"

Li took off his cap, scratched a nearly bald head. "Why don't you come aboard and see for yourself?"

"I will do that." Tetsuko followed the captain to the main gangway and crossed over to the foredeck of the boat. They slipped down the conning tower hatch, making a slight jog at the inner hatch onto a separate ladder. Below, welding torches crackled and floodlights filled the conn and periscope well with a brilliant white glow. Shadows and shouts and curses volleyed across the control room.

Li helped the industrialist down to the deck.

"Most of her control room gear was intact, though the diving board lights had to be replaced. Some of the ballast control piping was filled with 'crud', as the Americans call it. Plane and helm controls and linkages were rusty too. Bow planes were pretty well smashed in when she beached. We've replaced all that...bought some of it, cannibalized some...found some here and there--" Li half-smiled. "My boys are clever enough. What we can't buy or rig up and repair, we just pinch."

"Too clever, I'm sure," Tetsuko offered. He watched a pair of workers pulling wire bundles through the open front of a control panel. Li's men were a garrulous and earthy lot. Some were ex-Imperial Navy blowhards who had fled the Occupation, some were Chinese refugees and wharf rats from mainland coastal cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong, a few were Portuguese renegades out of Macau. All were dedicated Red-haters--that much they had in common. Their main dedication, though, was to getting rich quick, getting drunk or laid and getting out fast. Their ideology had been greased liberally from Tetsuko's bank accounts.

Mercenaries all, warriors for hire, they glared in predatory fascination at the Japanese industrialist as he made his way bow to stern inspecting everything, all anxious to see their next paycheck, the earlier the better, all wondering what lay in store in this patchwork junkheap of a vessel so long ago damned and abandoned by the Americans. Above all, Li's crew were crude and rough men, with quick wits and quicker fists.

To a man, each work crew stopped what it was doing to lay wary eyes on the 'stinking rich bastard' who was financing the entire operation from personal funds, word had it as a favor to the great general Makassar himself.

One crewman, however, was not quite like all the rest. As Tetsuko and Captain Li passed through the torpedo room before returning aft to the conn, torpedoman's mate Wang Liu Zhao made note of the fact that the 'stinking rich bastard' everyone had been talking about was indeed Masuhiro Tetsuko, head of the huge Omisumi combine. Wang knew of the man, and he knew Tetsuko had a reputation of being comfortable and influential around Americans. He committed to memory everything he could about the industrialist: his face and manner, a general description, the silent wheeze as the man passed through the cramped confines of the compartment. Later when his shift was over, Wang knew he would be asked to detail every word and eyeblink of what he had seen.

Though Li had personally recruited him from the Kuomintang Naval shipyard at Chi Li, downriver near the mouth of the Tanshui, Wang was no ordinary pipe fitter or torpedoman's mate. He had trained in both arts for weeks as part of his overall preparation for service with the Sharp Swords. In fact, Wang was a sergeant in the People's Liberation Army, the army of China, and its famed 38th Division, conquerors of Shanghai. Not much more than a year ago, Wang reflected, he'd been marching with his unit down the waterfront Bund in that coastal city, having driven the Nationalist dogs right off the mainland to refuge on this rocky, flea-bitten donkey's rump of an island. Now, his fortunes had brought him right into the lair of the Nationalist dogs with a chance to do real and lasting damage to the number one enemy of the People's Republic.

Wang knew that Jiang Chen Li would expect a full debriefing and as he returned to the piping work he had been assigned that morning--fitting new lengths of pipe to finish out a new loop of the torpedo tube pressurizing system--he wondered just how it was that a great and wealthy Japanese businessman fit into the picture of refurbishing a derelict American submarine. Even as he fitted up a tee and lit the flux burner to solder it to the pipe stand, he was aware that Captain Jiang was probably close by. The captain had come with him that very morning to Slip Number Ten, to snoop around for himself in his guise of a government shipyard safety inspector.

Over the last few days, over countless beers and fish and noodles at pubs along Ching An Street outside the shipyard gates, Jiang had slowly pieced together a sketchy but puzzling picture of the mission of the Sunfish.

It seemed she was being fitted out for a special, covert mission, somewhere in the western Pacific, something to do with the war effort in Korea. That would explain Tetsuko's presence...Jiang knew from PLA intelligence sources in Tokyo that Japan's most influential industrialist and founder of the huge keiretsu Omisumi was an American pet, "a capitalist lackey on a short leash" was the way Peking's State Bureau of Intelligence put it in official memoranda to the Division commander.

But exactly where she was going, and why, Jiang couldn't say. Wherever it was, the mission was soon. He'd seen the refit work level pick up smartly in the last week. Now, work parties were clambering over the hull night and day. When the first burlap sacks of dry stores provisions had showed up that very morning only a few hours ago, Jiang had carefully noted the fact, figuring Sunfish might begin firing up her diesels to shove off at any moment.

Loading dry stores lent fresh urgency to Jiang's next task--somehow getting into the captain's stateroom to look for anything resembling operational orders.

While Jiang used his inspector's credentials to bully his way aboard the Sunfish, Masuhiro Tetsuko was just climbing out the conning tower hatch. Captain Li's impromptu tour of the boat had convinced him that Sunfish would be ready for launch on schedule. After reviewing progress on her fitting out, Tetsuko spotted a limousine and Army jeep motorcade lining up dockside.

Captain Li helped the industrialist to the gangway. "Tetsuko-san, you're ride is here. I was told to have you topside and ready to go by 1300 hours." He bowed to Tetsuko, adding, "Now you're someone else's responsibility and I can get on with my work."

Tetsuko offered a slight bow in return. "A very informative trip, Li-san. My American colleagues will be satisfied with your progress. Remember what I told you--this boat is vital to the war effort in Korea. The Americans mean business. You must be ready on time."

Li was just glad to finally be rid of snooping bosses and bureaucrats. "Not to worry, my friend. You'll have your boat on time, with a full crew. And they're all loyal to me personally. Just you be sure the money isn't late. I don't fancy having my head cut off."

Tetsuko left the dock and climbed into a black Hudson limousine, idling just beyond the fence. He had a plane to catch in less than an hour to head back to Tokyo.

A few dozen feet away, 'safety inspector' Jiang Chen Li had managed to bully, threaten and cajole his way aboard the Sunfish. He had entered the conn, clipboard in hand, then steadily worked his way aft, all the while 'checking' the boat's frame and interior hull seams, her rigging and pipework, cryptically making notes of gibberish on his clipboard, but mindful of the steady traffic of welders, electricians, machinists and crewmen rubbing past him in the cramped confines of the boat's single corridor.

When at last the stream of passersby had dwindled off, he came to the captain's stateroom and managed to quickly force the lock.

Unnoticed, he slipped inside and shut the door.

The stateroom was little more than a large closet paneled in wood-grain plastic, streaked and still showing effects of water damage. He found a small safe over the pull-out desktop readily enough and set to work on the combination lock, his ears tuned equally to the muffled sounds of bodies and voices scraping along outside the room.

Exactly four and a half minutes later, his practiced fingers 'heard' the final tumbler click into place. He twisted the handle and the safe opened. Inside were several envelopes and a manila folder, creased to fit the small space. He pulled out the envelopes first--pausing momentarily when he thought the door was being opened--no, it was a commotion of something heavy being dragged down the corridor, perhaps more dry stores. He continued.

The third envelope he examined contained typed pages detailing what Tetsuko had told Captain Li of his mission. A torn section of a nautical chart--Jiang could see it was of some part of the Pacific--had been marked heavily in red with course headings and waypoints. Intrigued, Jiang quickly scanned the pages.

A few minutes' reading left him even more puzzled. Tetsuko's briefing and Li's own hand-scribbled notes in the margins had been faithfully transcribed almost verbatim by some unknown typist. The language was informal, almost conversational. To Jiang, none of it made much sense. He traced the course redlined on the chart scrap, mentally trying to place the islands and currents noted in some broader context. Clearly, the course followed a north by northwesterly heading. He realized, after a moment's figuring, that he was looking at a scrap of the western Pacific Ocean--yes, it had to be. There were the Bonins. And Iwo Jima. And latitude line 30 north.

It still made no sense. The course Li (or whoever) had plotted took Sunfish halfway to Hawaii. Jiang had expected a more northerly course, even northwestward, toward mainland China, and Korea. This course plot ended in mid-ocean. Reading and re-reading Li's notes, Jiang determined Sunfish was to make rendezvous at the eastern end of the plot, coordinates roughly 25 North and 165 West.

Rendezvous? With whom? Or what? Scanning further, he realized Sunfish was to make rendezvous with an American freighter, in mid-ocean, and support transfer of war supplies from one ship to another.

Jiang looked up, evaluating sounds from the corridor. No one interrupted. He went back to Li's notes. But he stayed alert.

None of the papers or the chart made sense. Why not just make the transfer of war supplies in port somewhere? And why a submarine anyway, if there were two freighters? Why refurbish an old derelict pig boat, damaged, abandoned and turned over lock, stock and periscope to the Chinese?

Jiang suddenly felt his neck hairs bristle...the same feeling he often had, just before sighting in on an enemy from concealment. 'Trigger hairs', he liked to call them. My antenna. They had saved his life a dozen times. He'd learned to pay attention.

A secret mission by the Americans to a mid-Pacific rendezvous, in an old fleet submarine left to rust on the beaches of Formosa. What the hell was going on? Maybe it was just a cover for the real mission. In any case, Jiang knew what he had to do now. He had to get this back to Marshal Peng and fast; all of it: the Sunfish's fitting out, her weapons and crew complement, her presumed course and mission. Jiang made a few notes of his own on the clipboard.

Then he slipped out of the stateroom, unseen, and made his way back to the conn.

"Well, are we going to sink to the bottom, inspector?" A gruff voice accosted him at the conning tower ladder. It was Lieutenant Xie Fang, the ship's exec. He glared like an angry boar from the helmsman's station, just as Jiang had started up the ladder.

"Everything seems in order, Lieutenant. The boat seems seaworthy. You just can't take any chances though. Not these days. Not with an old tub like this."

"No," replied Xie. "You can't. Mind if I take a look at your report?"

Jiang had to think fast. "You'll see my reports after they're compiled and approved."

Xie snorted. "You're a touchy little prick, aren't you? Must be hiding something."

"Only my contempt for someone like you, Lieutenant. These notes go to the Safety Office, just like always, then a report comes back to the shipyard. Except for a few obvious flaws--"Jiang glared back at Xie face to face--"looks like Shaogun will make out all right."

Xie circled the conning tower ladder, taking the full measure of this snotty little ass-kisser. "Just so we shove off on time, friend. I got bills to pay and a life to live. I don't need some officious little prick from the Government cutting into my ship pay. Understand?"

Jiang figured he could have put a fairly large dent in the exec's skull before the man took a second breath but he swallowed his anger. Sharp Swords were well drilled in close quarters combat, including jujitsu. Pity, he thought. Splitting this skull would have been a real pleasure.

Not today, Jiang told himself. He firmly removed Xie's heavy hand, which had dropped onto Jiang's shoulder, as a warning. For good measure, he squeezed the exec's fingers hard enough to inflict visible pain on the Lieutenant's face. Xie pulled his hand away and scowled.

"Perfectly, Lieutenant. Now if you'll excuse me--" Jiang hauled himself smartly up the ladder topside and crossed over to the dock.

No question about it--the Americans were up to something. Something involving an old World War II fleet submarine but it wasn't something involving Chiang Kai-shek or a Kuomintang invasion of the mainland. Li's notes--they could hardly be dignified with the term operational orders--said little more of use to Jiang. Maybe the real mission hadn't been written down, maybe it was still in the head of Captain Li.

That thought presented Jiang with an interesting strategic conundrum. He couldn't very well kidnap the Captain and take him back to China, could he?

Jiang had exited the fenced-in restricted area alongside Slip Number Ten at the same time the afternoon shift change came. He headed up a shallow hill, passing a light truck parked on the side of the road. A flash of movement caught his eye and he realized someone had been crouching on the other side of the truck, below the cab doors. Only the late afternoon sun cast enough shadow along the pavement to reveal the hidden observer.

He heard a door latch shut--it was the passenger side of the truck cab--and all of a sudden, the truck began to roll forward, down the hill toward the gathering knots of off-shift workers. It picked up speed as it eased down the slope. There was no one inside.

Instantly alert, Jiang saw the legs of the man who'd shut the cab door from the other side just disappearing through a row of shrubbery. Even as he weighed a decision--which way to go?--the truck smashed into a lamp post with a rending screech of metal on metal, then caromed out into the road again.

Less than fifty feet away, Hiro Osawa had just started to cross the street. He didn't see the truck.

Jiang Chen Li didn't know Hiro Osawa. He did not know that Osawa was a key staff assistant to Masuhiro Tetsuko. He did not know that Tetsuko had arranged a little 'accident' to remove Osawa from the payroll of Omisumi Corporation and from explicit knowledge of the Gallant Flag mission. A promise had been made to the Americans, a promise that Gallant Flag would not be compromised under any circumstances. For Tetsuko, the logic was simple and unavoidable: non-essential personnel were expendable.

Jiang Chen Li knew none of this. He simply reacted on instinct.

Jiang turned and chased after the careening truck, now skidding toward the opposite side of the Chang-An Road, toward a small machine shop surrounded by off-shift workers returning their tools. The truck rolled, skidded and wobbled from wheel to wheel, picking up speed again, heading right for them.

Jiang hustled to catch up with the truck cab, dodging fenders and flying doors. He launched himself into the cab, wincing as the truck's motion slammed the door on his legs, and groped frantically for the brakes. He rolled, finding himself pinned under the wheel, and pressed the brakes with all his strength.

The truck skidded, rear end swinging around, but its momentum carried it forward and further down the hill. It tipped over and slid on its side several hundred feet, sparks flying from metal on pavement, narrowly missing the machine shop building, then screeching along the pavement to pass within fifteen feet of Hiro Osawa and a few other pedestrians. Osawa had dived for the sidewalk upon seeing the runaway vehicle. The truck finally came to rest upside down, cab forward and front windows starred and shattered from impact, at the very bottom of the hill, crushing the Restricted Area fence.

For a brief moment, as he cautiously checked body parts and extricated himself from the floor of the cab, Jiang Chen Li locked eyes with Hiro Osawa, not ten feet away, lying prone on the pavement. No flash of recognition passed between them...they did not know each other at all. But each was given, if only for a fraction of a second, to contemplate what might have been.

Hiro Osawa wondered who it was that had dashed down the street and dived into the cab to stop the runaway truck.

Jiang Chen Li wondered who it was that had deliberately let off the brakes at the top of the Chang-An Road hill, letting a ton-and-a-quarter vehicle come rolling down a hill filled with dozens of Shaogun shipyard workers.

Though neither man would find answers to the questions just beginning to form in the back of their minds, Jiang Chen Li was the first to move.

He backed himself out of the crumpled truck cab, careful to avoid being snagged by sharp metal or glass, and left the wreckage as fast as he could, falling into a wobbly trot as voices and shouts filled the air behind him and people swarmed in around the truck.

No way was he going to stay behind for questions and police investigations. Wang Liu Zhao had a safe house in Taipei's Paitou district, a bamboo and pine shack, really, tucked away nicely in a narrow wooded defile a stone's throw from the Tanshui River Road north of the city.

The rest of the Sharp Swords unit would be gathering there by nightfall, and Jiang had solid intelligence he needed to share with the team. He was the commanding officer and a decision would have to be made, tonight at the latest.

Would the Swords stay in Formosa another day for further reconnaissance? Or would they make their pickup point on a rocky overlook five miles south of Chin Shan, a desolate headland at the northernmost tip of the island? A People's Liberation Navy Kilo-class submarine would be surfacing there just before daybreak, two miles offshore, and her signal lantern would flash exactly three times, precisely at 0500 hours.

Jiang knew that if the Swords were to make their pickup tomorrow morning, they'd have to drive east from Taipei to the coast road as fast as they dared, and retrieve the dinghy they had beached and concealed in a nearby cove.

The question was: had the Swords really learned enough in Taipei to puzzle out what the Americans were up to?

Jiang had no ready answer to that. Not yet. He decided to concentrate on getting away from the Shaogun works and the steaming, smoldering wreckage of a runaway truck as fast as he could.
CHAPTER 10

Saturday, December 23, 1950

On the Seoul-Uijongbu Highway, South Korea

10:30 a.m.

Xmas greetings from Korea

Land of lice and diarrhea.

From mucked-up shores we've half mastered,

Merry Xmas, you lucky bastard.

popular Christmas greeting on the 8th Army front,

December, 1950

Lieutenant General Walton Walker was mad. In fact, to be truthful, he was pissed as hell. He climbed into his jeep, parked outside Eighth Army's command post in Seoul's Chaebek Street fruit market (what was left of it), and sat down hard on the freezing cold upholstery. Furious at what he had just heard from his own staff--lying, ass-kissing toadys every last one of them--he banged the steel handrail welded to the jeep frame so he could display himself to the troops like his idol George Patton--and ordered the driver "to get this pile of scrap iron moving."

The driver, Master Sergeant George Belton, who had driven Walker all across France and Germany in the last big fight five years ago, slammed the gearshift forward and the jeep jerked into motion in a hail of tire smoke and gravel. No sense playing nice with the controls when "The Little Bulldog" was in this kind of mood. Belton had learned that lesson a long time ago.

No sir, he thought to himself, when you have the privilege of driving Walton Walker around a battlefield, you go balls out all the time. Walker wouldn't have had it any other way.

Walker was headed north that freezing morning. Didn't matter one stinking iota of an Army bean that the weather was lousy, icy and frigid, the roads either slick and treacherous or clogged with Bugout-fevered troops fleeing south like rats. Walker told Belton to make up time anyway he could. He had some awards to give out, some medals and citations, up in I Corps sector around Uijongbu. In a small pouch inside his poncho, Walker had half a dozen of Syngman Rhee's Republic of Korea presidential unit citations. They were destined for the U.S. 24th Division and the British 27th Brigade.

Walker was depressed, even distraught, as the Jeep swung onto the Uijongbu Highway, red lights flashing and siren blaring. Traffic was heavy, mostly ROKs heading south. Just the day before, Syngman Rhee had told the Americans he was pulling the South Korean government out of Seoul again, the second time in six months, and heading for Pusan. When the official announcement came later today, Walker figured the southbound traffic in fleeing refugees alone would make the roads impossible.

Sergeant Belton was well accustomed to Walker's moods and the Commanding General of the Eighth Army was particularly moody this morning. Not a man of many words, Walker seemed especially withdrawn today, smoldering silently like a volcano ready to blow. He had been unable to stop the Great Bugout, a near total rout of U.N and U.S. ground forces by hordes of Chicom infantry pushing down from Manchuria. He wanted to meet personally with his division commanders over the next few days, to light a little fire under them, put some backbone in them, to stand and fight toe to toe with the Reds like GIs. Walker knew that if his line continued to crumble, what had happened to the 1st Marines at Chosin and his own 2nd Division up north would ripple outward to the entire UN position north of the 38th parallel. They would be pushed back and everything won since Inchon would be lost.

Chilled at the prospect of commanding the longest retreat in American military history, Walton Walker pulled the rug around his legs up tighter against the icy wind.

They drove north for an hour, sliding past a steady stream of ROK troop trucks and bedraggled soldiers slogging south. The Uijongbu Highway was nothing but frozen mud, a narrow, two-lane strip of mud and ice. Behind the General's jeep, two more jeeps followed in close formation, the lead vehicle sporting three infantrymen and a .50 caliber quad-50 converted anti-aircraft gun. The follow-on jeep carried four more soldiers, all well-armed, and an M19 .30-caliber machine gun mounted over the rear seat.

Walker said little for the first hour, except to urge Belton on faster and faster. "Sergeant, get the lead out, will ya? I want to make Camp Hasting by sundown."

Fifty feet behind them, Lieutenant Stu Grimsley, principal staff aide to Walker, just shook his head. Walker's jeep spat mud and pulled away, too fast for conditions in a driving snowstorm that had descended that morning over central Korea. With heavy traffic coming the other way on the narrow road, the Jeep convoy had to cling to the edge of the road, sometimes with only two wheels on the ground.

This is insane, muttered Grimsley to himself. But Walker had already told Belton not to slow down for anything.

Grimsley silently prayed that somehow they'd make it. Walker was like that. Hell for leather until he made his objective.

The Jeep convoy passed through the shell-pocked rubble of the village of Yangwon, just after 11 o'clock. Belton had to slow to a crawl to negotiate heavy foot traffic over a wooden bridge spanning a frozen stream. On the opposite side, they descended through a series of switchbacks into a rugged, scarred, mud-choked valley and ran into a stalled column of U.S. deuce-and-a-quarter trucks and Korean refugees.

At Walker's urging, Sergeant Belton swung the jeep well to the outside of a long column, trying to pass some bogged-down tank transporters. In the snow, Belton never saw the South Korean weapons carrier swing out into the same lane, a hundred yards ahead.

The drivers saw each other when the distance separating them was less than seventy feet. At thirty-five miles an hour, neither had any chance to do more than flinch.

Belton swerved back but it was too late to avoid a glancing collision. The Korean truck struck the left rear fender of Walker's jeep, knocking it sideways, skidding it off the icy road into a shallow ravine. After the impact, the laws of physics ran their course.

Walker's jeep turned over, rolling several times as it plunged into the ravine. Walker and Belton were both thrown clear of the jeep as it banged and bounced like a toy. Belton landed twenty feet upslope, beyond the deep gouge of rending metal, mud, snow and ice, his unconscious body flopping to a rest at the foot of a scraggly, windswept line of shrubbery. He stirred for a moment, but did not immediately regain consciousness.

General Walton Walker was less fortunate. As he tumbled down the side of the ravine, the sixteen-hundred pound jeep landed directly on top of him, crushing his chest and breaking his neck. The General, still unconscious, rolled down the final yards of the icy embankment, the jeep with its wheels still spinning, shedding seats and door parts, coming to a final rest about ten feet away.

There was a moment of stunned silence all along the column. Only the low whistle of an ice-flecked wind swept across the Uijongbu Highway. Then, as if by signal, shouts erupted and soldiers dismounted, filling the road with motion.

Soldiers and medics and officers poured into the accident area, scrambling down the embankment to the two motionless bodies. Grimsley was among the first to arrive at the General's side. What he saw made his heart sink.

Walker's body was hoisted onto a stretcher made of tied-together ponchos. The General was hurriedly littered up the slope to another vehicle nearby, an ammo truck filled with mortar rounds. Room was made for the General and the truck sped off south, back toward Yangwon, where a crude battalion aid station had been set up that morning to treat the walking wounded.

The chief medic was a captain snagged out of medical school in California in the President's limited draft a few weeks before. He had only been in Korea for five days. His name was Otterstein.

The captain cut away Walker's tunic and undershirt, after helping several soldiers wrestle the General out of his coat. Right away, Otterstein could see the cause was virtually hopeless.

Walton Walker was still alive, though how that miracle of God had happened Otterstein could never have explained. The General was semi-conscious, paralyzed from the neck down. He was breathing with great difficulty--little more than a labored and rattling wheeze--and the captain was certain he had at least one collapsed lung, multiple vertebrae fractures, and severe head, facial and body lacerations and contusions.

Otterstein knew there was little he could do other than keep the General as comfortable as possible, setting up regular morphine injections from a packet of syrettes he kept on hand. An hour later, a MASH HO3S-1 helicopter arrived, settling down in a swirl of snow and rocks outside the heated tent. The CG of the Eighth Army needed far better hospital facilities than Otterstein could provide. He needed a full military hospital. The closest one was in Seoul itself.

Walker was hoisted up into the chopper. Grimsley climbed in as well. When the General was made secure and as comfortable as possible, Grimsley drew one of the attending medics aside. Captain Dave Wilcox was busy writing up a chart on Walker with one hand, while finagling with a balky IV drip with the other.

"Is he going to make it, Captain?" Grimsley asked.

Wilcox was growing frustrated by the moment, juggling five tasks at once. The last thing he needed now was babysitting some staff weenie.

"Look, pal, how the hell do I know? It doesn't look good, okay? Right this moment, only God Himself can save the General."

And indeed, when the helicopter had lifted off and been airborne for less than ten minutes, a MASH surgeon accompanying Detachment 681 reached across Walker's chest and could feel no pulse or breath at all. He noted on the chart that General Walker's face had already acquired the pallor of death. From this point, all that followed was automatic, meticulously described in Army Regulation 66-2, Care and Handling of Mortal Remains.

The surgeon began filling out the certificate of death, even as Kimpo Airfield materialized out of a ground fog and the chopper banked for a touchdown.

The chopper settled onto the airstrip just outside Base Ops at a few minutes before noon.

General Walton Walker was carefully littered down to the tarmac. The MASH surgeon made a final check for vital signs. There were none.

In exact accordance with AR66-2, Walker was pronounced dead on arrival.

Tuesday, December 26, 1950

Washington, D.C.

11:15 a.m.

Dr. Chambers Kimberly hated coming to Washington. Too many cold monuments, he told himself, as he stepped off the United Airlines Lockheed Constellation onto the tarmac at National Airport. Monuments for monumental egos. He went into the terminal, stretching, needing a drink and a smoke after the long flight from Albuquerque, claimed his bags and got a taxi.

The ride over to Independence Avenue and the Atomic Energy Commission building took ten minutes.

It wasn't just the monuments and the egos of the politicians either. Nothing good ever came of a trip to Washington. Always, there were meetings, conferences, investigations, hearings. Kimberly was a New Englander by birth, born and raised in the Brahmin country of Boston's North End, Groton-prepped and Harvard-educated with the requisite degree in Physics. But for all that, he was a lapsed East Coaster at best, having long ago forsaken proper breeding and snowy winters and Fifth Avenue shopping trips for the wild frontier of the New Mexico West.

Coming back East always seemed to him like coming home for dinner after playing all afternoon with the gang. You didn't want to do it but you knew you should.

It didn't help Chambers Kimberly's mood one bit that, this time, he had come back East to make war on a long-time colleague.

Kimberly trudged up the rain-swept steps of the Munitions Building and pushed through the double-doors into a stuffy lobby of cold linoleum, green and white cinder block walls and armed guards behind checkerboard barriers. He was late and he knew it but it couldn't be helped. Three sign-in logs and four flights of stairs later, he found the room with the frosted glass pane and the engraved sign reading General Advisory Committee. He hitched up his bags and pushed his way in.

They were all there, grim as a wake, waiting, smoking, drumming pencils on the old scarred, coffee-stained mahogany table.

Chambers Kimberly had come to the Nation's Capital to rat on a fellow scientist, something he would have found distasteful in the extreme save for what was really at stake here. He had come to stop Albert Ranier from wrecking the nation's atomic program for good.

"Finally, you're here. I thought you'd been caught in an accident." It was Lewis Strauss, millionaire banker and Commissioner. He'd agreed to meet Kimberly, on "a matter of utmost urgency," though not without his usual grumbling and sniping at "eggheads who can't even speak English."

Others were gathered at the table. Kimberly exchanged handshakes and greetings as he pulled off his soaked hat and jacket and thumbed open the briefcase.

Two inspectors from the Commission flanked Strauss. Martin Steeple was tall, dark crewcut with features sharp enough to slice paper. His eyelids hung like heavy curtains over fathomless black eyes. The other inspector was a pipe-smoker: Gary Lane. His houndstooth tie was all that Kimberly would later remember.

"From the Bureau of Inspections," Strauss explained.

"Police?" Kimberly asked. He poured some coffee and tested it. Lukewarm and bitter. A cigarette came out next. Kimberly lit up and felt better. The coffee could wait.

"More like detectives," Steeple offered. His voice was quiet, a faint menace under the even tone. "Investigators, if you like. We're attached to the Commission Chairman's office. Atomic energy security regulations. That sort of thing. I'm sure you know the drill."

"Indeed." Gordon Dean's goons were turning up better dressed and with improved manners lately.

Strauss was impatient. "I don't have all afternoon." He hated formalities. "These gentlemen are from the FBI, Chambers. Robert Blount--" he indicated a wiry man, tugging nervously at his lower lip. Blount had a high forehead, wet with perspiration in the steam-heated room. "--and Walter Givens." Givens was blond, football-hero body, with a tight smile. He nodded.

"A pleasure." Kimberly lied.

"You've made some pretty serious accusations here," Strauss went on. "I asked you to come to Washington and explain. Dr. Albert Ranier is one of the foremost atomic physicists of our time. He's made major contributions to our bomb program. I hope you brought proof. And details. These men like details. Dates, times, documents, that sort of thing."

Kimberly knew the inquisition would come. The truth was that Albert Ranier was a dangerous man, careless with facts, cavalier with reputations. He treated colleagues and co-workers like atomic nuclei...particles to be split, shoved around, discarded or transmuted into something else.

"Commissioner Strauss, I'm not a fool. I know the statement I made to you levels charges that seem pretty incredible to most people. Fact is, I can substantiate every word of it."

Robert Blount had stopped tugging at his lip. "Dr. Kimberly, let me see if I've got this straight." He read off a piece of paper. "'Diverting plutonium at Hanford. Doctoring production and test records to cover this diversion, theft of bomb hardware, intimidation and threats made to assembly technicians at Los Alamos.' Oh, and this one too: 'making spurious, slanderous and malicious accusations of Communist sympathies against all who disagree with him.'" Blount folded the page carefully, straightening it along the table's edge. He hunched forward on his elbows, regarded Kimberly with skepticism. "You've got a whole Red spy ring right here, Doctor. All wrapped up in one man. Makes Fuchs and Rosenberg look like amateurs."

Strauss was equally doubtful. "Chambers, look--I know you've been under a lot of pressure lately. We all have. But for the love of God and Abraham, Ranier did sign the loyalty oath. He's been through all the background checks. He's sworn to all the security regulations. The man comes out clean in my book, any way you cut it. That is, unless you've got better proof in that briefcase of yours."

Kimberly had not come to Washington unprepared. He searched in his briefcase for the suspect Hanford logs and found them.

"Commissioner, you and I both sat in this very room not a month ago, while the Committee debated the merits of this so-called Ranier-Tolkach method. You and I both heard Teller refer to it as a 'shadow of a ghost of a theory.' Someone else--maybe it was Weisskopf--called it 'vaporous drivel.' Look at these logs from Hanford Bulk Reduction. Shelby Winters made these copies for me. Batch J-1250, signed, sealed and delivered to Los Alamos. Production super initialed it--here and here--see? Winters' handwriting." Kimberly fingered the signatures. "--and the cans were shipped to Los Alamos on 8 December. By now, the plutonium has already been machined and inserted into casings, wired up, the works."

"We agreed to add five shots to Greenhouse, Chambers. This is just documentation for the make-up of those shots. What the hell's the big deal?"

Kimberly moistened his lips. "The big deal, Commissioner, is that batch J-1250 is not to the agreed-on specs. Here's your proof--" he pulled out some more papers, slapped them on the table, "from assays of tailings done in the machining bays at Los Alamos. I got curious, so I had them done. Look for yourself--J-1250 is nothing more than run-of-the-mill, garden-variety Mark VI grade plutonium, just like the rest of Greenhouse. There's no detectable difference. And the specs say it should reflect the Ranier-Tolkach composition."

"What exactly are you saying?"

"Simply this: a week ago, Shelby Winters called me from Hanford. The T-Plant production manager...you know him--"

Strauss nodded. "Yes, yes, 'The Atomic Ambassador.' Go on."

"--exactly. When the batch was first produced, Winters told me he looked at the inspection records. The chemistry was quite a bit different from what he expected. Dr. Ranier passed it off with some kind of theoretical explanation and Winters signed off. This was around 1 December. But a few days after Ranier left, Winters became suspicious. He got his production techs to test some of the tailings from Bulk Reduction. That's when things really started to get interesting."

"And you're saying these tailings don't match up with the inspection records?"

Kimberly pulled off his glasses. The steam heat had fogged them. "I'm saying the records Winters signed detail a type of chemistry no one's ever seen before. Assay results from tailings--out of the same batch--show that J-1250 is just standard Mark VI-quality plutonium. I've done similar work on machining scrap at Los Alamos--Ranier doesn't know this."

"And?"

"Mark VI. The usual stuff...same composition and purity. Right up to spec...for Mark VIs."

"But not the spec Ranier explained?"

"Exactly. And not the records Winters signed off either. See for yourself...." Kimberly matched up the suspect inspection records and the assay results line for line, pointing out the discrepancies. "Something's fishy."

Robert Blount studied the same comparisons. He began tugging at his lower lip again. "What's the explanation, Doctor? An error?"

Kimberly looked sour. "This is no error. This is deliberate falsification of the records. Deliberate misrepresentation of his so-called theory. I'm telling you...Albert Ranier's gotten the Committee to add five more shots to Greenhouse, based on a theory that doesn't hold water and probably doesn't really exist. The plutonium for these shots is just like the rest. Mark VI grade."

Blount was making a few notes on yellow legal paper. "What about other aspects of these bombs? Could something else make these shots different--say, the construction, the way the bombs are detonated?"

Kimberly shrugged. "Possibly. We do test different architectures in the casings. But that's not what Ranier sold to the Committee. Albert Ranier offered a new method of fission, based on a certain plutonium chemistry. The Hanford records show the same chemistry. But the actual plutonium does not."

"Production error?" Blount offered.

"Improbable. There are eleven stages of assay and inspection, from dissolving all the way to nitric acid precipitation and final concentration. Any deviations would, or should, have been caught earlier."

"Should have?" Blount drummed a pencil on his lips, already contorted from tugging. "You're convinced this is deliberate falsification?"

"It's the only thing that makes sense."

"Why is that?" Blount challenged. "What does Dr. Ranier gain by falsifying inspection records at Hanford?"

Kimberly wondered how blind could they be? "Five additional shots of Mark VI bombs in Operation Greenhouse, for starters."

"To test what?" Strauss wondered. "If the chemistry's the same, the design's the same, what do we gain with five extra shots...more confidence in the design?"

"Or five unneeded atomic bombs." Kimberly's thoughts hung in the air like an odor no one wanted to acknowledge.

Martin Steeple had an idea. "Dr. Kimberly, you've charged that Albert Ranier has made slanderous and malicious remarks carelessly, accusing respected colleagues of Communist sympathies, leading some workers to lose their clearances."

"He sees a Red under every rock."

Blount said evenly, "So do we, lately. That's why the President approved loyalty oaths. We can't be careful enough about security in the program. Fuchs, Gold, the Rosenbergs...look what they've done. Extremely damaging to the U.S."

"I'm not quite sure what you're driving at with all this," Strauss said. He tapped out an Old Gold and lit up, smoke curling around his face. "I see all this as an honest mistake, unless there's more evidence."

Blount was skeptical. "No, Commissioner, Kimberly's right. It may be just that--an honest mistake. I hope it is. But it may be something else too. We really can't take a chance. I've been scanning Ranier's dossier here...Czech immigrant. Freedom Award from the Liberty Foundation. Zealous anti-Communist. Makes frequent trips back to Europe."

"To see family, I'm told."

"Maybe. Whatever it is, we need to dig a little deeper into this records business."

Steeple didn't have to be convinced. "Commissioner, just speaking for the AEC here, I'd have to agree: we've got probable cause to start an investigation already. This kind of discrepancy needs an explanation. I say we take this to the Chairman, right away."

"Worst case," said Blount, "maybe we pull those five extra shots off Greenhouse until the investigation is done."

Strauss was dubious. "Chairman has to approve that. General Advisory Committee too. And the President has the final say." He fiddled with an engraved cigarette lighter, flicking the flame on and off. "I'll call Gordon Dean right away. With luck, we can get an audience this afternoon. Chambers--?"

"Yes, sir?"

"You'll have to make a strong argument for the Chairman. He's a lawyer--he likes evidence. Lots of it. You honestly think we should delay or interrupt Greenhouse? The Chairman won't be happy about that. Promoting strength through atomic energy is big with him. 'Atoms for Peace' is his baby."

"Commissioner, Operation Greenhouse isn't about peace. It's about atomic bombs. I don't know what the answer is. I don't know what Albert Ranier is up to either. But the way that Ranier and Edvard Tolkach steamrollered the Committee into adding shots to Greenhouse--that left a bad taste in my mouth. That wasn't about science. That was politics and personal ego, pure and simple."

"You're sure this isn't just being vindictive? Or jealous?"

Kimberly was indignant. "Certainly not. I'm a patriotic American. I take my oaths quite seriously. I just have a problem when someone like Ranier is able to use the security procedures we all have to deal with, and the real fears we all have about the Russians compromising our defenses, to insinuate something personal, some private vendetta, or maybe some pet theory into the debate. I don't like being taken advantage of."

Strauss was sympathetic, if not fully convinced. "I'll call the Chairman's office right away. The Greenhouse task force sails any day now. Any concerns about security, he needs to know them, and fast."

It was nearly five o'clock before the Chairman could carve time out of his schedule to see them. Gordon Dean had taken over from David Lilienthal only last February, not long after the President had approved Teller's Super project, building a hydrogen bomb. He was a balding, bespectacled, one-time New York lawyer, with a gravelly laugh and an ornate watch on a chain poking out of a vest pocket. His shirt sleeves were rolled up and the office smelled of pungent cigar smoke.

Dean seemed jovial as he greeted Strauss, Steeple, Blount and Kimberly. Kimberly mentally clothed the Chairman in a Santa Claus suit; he had the girth and the merry eyes for it. Dean arranged chairs around his desk, then sat down and offered around a humidor of Panatelas. There were no takers.

"Just heard from my youngest son," the Chairman beamed. "He managed to stay on his new Christmas bike for a whole block without falling off and skinning himself. Called me right up, he was so pleased with himself." Dean responded to the array of grim faces staring back at him.

"You guys look like you just came from a morgue. Did somebody die or is it worse than that?"

Strauss cleared his throat. "It's worse, Gordon. We may have another spy in our midst."

Dean's smile abruptly faded. Santa Claus was no longer so jolly. "You have some evidence to show, I presume."

"We do." And Strauss spent the next half hour, with help from the others, detailing everything Kimberly had told them.

Dean listened closely, wrapping and unwrapping a cigar which he never lit, growing increasingly alarmed at the unraveling of another Communist plot to penetrate America's atomic establishment. There had been too much of that the last few years. Even worse, the avalanche of accusations alone only added fuel to the fire for rascals like Joe McCarthy, all too often obscuring the real threat with all his theatrical bombast.

Even before Strauss could finish, Dean was thinking out loud. "We can't give an inch to the Russians. Hell, Truman's got everyone's balls in a wad after Stalin detonated his own bomb last year. I need to get Hoover in on this, right away. Marshall, too. They'll have good ideas."

"They can help you with Truman, too," Strauss suggested. "The President trusts them and respects their advice."

Dean excused himself and placed several calls. Marshall turned out to be dining with Omar Bradley at Fort Myer, two old Army buddies swapping lies over a few beers. Hoover was still at his Bureau office, perusing evidence in an interstate hijacking case.

Both men readily agreed to cut short their business and promised to be at Commission headquarters within the hour.

J. Edgar Hoover arrived first. He was grim, shaking hands all around, a worn briefcase tucked under one arm. Marshall appeared minutes later, steel-gray hair, formal and aloof.

At Dean's urging, Kimberly related the essence of the story once more. He was concerned, he added at the end, explaining his fears about Albert Ranier.

"He's utterly devoted to finding a way to get his weapons designs into combat for test. He's a rabid anti-Communist."

This puzzled Hoover. "If he's so anti-Communist, Dr. Kimberly, then who's behind this plot of yours? Who's working with him? Financing him?"

"I don't know," Kimberly admitted. "My thinking is that any accomplice he has must be American. Not Russian."

"Why is that?"

"It makes sense. Look, Ranier is a Czech. The Russians just overthrew the government in Prague two years ago. The Communists have complete power now. They're killing or jailing all opposition. Apparently, that includes some of Ranier's family. He's bitter and angry and he hates the Russians."

Hoover shrugged. "Sounds like a patriotic American to me."

"No, sir, a dangerous provocateur is more like it. He's already fingered several technicians and a scientist from T-Division at Los Alamos and Hanford, claiming evidence they were Communist agents. It was preposterous."

Hoover was noncommittal. "I did a little investigating before I came over. Turns out these two technicians and the physicist were both friends of yours. Isn't that true?"

"It is but what diff--"

"Ranier did sign the loyalty oath," Hoover went on. "It is the patriotic duty of every American to help root out Communist subversion."

"Director--" Kimberly was growing exasperated, "--I'm not the one on trial here."

"Just trying to make sure we understand each other."

Kimberly swallowed a strong desire to lecture Hoover on the rights of citizenship. "For your information, sir, I also have signed the loyalty oath. The real issue here is misuse of power. Albert Ranier has both the reputation and the personality to wreck the careers and personal lives of perfectly innocent people who happen to cross him. This has to be stopped. Patriotism and anti-Communist vigilance are just tools to him. Tools to be used. Until Shelby Winters called me, I didn't know what the tools were being used for, only that the atmosphere at T-Division's pretty damn edgy now and Ranier's not helping. Now I see what's going on. It's a personal vendetta against the Russians. And he doesn't care how many lives are ruined in the process."

Marshall was always the peacemaker, the voice of reason. "The President needs to be informed about this. He approved the extra shots for Greenhouse, after the Committee recommendations."

"And a task force formed, right away," Hoover decided. "Blount here will head it up." To Robert Blount, he added, "You'll have to work with AEC on surveillance. Investigate this man's every move. Follow him everywhere. There's plenty of evidence to warrant an investigation. I'll clear it with the Attorney General."

A few minutes later, the meeting began to break up. Marshall agreed to take the matter to Truman. Dean said he'd come along. The President was at Blair House tonight, with Bess. He had a light schedule.

Hoover and Blount would return to the Bureau's offices at the Justice Department. Steeple would go too, bringing files from the Commission's Inspector General on the matter.

Chambers Kimberly wasn't invited, an oversight that did not particularly bother him. Hoover came over, rifled through the papers he had brought. Kimberly showed him the suspect inspection logs. He pointed out the discrepancies but it was plain the Director wasn't interested in the paperwork.

"This Ranier fellow," Hoover asked, "what's he really like? And why does his patriotism frighten you so much?"

Kimberly chewed that one over. "Albert Ranier is consumed, Director. With revenge, justice, something like that. He knows he's in a position of great influence and he's got no qualms about using it. The greatest problem I have is how he used the loyalty oaths and the whole Red hysteria at Los Alamos last year to intimidate others. Ranier's a master at innuendo and insinuation and when you confront him with it, he just goes into that phony 'I'm just a poor immigrant who doesn't speak English' front. Anyone crosses him, anybody gets in the way of that ambition to make amends for what happened to Czechoslovakia, he's already got the accusations ready and he knows how to bait the authorities with them. He puts all the charges out there so the authorities have to react, have to do something. And nowadays, that's all it takes to destroy someone. He's like some damn plague. One touch and you're automatically suspect. On some list. Lost your clearance. Out of a job. Maybe even under arrest. Evidence doesn't matter. In Ranier's eyes, you're Red until proven otherwise."

Hoover considered that, rubbing his doughy face with hands surprisingly delicate. "We need more Americans like him. Vigilance is the price we pay for freedom, Dr. Kimberly. It pays to be suspicious."

"Especially when there's overwhelming evidence of irregularities. The truth has a way of slapping you in the face like that."

The FBI Director glared back like a bulldog, his jawbones clicking as he ground his teeth. "The difference between you and me, Dr. Kimberly, is pretty simple, don't you think? I don't spend a lot of time worrying about the Truth. Simple justice is enough for me. Truth is really black and white. We have laws. You and I have to obey them. When we don't, we're guilty and we should be prosecuted. We obey the laws, we don't have to worry."

"Mr. Hoover, I worry about only one thing: what the hell is Albert Ranier up to? Until we find that out, nothing else matters."

Hoover and agent Robert Blount returned to Bureau headquarters, on the eighth floor of the Justice Department building. The day after Christmas, Pennsylvania Avenue traffic was light; a winter storm had dusted the Nation's Capital with an inch of snow. Hoover summoned Blount and all his division heads to a meeting in his office.

Along with Blount, Michael Savard, of Identification showed up. He was accompanied by Don Kepner, of Criminal Investigation and Ludlow Whitley, of Research. Each division head brought his own deputy and Hoover called in his own administrative assistant Harlan Eames to take notes.

The Director was brusque, explaining the Ranier case.

"I want a task formed right away. Today. Don, you'll head up the force. For now, the mission is full-time, twenty-four hour surveillance of Dr. Albert Ranier. We'll have to coordinate with Atomic Energy Commission security service. Probably Army CID as well."

Kepner's assistant was a blond crewcutted prep-school type, Kevin Keegan. Keegan was furiously scribbling notes while Kepner looked on.

Kepner was curious. "Who is this Ranier fellow anyway?"

Hoover was re-arranging papers on his desk, making small neat piles, shuffling and re-shuffling. "Physicist at Los Alamos. There's another physicist--fellow named Chambers Kimberly--who's caught Ranier doctoring records. Something to do with the next atomic shot in the Pacific. Operation Greenhouse, it's called."

"Any specific charges?"

Hoover shook his head. "Not yet. Call it 'suspicion of intent to commit sabotage of the tests.' That'll have to do for now. We need any warrants, we can take that to the judge. What's your approach, Don? Form up several teams?"

"Basically, that's our usual method. We'll pull at least six agents, from Albuquerque, Phoenix, field offices nearby. I'll need approval, by the way, to get my men on-site at Los Alamos. That gives us three teams of two, and we'll overlap the coverage. The first step, after we're formed up and briefed on the rules of engagement, is to get over to Los Alamos and poke around, establish this fellow's daily patterns and habits. It takes a week or more to get a good tail going, kind of get your rhythm. You have to be careful, kind of ease into it. Otherwise, you make a mistake and alert the suspect. Oh, and I'll also need all the background we have here."

"You've got it," Whitley said. "I'll have file copies on your desk first thing in the morning."

"I need hard evidence," Hoover told them. "Kimberly's making serious charges. To substantiate them, we'll need physical evidence. Fingerprints, access privileges, authorizing letters, handwriting samples. And photos. Lots of photos."

Kepner knew the drill well. The Bureau had helped nab several Red spies the last few years and the Counter-Intel boys were swaggering like jocks on game day. "Understood, sir. Kevin here's a real Einstein at putting together a surveillance plan." Keegan was actually the division chief of operations. He oversaw any kind of tail or sting CI had to run. He'd been with the Bureau for years.

"Very important principle to watch out for, sir," Keegan explained. "Just what kind of access does the subject actually have? We look for two types: authorized access and actual, physical access. The first is what he's allowed to do. The second is what he actually could do, given his position, location, opportunity, proximity. That sort of thing. The tail has to work both sides of the street here, and do it without tipping off the guy. It's an art."

"Kevin's a real artist," Kepner bragged. "This fellow's got fingers poking around where they shouldn't be, we'll bag him."

Kevin Keegan made more notes as the meeting went on. Unknown to the others, he had actually made two sets of notes: one for the surveillance plan on subject: Albert Ranier. And one set for another type of surveillance plan. This plan would have to be approved by Keegan's local handler, a dark, swarthy man named Pyotr Nedved, who also ran a little intelligence operation called BLUEJAY. Nedved just happened to work at the Soviet Embassy, about ten blocks northwest of Hoover's corner office. There was more to Kevin Keegan than anyone on the eighth floor realized.

Keegan found himself mentally operating on two levels, as he tried to follow the discussion on Operation Ranier. Initially, he was a bit shaken by the realization that there might be a renegade American physicist diverting nuclear material. He didn't know for sure but he suspected that this was not a separate NKVD operation. In any case, he knew he had to get this to State Security, to Nedved and maybe higher, as soon as possible.

Hoover laid out a daily schedule for reporting. "I want to know what you know, every day...call in at eight in the morning my time. We've got to act fast on this...if Ranier's up to something, it may surface in the next week or so."

"These test shots--Greenhouse, or whatever they're called--" Blount was fumbling through his notes, trying to decipher them--" when does all this happen?"

Hoover explained the test program. "The task force is assembling now. Joint Task Force Three. Most of the ships are at San Francisco, Oakland, Hunters Point. They sail in a week, pretty much as a self-contained force. There'll be several weeks of preparation work: building stuff, laying out instruments, wiring, that sort of thing. With any luck, the first shot--code name is Dog, I believe-- will go off in mid-January. Then we have three others--all Mark VI and Mark V bomb tests. After that, the new devices...Ranier-Tolkach devices. Whole thing will probably last until June, at least."

Blount was scribbling fast. So was Keegan. "Ranier's part of this test, right? I mean, he's involved at the test site, as a scientist?"

"Up to his nose. He pushed the Advisory Committee hard to try out these new designs."

"So why the secret diversion of material? Why doctor up records? Something doesn't click here."

Hoover said, "Somehow, for some reason, he's building a personal stash of material. Fissionable material. Hell, for all I know, he may be trying to make his own bomb. I wouldn't put it past him. But something's up. Something to do with Greenhouse."

"Maybe he tries to hijack a bomb or two," Blount theorized. "How much do these things weigh?"

"About eight thousand pounds. And the implosion devices have casings nearly fifteen feet long, and four to five feet in diameter."

"Maybe he's got help," Hoover offered. "Maybe they grab a bomb while it's in shipment to San Francisco."

Kepner was dubious, had been all along. "For what purpose? How the hell do you grab a Mark VI atom bomb and hope to get away with it? You can't just stick it in your basement next to the Magnavox, can you?"

Blount was flipping through a desk calendar, moistening his fingers with each turn. "We need evidence. Whatever's up, it may pop soon. Mr. Hoover, I'd like permission to expand my task force."

"An idea?"

"Call it a hunch. I want surveillance coverage in Frisco too. These bombs...they start out where?"

"They're crated for transport at Los Alamos. Critical assemblies are shipped separately from the main device. That means the final insert--the final plug of plutonium and its bolts--are kept separate almost until arming time at the test site. For safety's sake."

"Who runs the shipping operation?"

"The Army. They've got a special train--all armored and extremely well guarded--from Los Alamos to the shipyard. J Division's responsible for test prep and getting everything ready to ship. They work with the Corps of Engineers, Army CID, special detachments of Military Police companies that do guard duty on the train, right up to the side of the ship."

Blount was fascinated. "Hard to see how you'd ever figure on grabbing a bomb from an Army train. And the shipyard?"

Kepner shrugged. "Tighter than a whore's ass. MPs and Shore Patrol and Marines thicker than mulligan stew. Docks, warehouses, shipboard...you'd need a regiment just to break in."

"Still and all," Blount said, "I'd like a Bureau team to check it out, look for holes, soft spots. It'll have to be worked out with the Army and the Navy."

"AEC too," Hoover reminded him. "I'll put you in touch with Cory Donnegan. He heads up the security service at Los Alamos...Atomic Energy Security Service, it's called. He knows the right people to talk to."

Hoover's face seemed more relaxed. He slumped in his chair like a crumbling mountain. "That's it, then, men. Looks like we have a plan. Blount, you leave tonight. Get out to New Mexico and see what the hell's going on. The bombs are still there for now. Ranier's there. Maybe our answers are there too. I'll call Frank Pace at Army. Frank Matthews too. We'll work out a scheme of cooperation with the Army and the Navy, so we're not all shooting at each other. I've got to have both of them in bed with Bureau on this one, especially if we got counter-intelligence matters involved. Russians make me nervous, I don't mind telling you that. You need anything, call this office. I'll tell Harlan Eames to put it through right away. Off hours, he'll know how to get in touch with me."

With that, the meeting ended. Kevin Keegan signaled Kepner over. He told the CI chief he was headed downstairs, back to his own cubbyhole office.

"Gotta write all this up quick, boss. I'll never remember it later."

"Sure thing, Kev. Let me see your notes first thing in the morning."

Keegan obliged as he left Hoover's office, trying to walk down the linoleum hall to the stairs as calmly as he could. He knew this was dynamite and Kepner wasn't the only one who'd be getting notes tomorrow.

In his office on the sixth floor, Keegan grabbed up some folders of unclassified paperwork, just to cover himself, and a few writing pads and stuffed everything in his gray briefcase. He signed out and left the Justice Department building, intent on catching a taxi back to his second-floor walkup at Seward Square, a few blocks east of the Capitol. He stepped out of the lobby into a cold wind, with lowering clouds scudding by, promising more snow tonight.

He changed his mind on the taxi and decided to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue instead. The trek would take about half an hour and the air was bracing enough to steady his nerves, give his racing mind something else to focus on.

Kevin Keegan knew he was in for a long night.

Three hours later, hunched over a cramped kitchen table under a single hot lamp, Keegan had nearly finished transcribing his notes in the special ink Nedved had given him last month. The ink was invisible to the naked eye, needing a certain wavelength lamp to be seen, and was not to be used except for critical intelligence that needed a courier.

No dead drop for this stuff, he told himself. Nedved needed to see it as fast as possible, tonight if possible. Sometime before dawn, Keegan would throw on his overcoat and slog out into the snow, heading north ten blocks toward a small bakery--Fineman's was the name--that occupied the corner of F Street and Ninth, in the very shadow of District Police Precinct Station Number Nine. Opposite the bakery was Sherwood Playground.

Just before sunup, Keegan knew, the courier would be leaving the bakery with a large parcel under his arm, heading out across the playground from the Ninth Street entrance. By procedure, Keegan would set out at the very same time, entering the playground through the northwest gate, walking at a brisk pace through a cluster of wooden play frames and swingsets, heading diagonally for an intersection in the center of the park, an intersection partially hidden by a chaotic stand of jungle gym bars lined up along the path.

The bump and switch would take all of ten seconds, when done properly, by trained field agents. Kevin Keegan was not a trained field agent. The rendezvous in a dark deserted playground with a total stranger--it was a different man every time--always unnerved him. His knees wobbled uncontrollably and once, he nearly tripped the courier as they made the exchange and walked away from each other.

But it had to be done and Keegan had learned that with enough whiskey, he could usually manage it. He took a sip from a bottle now just half-full and let the fiery liquid burn its way down. His stomach churned and grumbled--there was a half-eaten bologna sandwich on the table beside his stack of papers, but he wasn't hungry. Maybe a smoke....

He realized, as he wrote, that his hand was shaking. Was it the swap he knew he would have to make? Nedved had growled angrily at his urgent phone call two hours ago...not procedure, don't ever call me at this number, you idiot... But something in Keegan's voice--an undercurrent of fear, nerves, maybe--told Nedved this wouldn't wait. Every agent had to be babied and stroked a different way. And when one of his 'flock' somehow stumbled across an intelligence diamond among the usual pig's manure they

always gathered for him, Nedved also knew it was best to play along and 'rock the baby' as Moscow Center put it. So, reluctantly, he growled at Keegan to "be at the usual place" and be prompt. A courier would be sent.

Atom bombs loose in the Pacific? A renegade American physicist?

What would Nedved and Moscow Center make of it?

More importantly, what would Nedved reward him with once they saw the value of the notes he was making? Keegan brushed aside pleasant visions of a trip to Italy and a new Tucker on the curb outside and tried to concentrate. He steadied his hands with more whiskey, massaging his cramped wrists, and tried to think of nothing but finishing the work. Really, there was no hurry. Best to take some care and write as legibly as he could.

He expected he'd be up all night anyway.

Tuesday, December 26, 1950

Anjin, Manchuria, People's Republic of China

8:30 p.m.

A frigid Siberian front had come blasting south across the mountains of southern Manchuria and the wind howled through the cracks and crevices of Charlie Barracks like a tormented soul. To Ray Skiles, Second Mortar of Bravo Two-Five, United States Marines, the howl sounded about right for all the tormented souls of the Prisoner Re-education and Corrective Labor Camp Number Seven. Like a dirge, the wind played a crescendo of agony on the wood and thatch roof of the barracks, and some kind of arpeggio of pain around the tacked-up canvas strips of the window flaps.

Why, he wondered ruefully, would a man ever think of a friggin' opera at a time like this?

They had spent the last ten days in the first circle of Hell, ten days since the 'Mayor' of Camp Seven, a hard-bitten cocksucker named Liu Si-lingh, had tortured Tony Benecky in the bowels of the camp's grim 'City Hall.' Now both Skiles and Benecky were sick with dysentery, coughing up blood and phlegm every hour, and suffering severe frostbite on multiple fingers and toes.

The worst thing was: somehow, they were still alive.

Luke Noland squatted down and felt Benecky's forehead, peering into dead, runny eyes for any signs of the spark of life. A man could easily check out completely in a place like Camp Seven. Just will himself to death, shut down everything and give up. You could see it first in their eyes. They were dull, flat, unfocused, no glimmer of recognition at all. When Luke Noland saw that in one of the poor souls consigned to Charlie Barracks, he knew he had two choices: let what would be happen anyway or bore into the poor sucker and goad him or taunt him back to the land of the living.

With Tony Benecky, it was dicey. Noland thought the Marine could go either way.

"Get Major Anderson," he told one of his platoon buddies. "Get him over here right now. This jarhead's still got some fight left in him."

So they got Major Ervin Anderson. The lanky medic from 7th Cav lived across the snowy quadrangle of the prisoner courtyard, in George Barracks. He'd been captured outside of Uijongbu, surrounded with the rest of Fox Company in a Chicom pincer attack at night. Half the company--perhaps seventy or eighty men had been killed, slaughtered in savage hand-to-hand combat. The rest had surrendered.

They were marched north to sample the hospitality of Camp Seven.

Anderson stamped off the snow from his shoe-pacs and took off a ragged poncho. He bent down to examine Benecky. Frozen breath puffed out of his mouth in clouds of steam.

"First thing we do, boys, is move the sergeant closer to that iron pot. You got any hot water left?"

"Not much, Major." It was Ned Betters, staff sergeant, U.S. Army Second Infantry. "I've begged for more. Fuckin' goon guards just stare at me. Like they were dogs or something."

"They ain't dogs," said a gravelly voice from somewhere. "Dogs have more sense."

"Well, then bring that pot over here. This man needs heat."

There was a smattering of grumbling as the kettle, by now lukewarm, was hoisted and lowered to the floorboards. Anderson set the pot next to Benecky's face. The water inside was cooling down rapidly.

Benecky put up no resistance to Anderson's exam. He flopped like a lifeless doll as the Major gingerly felt around the tissue of his fingers and toes. Anderson cautiously removed the remnants of a shoe-pac--it was nearly frozen onto the skin of the sergeant's left foot. Exposed to the cold air, Benecky's foot reeked of decaying flesh. It was a pulpy mass of purple and red splotched meat, barely a foot at all.

Anderson wet a few rags in the warm water from the pot and carefully wrapped the foot, swaddling it with what heat there was. "You bozos should have called me sooner. This man's got gangrene."

Skiles came over, holding his breath, and bent down.

"He's been delirious the last two days, Doc. I had to kinda slug him once. Last day or so, he's just stared. Don't seem to see anything at all."

"No shit, Corporal. If this foot isn't amputated, he could lose the whole leg. Even die. What did you think...he's just going to tough it out? This man's got a serious infection. Bacteria, guys. They eat flesh."

There was a little ripple of murmuring around the barracks.

Benecky was feverish. His mouth was puckered with red sores, some open wounds. When he talked, he drooled, and he croaked like some frog under a ton of quilts.

"Let...me die...."

Skiles hadn't heard his buddy talk in three days. Three days of dysentery and vomiting up blood and a sick, rattling snore when he dozed. "What are you talking about, Sarge? Doc here's going to make you better."

"Let...me...die...I...want--"

"Bullshit and red roses, Sarge. You can't die on me. Marines are made to fight, not die."

Noland jumped in too, dropping down to sit on the icy floorboards next to the Marine. "He's right, you jarhead prick. You gotta live. We all gotta survive this rathole. Tell the fucking world about Anjin and Camp Seven. There's still lots of Red bastards left to kill. Can't have no pissant jarhead Marines wimping out on me."

Anderson understood what was going on. In camp, it was called The Treatment. There was no medical procedure for it. But sometimes, miracles did happen. Sometimes, The Treatment could pull a man through, just piss and vinegar substituting for all the aspirin and penicillin and morphine that 'Mayor' Liu Si-lingh wouldn't give them. Sometimes, The Treatment was all that was left.

Anderson turned to Skiles. "What do you want me to do?"

Skiles had lost count of how many times Benecky had covered his ass as a raw boot back at Pendleton.

"Go ahead, Doc. The man's gotta live. Amputate the foot."

The operation was conducted that night, nearly midnight, by a flickering bulb over a bed of rags and shredded ponchos and rat-eaten blankets. The Chicoms knew what was going on. To Skiles' surprise, Anderson turned up with a small flask of something like brandy. It was obvious, from the start, that the whole affair had at least the tacit support of the Chicoms. Later, when Skiles thought about it at all, he figured Liu permitted the operation, even made a few meager supplies available, to soak up some of the tension. It tended to make jarheads and Army doggies a little more pliable down the road.

The brandy served as an anaesthetic, but for the most part, the operation--if it could be called that--was done without any.

Benecky got his voice back quickly. He screamed at the top of his lungs half the night and had to be held down by five men. Finally, hoarse and panting for breath, mercy intervened and he passed out.

"Screaming actually helps--" Anderson muttered. His hands, wrists and face were covered with blood. "It helps circulation...see his face? More color."

Yeah, thought Skiles. Whatever you say, Doc. The color of ashes. He leaned hard on Sarge's shoulders, until the man was finally still.

Anderson completed the amputation in about ten minutes, after Benecky had passed out. Stitching up the wound took another twenty minutes; the medic used simple knives, boiled in hot water, and shoe threads twisted together and drawn fine over a knife's edge for stitches. He flushed and soaked the wound with more lukewarm water and bandaged the stump with rags and felt coat liner. While he cleaned up, and Benecky snored and whimpered, the rest of Charlie Barracks fashioned some crude crutches from pine bedposts, to help the Marine when he came to.

Benecky hovered on the edge of consciousness for several hours, rattling, crying out, shivering. While he moaned, Skiles huddled by a window--he sucked in cold fresh air to get the stench of rotted flesh and blood out of his nostrils. It made him sick to his stomach and he heaved up again. Then he felt a little better.

After a time, several doggies came over and sat with him. At first, the conversation was gibberish: home, family, hobbies, scumbags they had seen around their battalion. Later, in low voices, the conversation took a different course. Now, the talk was of escape, breaking out of Camp Seven and making a run for it.

Noland's idea was the most intriguing. The Fifth Cav staff sergeant outlined the details.

"We'll have to tunnel out. There's no other way I see."

Skiles was dubious. "Right. With what...toothpicks? Splinters?"

Sergeant Betters stamped his feet to keep warm. "Friggin' ground's frozen solid. We'd need a backhoe just to break the soil."

"Look, asshole," Noland hissed. "I'm telling you, it can be done. I got me some ideas."

Skiles watched Benecky writhing on the floor. Doggies squatted around the Marine, trying to keep him comfortable, wetting down his forehead with rags. "So we break out, Noland. What then? We can't just hitchhike back south. Hell, the front line's collapsing so fast, by the time we could break out, the UN might well have already pulled out of this hellhole country altogether."

"Maybe," Noland admitted. "Maybe not. The way I see it, we break out of Anjin and head south by southwest. Toward the coast."

"It's a cinch we're too far north to get back to our own lines."

"If they're still there."

"Head for the coast." Noland took one of Major Anderson's knives, still flecked with blood, and carved out a rough map of Manchuria and Korea on a corner post. "It ain't that far. Anjin was only a day's march past the Yalu, right?"

"I don't remember," Skiles said. "I was comatose."

"Whatever. We make the coast and we look for a boat. There's got to be boats on the coast. Even a fishing boat would do."

"Then what? We go fishing--"

"Sort of," Noland replied. He carved an arc down from the imaginary coastline he had scraped into the pine board. "Here's South Korea. If we can lift a boat that's seaworthy, we just sail away. Toward South Korea...Inchon, maybe. Or Japan. Maybe even Task Force 34, right smack in the middle of the Sea of Japan. I could see us right there with the Essex or the Oriskany."

Betters looked sour. "So what are you, anyway...Admiral Nimitz, or something?"

"I've handled boats before. My uncle's got a shrimper down in Mobile. I can pilot a boat at sea."

"Noland, this escape idea of yours is about the most harebrained scheme I ever heard of."

Skiles wasn't so sure. "If it's so harebrained, why don't you think of something better? At least, it gives us something to work for and live for everyday. Beats sitting around in this rathole and rotting."

"Or playing tiddlywinks with the 'Mayor'," Noland said. "It's just a matter of time before what happened to Benecky happens to us too."

Betters still wasn't convinced. "It's cockamamie, I'm telling you. Pure cockamamie. We'll be rescued by angels of God before we could ever tunnel out of here. Get real."

Noland was getting madder. "It may be cockamamie, Sergeant, but I'd rather die fighting like a soldier than die from malnutrition, frostbite or dysentery. I say we work up a plan, make a schedule, assign duties. This is the friggin' Army, after all. We ought to know how to dig ditches."

Skiles was all for it. "It's a cinch this cat Liu is going to torture and murder every last one of us anyway. Who wants to die like a rat?"

"Watch who you talk with," Noland told them. "I'll keep a list. Liu's got every barracks filthy with informers. There's rats and then there's rats. Neither of 'em's worth a spit."

Skiles picked and probed at Noland's idea for a few minutes longer but nobody had any other alternatives. The three of them agreed to meet with the rest of Charlie Barracks, individually or in small groups, to press the case. Then they'd see what kind of unanimity there was.

Noland was itching to get started, tonight, to start rounding up digging tools and start hacking away at the frozen ground under the floorboards.

What he didn't know was that Sergeant Ned Betters, his closest buddy from Fifth Cav, would duly report back to the two Chicom guards who brought him meat scraps and riceballs every other day the precise nature of the escape attempt and their progress.
CHAPTER 11

Wednesday, December 27, 1950

Aboard NKVD Special Train #2, the Kazan

Midnight

Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria stared out the frosty windows of the armored train car at the black infinity of the nighttime Russian steppe. There was nothing to see; though he knew that the ground racing by would have been brown and sere were it summer, and now, in the middle of winter, cloaked with snowdrifts. Only the pale reflection of a studious, rather sad and bespectacled one-time architect, which he had studied to be many years before, stared back at him. Nothing was visible outside the window of the Kazan yet Beria saw much, much that troubled him.

He had just finished reading over for the fifth time, a flash message that had been sent up decrypted from Ciphers earlier that evening. He had received the summary a few hours before, in his seventh floor office at Number Two Dzerzhinsky Square, in Moscow, a message from an American source known only as Treeline, a source in the capital Washington. The message indicated that there was strong evidence the Americans were going to use atomic bombs in Korea. Treeline made a strong case and Beria could find no holes in his reasoning or his methods.

It appeared that the Americans were planning on using the cover of an atomic test series in the Pacific, something called Operation Greenhouse, to disguise their diversion of such terrible weapons into the Korean theater.

Beria sipped at a Georgian brandy, letting the hot peppers tickle the end of his tongue. His compartment in Kazan's third car, was dark and stuffy, save for a small lamp over his quilted lounge chair in the corner. Papers were scattered over the top of the writing table next to the chair. Requisitions, budgets, details of operations, surveillance summaries...he cared nothing for any of them now.

But this--Beria held out Treeline's decrypted summary as if it were a holy sacrament--this was something he had to give credence to.

Treeline had been accurate before in his assessments of American intentions. Startlingly accurate. He was one of Beria's favorites--a mole inside the American FBI. Even Nedved, his handler and always a skeptic, had offered little in the way of countering evidence this time. He had let Treeline's own statements stand virtually unopposed, without comment.

Not like Nedved to give up a chance to hog some glory, Beria thought.

He was worried.

If the Americans were concerned enough to initiate their own investigation, there could only be one or the other of two conclusions: the highest military commanders, perhaps even MacArthur or Marshall themselves, had begun to plan an atomic strike outside the normal chain of command. But how was it the FBI was called to investigate? Had not Truman himself approved this business? Beria pondered the implications.

The other possibility was that the entire operation was a hoax, desinformatsiya on a huge scale, to throw off Soviet intelligence. Beria decided he really couldn't afford to discount either possibility.

There was another side to the story. Beria picked up the phone on the writing table and ordered his unwilling guest to be brought up to Kazan's third car. The People's Commissar of State Security had ordered Fyodor Trofimenko to accompany him on the overnight train ride south to Kazakhstan. By the time the Kazan made rendezvous with Stalin's special train the Pobeda outside Samarkand six hours hence, Beria figured he

would hear the real truth from Trofimenko's lips. Either that or the Tokyo operative known at Windward would vanish forever from this earth, his limp and broken body tossed like dinner scraps from Kazan's speeding platform, out into the barren snowy steppe country of northern Kazakhstan.

Trofimenko appeared moments later, after a faint knock at the compartment door.

"Come." Beria re-seated himself behind his writing table, now cleared of all papers, but he left only the single lamp on. Trofimenko would stand, in the lamp's pale glow. The People's Commissar would speak to him from darkness behind his desk.

A uniformed guard of the Ninth Directorate held open the door, and Windward came in. He was nervous, fidgety, his hands rubbing each other over and over. The guard shut and latched the door.

Beria glared up at Windward, squinting, blinking fast in the lamp's glow.

"I've read the wiretaps from Canary One, Fyodor Maximovich. This could be an American trick. Have you thought of that?"

Trofimenko didn't know what to do with his hands. They moved of their own free will, finally seeking each other out behind his back. Respectful and military--yes, that seemed the best....

"I have taken precautions, Comrade Commissar, to make sure the tapes are genuine." He described briefly how he had enticed Fumei An to suborn an American Army officer and how she had coached the officer on precisely placing the device.

"Good." Beria studied the worm wriggling in front of him. "Your source will be thoroughly checked out, in any case. We can't take a chance that this is an American trick."

"Commissar, the Canary device gives us valuable intelligence. We know what MacArthur knows, what he's thinking and planning."

Beria was suspicious. "It's only a matter of time before the Americans discover the bug, if they haven't already. Don't be so gullible. What you've brought me is another piece of the puzzle. On the one hand, I have this--" he held up Treeline's decrypted dispatch from Washington. "And on the other hand, I have your tapes. They seem to support each other. But we must be careful of a trap."

"Will I be returning to Japan, Commissar?" There. He had asked it...the question pounding in the back of his mind.

Beria seemed not to have heard. "I meet Josef Vissarionovich at seven this morning. This train has special clearance on the Sverdlovsk-Karaganda Line. We'll be outside Samarkand just before dawn." Beria put down the tape transcripts in their red-bordered folder--Eyes Only Members of the Central Committee--pulled off his pince-nez glasses and pinched his nose wearily, massaging some feeling back into his face. "I have to make a recommendation. We have clear evidence the Americans are going to widen the war in Korea. Stalin's hosting Mao and Kim in Samarkand--they're probably already there, strolling around like fat little tourists--and Stalin'll want to know about this ahead of time. He'll want to use it, an extra card in his hand. If only I could be sure...."

"Sure of what, Comrade Commissar?"

"Of what is true. And what is not. The Americans aren't stupid. We've penetrated their atomic program for years and they're paranoid and suspicious. As I would be. All this intelligence fits too well together. It feels..."Beria shrugged, groping for the right word--"wrong somehow. It could be an elaborate deception. Maybe all this is something Truman thought up to force our hand. Flush out more spies and operatives, like Fuchs and the Rosenbergs. But Hoover's part puzzles me. Hoover is the aspect I can't figure out. Why involve the FBI if the operation is only a military deception? Could this desinformatsiya be that elaborate? Somehow, some way, I have to be sure. Before I meet Stalin."

Trofimenko didn't know what to say or do. Clearly, this was an opportunity. But you had to be careful. The wrong phrase, the wrong question, could be extremely dangerous. Beria was a snake. You didn't make quick moves around snakes.

"Perhaps, Comrade Commissar, more intelligence is needed. If I returned to Tokyo...if I question my entire network of operatives...I've heard rumors of a special campaign, maybe a second front in China. Some of my sources in Yokahama--dock people, freight handlers--have told me this. I could bring you more information."

Beria considered that. "A possibility. But I need something now, before we reach Samarkand. Tell me: if MacArthur brings atomic bombs into Japan, where would they be based? Do you have this information?"

Trofimenko's mind raced. "Not specifically, Commissar, but I have nearly a hundred sources in Tokyo and Yokahama. Let me go back and I promise you I'll make all the canaries sing to me. I'll get that information and dispatch it right away."

Something in his voice intrigued Beria. Fear? Hope, perhaps? A pleading tone? The Commissar of State Security regarded Trofimenko as a snake would its next prey. "I'm sure you would. But for now, you stay aboard the Kazan. The tapes tell me a lot. But your background, Fyodor Maximovich, could tell me even more. How long have you lived in Japan? How long have you been posted to Tokyo?"

"Almost five years, Commissar. I've developed a network of more than a hundred informers and sources. I've got eyes and ears all over Japan, especially Tokyo and Yokahama." Trofimenko couldn't resist a little salesmanship. "My best sources come from a geisha bar near the Imperial Palace. American Army officers go there often. The girls tell me everything they hear."

"Clever." Beria was pensive. The meeting with Stalin was less than five hours away. "I've read a lot of your dispatches. You keep up with your assignments. I want you nearby when we reach Samarkand. Josef Vissarionovich may have questions I can't answer. American intentions, American practices in Japan, that sort of thing. Your knowledge could be useful." The People's Commissar turned back to the window, seeing things only he could see. Trofimenko's reflection shone back at him.

"Go back to your compartment, Fyodor Maximovich. And be ready to report to me at once."

"Of course, Comrade Commissar."

Kazan reached the dusty outskirts of Samarkand just as the orange ball of the sun began rising over the city's mosques and mausoleums. The train engineer executed several track changes, before gliding to a stop outside Komsomolsk Station, two blocks from al-Aqsa mosque.

Alongside platform number one, Stalin's own armored train, the Pobeda, huffed and steamed in the cold desert air. For a distance of half a kilometer in every direction, green-clad border troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and NKVD Ninth Directorate officers had cordoned off the tracks, even going so far as to empty Registan Square and the Tamil souq (market) of its early morning vendors and produce stalls. Amid loud protests, the troops formed a defensive perimeter half a kilometer in diameter around the track siding. The great Vozhd of all the Russias would not be disturbed by anything this morning; State Security would see to that.

Samarkand itself was a dry and dusty caravan crossroads in the bosom of the Kyzyl Kum mountains. Captured by Alexander the Great, destroyed by Genghis Khan, home to Tamerlane's empire, by legend, the great Silk Road had once passed through the city centuries before, tying the exotic riches of the Orient to a medieval Europe just emerging from a millennium of rude, starvation existence. It was a city bisected in time, torn between centuries, a city of camel herds and diesel-powered Volga sedans, of Islamic mosques and Soviet culture palaces, burial places for Mongol overlords and drab offices for Communist bureaucrats.

Just after 7:30 in the morning, Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria crossed the gravelly track siding, bundled tightly against a stiff northerly wind, and stepped inside the heavily-guarded compartment of Pobeda's fifth car...Stalin's car. In an anteroom inside the exit platform, he removed his fur coat and shapka, adjusted his glasses, and entered the lion's den.

Josef Vissarionovich Stalin stared red-eyed at the People's Commissar as he made himself comfortable on a nearby divan. The compartment was dark, save for faint dawn light creasing the windows behind the drapes.

Stalin sat awkwardly on a simple wooden stool in the corner, his lap covered with maps. Empty bottles were scattered around the floor. His voice was thick and slurred.

"I need rest, Lavrenti Pavolovich. I've been up all night studying maps of Korea...Shtykov's scribbled all over these things...the front lines, the main units, who's attacking who. I meet the fat little Chinaman at noon. What brings you speeding across the desert in the middle of the night to catch up with Pobeda?"

"Atomic bombs, comrade. In Korea. Or heading that way. And soon."

Stalin shifted wearily on the stool; finally he could not get comfortable and lay down on the divan. Beria gave up his seat.

"Proof? I suppose you have some proof now. I suspected this all along."

Beria recited what he knew, turned over Treeline's dispatches, then Windward's tape transcripts. Stalin scanned the pages, his moustache twitching. A tiny stream of drool formed at the corner of his mouth. When he was done, he let the papers fall to the floor and lay back, closing his eyes.

"Truman means to attack China. Directly. I'm sure of it."

"He denied any such plans to use atomic bombs in a press conference just two weeks ago."

"So?' Stalin shrugged, spat onto the carpet. "He lied, that's all there is to it."

"What about Mao? You'll show him this?"

Stalin considered that. He lay still for a moment, his breathing shallow, rattling, his hands weighing possibilities. "I have to. We're committed to the Chinese. I don't like the yellow bastards worth a pig's pie but we've signed a treaty and Mao has made a revolution out of a barnyard. We've got to support them. We're meeting at al-Aqsa at noon. Kim il-Sung too. If Truman's going to rain atomic bombs on the Chinese, Mao's got a right to know." Stalin smirked. "Not that I'd mind seeing him cut down a notch or two."

"You need rest," Beria observed. "And sleep." The Infallible Protector of the Motherland was hung over from a night's drinking binge.

"Give me three hours," Stalin murmured. "And take these maps. See if you can make any sense of Shtykov's scribblings."

Beria started gathering up the charts. "You know why Mao wanted a visit?"

"Of course." Stalin wedged himself in tighter against the divan, ready to nod off. "He wants more guns. More bombs. Tanks, planes, everything. Like we have an inexhaustible supply."

"You think he can really push the Americans out of Korea?"

Stalin sighed. "I don't know if I want him to. Some times, having Truman and MacArthur on Mao's doorstep can be useful. Keeps the yellow pig honest. And pre-occupied with his own borders. Less chance to make mischief on ours."

Beria now had an armful of crumpled, cigar- and vodka-stained maps. "When do you want me, Josef Vissarionovich?"

Stalin didn't reply for a long time. Finally: "I'll send a car. We're touring al-Aqsa, Tamerlane's mausoleum, the observatory, then having lunch. I'll give the yellow pigs one hour after that, no more, to press their case."

"And tonight? A reception, perhaps?"

Stalin smiled faintly, unseen in the dark. "Of a sort. I'm sending the lot of them up to Semipalatinsk tonight. On a plane."

"Semipalatinsk? Why on earth--" then Beria stopped in mid-sentence. He understood.

Stalin coughed out a groggy chuckle. "Exactly. Kurchatov's got a new bomb up there, ready to go off. Twenty kilotons, I'm told. The shot goes at dawn tomorrow. You should go too. Me, I hate to fly."

Beria considered the idea. It had merit. He mulled over the possibilities. "Mao's never seen one, has he? Twenty kilotons is almost two Hiroshimas. That should give the little peasant a good shaking."

"Indeed." Stalin was already yawning, half-snoring. "Truman's not the only one with a big stick."

Stalin met Mao and Kim il-Sung outside the al-Aqsa mosque at noon. Mao came in a dark blue pea coat and olive trousers, rotund and waxy-faced with a bright red wart inflamed by the dry desert air under his left eye. Kim was a grinning cherub, just glad to be alive after being run out of North Korea by MacArthur's Eighth Army.

Handshakes, hugs, backslaps and a few photos were done. Stalin launched into a perfunctory tour of the blue tile and dusty stone mosque, now a tourist attraction in the heart of old Samarkand. With interpreters and advisors in tow, the three dictators inspected the ruins of al-Aqsa like well-fed, somewhat reluctant tourists.

As they meandered among the minarets and across a stone courtyard grown weedy with desert juniper shrub, Stalin related the news from his intelligence sources in America and Japan. Mao clasped his hands behind his back and waddled alongside, squinting in the bright blue sunshine. The high dome of his forehead with soon bathed in sweat. At length, he removed his pea coat, fit more for a Peking winter than a central Asian desert.

"Your sources, comrade Stalin," Mao said, "they are trustworthy? You've corroborated this in other ways?"

"Windward and Treeline have been very reliable so far. We always double-check our sources. We have multiple agents in America, tracking down facts, checking things."

And in China, Mao thought. "It's hard to believe Truman would go this far or let MacArthur take the matter to this point." He paused in the middle of the courtyard, regarding several stone pits full of sand; before the Soviets had forced al-Aqsa to close, the pits had held clean water, for daily ablutions and prayer. Mao dipped his fingers into the sand and let the fine desert powder fall through his fingers. "We've taught the Americans a hard lesson the last few months. My First and Second Offensives have been spectacular successes. We've pushed them back south of the 38th Parallel. Now Truman raises the stakes."

Stalin wasn't so sure. "It could be a bluff. MacArthur would try anything to stop from being routed."

Mao nodded. "It's only a matter of time before the Americans are kicked completely off the peninsula. Then, we'll see who's the biggest fish in the lake."

"What if it isn't a bluff?" Kim asked. His hands came out of his tunic and jerked like a puppet. "What if MacArthur really does have atomic bombs? What's the target?"

"The Yalu River bridges," Mao offered. "That would be a logical target. And our supply yards in Manchuria...Harbin, Shenyang, places like that."

"Yet you just said, comrade Stalin, that the Americans are investigating this secret operation...this Gallant Flag." Kim was puzzled. "What exactly does that mean?"

Stalin shrugged. "Our sources say the American FBI is forming an investigative team. Truman, Hoover, some of their top officials claim that MacArthur has exceeded his authority. Permission has not been given for using atomic bombs in Korea."

"You believe this nonsense?" Mao asked. "It makes no sense at all. Truman would already have approved such an operation. Unless there's a coup underway."

"Or disinformation," Stalin said. "That's my theory. I believe there are no atomic bombs, not any destined for Korea."

Mao was skeptical. "My friend, you can afford to be so sure of that. I cannot. China can absorb any blow the capitalist dogs can throw at us...make no mistake about that. But I want to know where these bombs are--if there are any bombs--and where they're targeted."

Stalin led them back toward the cool stone balustrade of the mosque's inner corridor. "We're squeezing our sources now to find that out."

"Maybe a sabotage operation should be set up. That would make me feel better." Mao extracted a Red Lion cigarette and lit up, cupping the lighter against breezes blowing through the abandoned mosque. "Stop the bombs in America if we can. You've got a whole network already in place, don't you?"

Stalin was loath to admit it but he did. "It's only to be activated in times of general war."

That irritated Mao. "What the hell do you think will happen if MacArthur starts dropping bombs on us...? I'd call that general war. And you're bound to us by treaty...assuming you honor your commitments."

Stalin was blunt. "We Bolsheviks are good for our word. I promise you--both of you--no atom bombs will fall on Korea or China. If they do, if Truman and MacArthur turn crazy--the Soviet Union will use its atomic arsenal in defense of Communism. We have every right. And we have plenty of atom bombs of our own."

"Exactly how many, comrade Stalin?" Mao challenged.

Stalin had developed a strong loathing for the pudgy little Chinaman. "Hundreds," he lied. "In fact, we are testing one at Semipalatinsk tomorrow morning. I offer you a trip up there tonight--courtesy of the Soviet Union--so you can see for yourself what Soviet atomic power looks like."

Mao readily accepted and Kim decided to tag along as well. The tour of al-Aqsa ended and the three dictators returned to Pobeda's dining car for a lunch of blini and shashlik, beluga and kebabs, well lubricated with brandy, vodka and plum wine.

Mao ate heartily while Stalin smoldered and sulked from the Chinese accusations. The Russian Vozhd picked at his sausages, then polished off a Ukrainian spertsem and lit up a cigar.

"We take this intelligence very seriously," he announced. "Never suggest the Soviet doesn't honor his promises. As vanguard of the great proletarian revolution--"

"--you have sadly lost sight of the details of the struggle," Mao completed. His lips dribbled plum wine and he sucked caviar off his fingers. "In China, we have a peasant's revolution. Something Marx and Lenin said couldn't happen, yet it did. The people's truth has a strange way of confounding the eggheads, doesn't it?"

Kim shifted uncomfortably while Stalin swallowed his growing irritation with the little yellow pig. Illiterate barnyard animals don't make a revolution, he thought to himself.

"Perhaps when eggheads have atomic bombs, they can determine for themselves what the truth really is."

Mao just smiled back.

The four-engined Antonov transport gleamed bright in the cold desert sunshine, its engines belching smoke, as the motorcade snaked its way across the ramp. Stalin had accompanied Mao and Kim to Abramov airfield just outside Samarkand. There, they would board a special aircraft of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the hour-long flight up to Semipalatinsk. The Soviet atomic testing ground was located in a desolate corner of northern Kazakhstan.

Stalin made perfunctory gestures of farewell, ritually hugging both despots, then half-saluting as the two men climbed the stairs into the aircraft.

On parting, Mao had reminded him. "Our spring offensive is less than a month away. Give me what I need and I'll throw the Americans out of Asia for good."

Stalin promised to consider the requests. "Truman already trembles before us." As he waved with his right arm, his good arm, he added: And so shall you, my friend. So shall you.

Stalin didn't wait for the takeoff. He climbed back into the black Volga sedan to get out of the stiff desert wind. Before the motorcade could embark, he ordered the driver to radio back to Beria's car, three cars behind.

"I want to see Lavrenti Pavlovich," Stalin ordered. "He rides with me." The order went out and presently, the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs was opening the door and climbing into the rear seat of the Volga. Beria huddled over the car's heater vents for a moment, to warm his hands and face. A black muffler around his neck made him look like a pale blue egg, an egg with sand-blasted pince-nez frames. Beria cleaned the lenses while Stalin ordered the driver back to Samarkand's train station.

Stalin slouched back in the seat, unwrapping a black cigar. He didn't light up, merely sniffed at the pungent aroma of the tobacco.

"I've been giving this matter some thought," he announced. "This agent of yours--the one in Tokyo--?"

"Windward," Beria reminded him.

"Windward," Stalin rolled that around his tongue, then sucked on the cigar tip. "Yes...how long has he been posted to Tokyo?"

"Almost five years."

"And he's reliable? A good communist?"

Beria nodded. "Very reliable. He produces excellent intelligence. Meets his quotas, exceeds them sometimes. He could be a hero of socialist labor...in another line of work."

Stalin mulled over the possibilities. "It seems, from the reports, that a lot of the key figures in this American 'operation' are in Japan. Windward implicates MacArthur directly. His staff too. We need to dig deeper into this pile; we need someone with experience in handling Americans. Someone who understands what motivates Americans. What does Shtykov say about this Windward?"

Beria shrugged. "He signs off on most of the dispatches. Officially, he concurs, thinks of Windward as a valuable source. Unofficially--" Beria could well imagine the Ambassador's florid face--" he's quite jealous. He feels Windward's success threatens him."

Stalin chuckled. "Good. I like to hear that. I'm a believer in men who look out for their own self interest. A man who does that is a man I can trust. If Shtykov's jealous of this agent, it means Windward's on to something."

"You think Windward should lead our operation against the Americans?"

Stalin nodded. "He knows American military thinking, their practices. He understands their command structure. This makes him valuable to us."

"You're thinking of sending him to America?"

"A covert insertion, under deepest cover. You have agents already in place...Treeline and your FBI mole--"

"Bluejay."

"Exactly. They could cooperate to learn as much as possible, both of the American operation and why the FBI is investigating such an operation. To see if this is not perhaps desinformatsiya after all."

Beria was cautious. "There's a risk in this, Josef Vissarionovich. A risk in bringing isolated agents together. If they are under surveillance or if one makes a mistake, it could compromise our whole network in America."

"I know that." Stalin stared out the window at the approaching domes of the train station. Soon, he would be safely back in the armored womb of the Pobeda. "But this is urgent. I don't know what Truman's really up to or MacArthur. Something's there. The consequences of not being prepared make the risk of three top agents cooperating right under the FBI's nose worth taking. I don't want to do it. But I can do no less for Mao. We have to support the revolution and if the Americans use atom bombs on China, it threatens them and us."

The motorcade pulled into the covered arcade of the train station. Stalin and Beria got out and made their way through a cordon of security details to the edge of the platform. Stalin lit up his cigar and puffed at it vigorously, wrapping his jacket tighter. Beria knew he made his decision.

The Protector of all the Russias laid a heavy hand on Beria's topcoat, squeezing his shoulder. "Issue orders for Windward right away. There's to be no delay on this, not even a second. Make sure he's thoroughly briefed and trained. Then send him on to America. Send him through Mexico. We need more intelligence. And we may need to take preventive measures too."

"Sabotage?"

"It would be enough," Stalin said, "if any bombs bound for Korea met an untimely accident. Inside America."

"Of course, comrade. I'll have Ninth Directorate work up a plan for your approval."

"Issue orders for Treeline and Bluejay as well. They must be informed about this change in our operational practices. Who is the rezident in Mexico now?"

From memory, Beria dredged up a name. "Colonel Vladimir Alexeyevich Brylin. His father was glavpolit with Zhukov's armies in the Hitlerist War...a good political man. A staunch communist."

Stalin's eyes narrowed. "Trust not in politics, Lavrenti Pavlovich. You'll live a lot longer. Politics can change. But a man's self interest...that is constant."

"Of course, Josef Vissarionovich."

"Send this Treeline to Mexico City himself, to meet with Windward and Colonel Brylin. So there is no misunderstanding. We must put ourselves in a position to help our Chinese comrades if that becomes necessary. And now that Mao knows about this little operation the Americans may be planning, any help we offer will come at a price." He stepped up onto Pobeda's loading platform, and turned back to Beria.

"A very high price."

Wednesday, 12-27-50

Blair House, Washington, D.C.

Mid-morning

Harry Truman was furious. He slammed a fist on the kitchen table and half of Blair House shook. Even Floyd Boring, the President's daytime Secret Service agent, peeked into the kitchen.

"This kind of traitorous behavior has just got to stop. Stop right now. It makes a mockery of the whole loyalty oath program. Mr. Hoover, I sure hope you're looking into this matter."

J. Edgar Hoover swallowed hard, glanced over at Marshall and AEC Chairman Gordon Dean. "We've already formed an investigative task force, Mr. President. And I've got a surveillance detail forming up in New Mexico right now."

"Surveillance, my ass." Truman's forehead was wet with perspiration. The kitchen's steam radiator worked a bit too well and the President wiped at his face with a handkerchief. He loosened his tie for good measure. "The sons of bitches are already trying to divert plutonium and sabotage our atom bomb program. This Ranier fellow should be arrested right away, today, before he does any more damage."

Marshall eyed the FBI Director, who took the cue and stirred uncomfortably. "Mr. President, we have sufficient evidence to arrest Dr. Ranier on several federal counts--falsifying records, breaching security at several points, probable theft of government furnished equipment--but there's a pretty good reason for holding off picking him up just yet."

"And what is that?"

"Well, sir, we think there are other people involved. We don't really know completely what Ranier's up to--just suspicions and some evidence to date, mainly from this Chambers Kimberly who came over to see Mr. Dean the other day. If we wait a few days or maybe a week, we might be able to net some bigger fish. Maybe even unravel this whole operation. That would set back Soviet espionage efforts for years."

Truman rubbed at the stubble of a poorly shaven face. "My inclination, gentlemen, is quite different. What I really want to do...what I think is right to do is to order a full-scale investigation. Have this Ranier fellow and any collaborators at Hanford or Los Alamos watched, interrogated, arrested or at least have their security clearances revoked. In my mind, these are clear violations of their loyalty oaths. And Lord knows, we don't need to give Joe McCarthy any more ammunition."

General George C. Marshall was grave. "It's my opinion, Mr. President, that this so-called plot to divert or tamper with atomic bombs may well be related to events in Korea."

Hoover agreed. "The evidence points to high-level involvement too. The average citizen, even the average worker at Los Alamos doesn't have the pull to bring this kind of effort off. If it's Korea behind this, maybe MacArthur's involved."

That earned a rebuke from Marshall. "Doug MacArthur would never have anything to do with something like this. Hell, Mr. President, the man's served his country for fifty years."

"I'm not saying MacArthur's responsible, just that--"

Marshall held up a hand. "A lot of people misunderstood Douglas MacArthur. Granted, he can rub you the wrong way. He's got opinions. He's not shy about expressing them--"

"He's an arrogant son of a bitch, if you ask me," Hoover decided.

"He's one of the few genuine heroes of our time."

Truman waved everyone quiet. "Gentlemen, that's enough of that. I happen to agree with Mr. Hoover here but that's beside the point. What really appalls me is the audacity of this Ranier fellow--and anyone else involved--to try and steal an atomic bomb. It sounds like science fiction. Or a bad movie."

Hoover shuffled through some notes. "Mr. President, we have to work this case on the assumption that foreign powers are involved. Probably the Soviets. Maybe even the Red Chinese."

"Evidence?" Marshall asked. He enjoyed giving the FBI director his own medicine back.

"We're developing evidence now, Mr. Secretary. I've got men from Criminal Investigation and Counter-Intel assigned already. Ranier's under twenty-four hour surveillance starting today. The man can't fart without us knowing it."

Truman shook his head, finally removed his tie altogether. Jesus, I'd give an arm for a bourbon straight up. "It's been a year and a half since the Russians detonated their first atomic bomb. It's a cinch they're desperate to catch up with us. Hell, the whole country's thick as stew with Red spies. Now Joe Stalin's trying to hijack our whole bomb-making process, lock, stock and barrel." Truman's face darkened. "I'll be damned if he's going to get away with it. Not on my watch."

Gordon Dean had listened to the arguments, sorely troubled by all the implications. He hadn't been in the Chairman's office even a year and the country was being rocked by more spy scandals and accusations every week. If half of what Joe McCarthy claimed was true--it made his stomach sour. The roast beef sandwich he'd swallowed practically whole for lunch seemed easier to digest than what Hoover was telling them.

"Mr. President, my biggest worry now is Greenhouse," Dean told them. "We're transporting ten Mark VI-sized atomic devices from Los Alamos to San Francisco and then on to the middle of the Pacific next week. What if the Reds try something en route, while we're shipping?"

Marshall tapped a pencil on his notepad. Neat scribblings lined the pad like ranks of hieroglyphics. "The Army and the Navy know how to protect them. We should let them do their jobs."

"Nonetheless," Truman cut in, "I'd rather be safe than sorry. Call Bradley and tell him we need to step up security and surveillance for the whole operation. I don't want some Red posse hijacking the damn train in the middle of the desert. And I'm authorizing you, Mr. Hoover, to launch a full-scale investigation. FBI will be the lead agency within the Government, but we need State and Defense involved too. And you as well, Gordon. Can't forget about Atomic Energy. Maybe CIA as well."

Hoover asked, "Should we consider postponing these Greenhouse tests? That might give us some time to flush any more conspirators out, develop better cases."

Dean and Marshall spoke in unison against the proposal. The AEC Chairman added, "It's not a good idea right now. We're on a real steep learning curve with our fission bombs and our arsenal needs every scrap of research information we can get. If we're going to stay ahead of the Russians, we need these tests to modernize and improve our inventory."

"I agree," Truman decided. "For now, Greenhouse stays on schedule. But I'm wondering...two months ago, Doug MacArthur and I met at Wake Island. Got to meet the man and size him up. What if I order another meeting? Just to question the esteemed General and see what he knows about all this?"

Hoover was against it. "Mr. President, with all due respects, I'd have to advise against it. If MacArthur's involved, your questions might tip him off, alert him he's under suspicion."

"General MacArthur is not under suspicion here," Marshall insisted. "This investigation is not about the conduct of the Supreme Commander. For God's sake, we can't be suspecting everybody of everything, can we?"

"If you say so, Mr. Secretary. In any case, Mr. President, I'd advise that you let the investigation proceed. Let Ranier continue his little diversion operation, under surveillance of course, and see where it leads." Hoover glared over at Marshall, then sat back in his chair with finality. "We play our cards right here and we can flush these jokers out and crack the whole egg wide open. Give the Soviets or the Red Chinese an intelligence black eye it'll take years to recover from."

Truman wasn't totally convinced. Dean was nervous. Marshall smelled a bureaucrat scratching out more turf. The President wanted a cigar badly and bellowed out for his secretary. But Rose Conway appeared in the kitchen door with empty hands.

"Sorry, Mr. President...all your humidors are empty. I'll send a staff person down to Malloy's right away." Malloy's was the President's favorite tobacconist, just the other side of Lafayette Park. Thank God Bess wasn't around. The First Lady was terror on perfectly good panatelas.

Truman grew more agitated. "Gentlemen, we are facing one hell of a perilous situation in Korea right now. Eighth Army's on the run...the Marines damn near annihilated up North...Reds have a new jet fighter, something called a MiG....I've just signed the orders for a limited re-instatement of the draft and that'll make me about as popular as a cowpie in the punch bowl--not that I give a rat's ass about that today. I don't mind telling you that I'm extremely reluctant to wait very long on shutting down this little plot. Makes me nervous, knowing Stalin's nosing around in our bedroom. I guess I just don't see a whole lot of good coming from waiting."

Hoover had thought he had won the President over. Now, he was backing away. "Mr. President, in my honest opinion, national security is better served by being patient in this case. Alert but patient."

"I suppose you're right," Truman said glumly. "But it goes against my better judgment."

"We'll keep Ranier and the Greenhouse staff under the tightest possible surveillance. The Bureau will work hand in glove with AEC on that, I promise you. These jokers try anything serious, we'll nab 'em quick."

Dean seconded the promise.

Not to be outdone, Marshall made promises of his own. "Defense will launch its own investigation too. I want to know everything I can about how atomic bombs are handled, stored and transported once they leave Los Alamos." Marshall was particularly at pains to prove Hoover wrong in his suspicions of MacArthur and the SCAP staff. He knew perfectly well Defense would have to counter-investigate to keep the FBI from hogging all the glory. "And we'll coordinate on a daily basis with the Bureau."

"I want the same," Truman said. "A daily update. Send it to Leahy."

Hoover and Marshall both promised they would assign top men to the case right away. Truman was mildly irritated at the competitive antagonism between the two. Both wanted to be first to complete the investigation.

Truman figured he knew exactly what was going on between them. It was plain as day. Marshall wanted the investigative glory to go to the newly minted Department of Defense, a bureaucratic infant in Washington terms, having been in existence for less than three years. He needed the influence to reign in the Services, cut back the traditional powers and prerogatives of the Army and Navy. Hoover, on the other hand, wanted to beat Marshall to the punch so the Bureau's reputation remained intact. Of course, he would be partially hampered by the inconvenient fact that the Bureau couldn't legally conduct investigations outside the U.S. Truman smiled inwardly at the thought: both men would have to cooperate for either one to get what he wanted.

A marriage made in hell, the President concluded.

It was apparent that both Hoover and Marshall had suspicions about where the investigation would ultimately lead. Truman offered no comment when Hoover said, "I'm sure the evidence points to the Far East, somehow, some way. My take on this is we'll find the perpetrator or perpetrators out there."

Marshall was dubious. "Well, we can't rule that out, of course. Personally, I'm not so sure. I think the real snakepit is Los Alamos. That's where Fuchs worked and some of the others. But rest assured, if there's any violation of the law inside the Defense Department or any of the Services, it will be dealt with quickly and severely. Mr. President, you have my solemn word on that."

"Good. Glad to hear it, George." Truman had made up his mind. "I'll give you all until January 10, two weeks from now, to solve this case before I act. I've got to consider all the implications for national security. If you have nothing by that time, I'm going to indefinitely postpone Greenhouse and revoke the security clearances of Dr. Albert Ranier and all his associates."

Thursday, 12-28-50

Mexico City

2:15 p.m.

Fyodor Maximovich Trofimenko spotted the tail right away. It wasn't too hard. Whether American or British, it didn't really matter. Fifty yards behind--on his side of the Avenida Chapultepec, once you spotted them, they stood out like a neon sign.

Dark gray worsted jacket, white Homburg, maroon tie. He was a dandy, this one, the Russian saw from the reflection in the front door of the tienda. Trofimenko had opened the door to the store as if he were going to enter, then 'changed' his mind. The momentary pause gave him a crude mirror with which to examine the pedestrian flow behind him.

Question was--what now? Fyodor Trofimenko had a rendezvous to make, beneath the marble columns of the Monument to the Boy Heroes outside Chapultepec Castle and he had to make it by three p.m. He had set out on foot from the massive stone fortress of the Soviet Embassy on the Avenida Cuauhtemoc shortly before two, intending to make several circuits around the Park, backtracking, studying the crowds, to flush out any surveillance. In this effort, he had been more successful than he really planned on. The Amerikantsy seemed to be everywhere, at every corner, ahead of and behind him, shadowing him from across the broad avenue. Or maybe not. Trofimenko's heart was racing and he forced himself to stop, to take deep breaths and gather his wits. An old mujer had spread out colorful quilts on the sidewalk ahead of him, hawking pistachios, avacados, green bananas. Trofimenko dropped ten pesos into her can and helped himself to a sackful of the nuts. Quickly, he stole another glance behind to make sure.

Yes. The Homburg was still there, casually flipping through a magazine at a corner newsstand. Trofimenko had accumulated details of his appearance over half a dozen furtive glances down the last several blocks. He figured the tail to be American: mid-thirties, maybe a full two meters in height, lean and wiry. And no doubt well armed. The Amerikantsy loved their Colt .45's.

He checked his watch. Tail or no, he had to make his rendezvous with Treeline at three p.m. If the tail was too close, his field instructions were clear: a vertical piece of black electrical tape, five centimeters long, on the last pillar of the stone balustrade at the northwest corner of Chapultepec Park. A simple message: Rendezvous cancelled. I will contact you by the usual method in two days.

Trofimenko felt the roll of black tape in his suit pocket. He prayed he wouldn't need to use it. The meet with Treeline was critical. Beria himself had said so.

Trofimenko was boiling over with conflicting feelings. Overriding all of them was relief...he was just glad to be out of Russia again, in the field, on a mission vital to the State. He had stuck his head in the lion's mouth once more and gotten it back intact. How many more times could be do that and not be devoured?

Trofimenko shook his head ruefully and plowed on into the thickening crowd along the avenida. Every trip back to Mother Russia's embrace was worse than the one before. His nerves were almost shot when the State Security car had dropped him off at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport the day before. Aboard the flight to Berlin, he had shut the window curtain tight, not even daring to watch his beloved country slide by twenty thousand feet below. It was only when he had crossed into the British sector in Berlin and caught the train outside the Tiergarten that Trofimenko had dared admit to himself just how frightened, how utterly panicked, he had been riding a train with Lavrenti Beria into the heart of the central Asian steppe country at night. A single word from the People's Commissar, maybe not even that, perhaps only an eyeblink or a sideways glance, was all that was needed. Beria could have swallowed him whole and made him disappear from the face of the earth forever.

But it hadn't happened and Trofimenko was grateful beyond words. As if he had just been miraculously cured of a fatal disease, relief and fits of giddy laughter flooded his mind. He had nearly missed the train connection at Frankfurt.

Now, five thousand miles away from the claws of the Motherland Rodina, he'd been assigned a mission vital to the State. Windward sucked in a series of deep breaths and forged ahead, narrowing his powers of concentration down to a small bubble of faces and legs and hands all around him.

Presently, the avenida gave onto a broad plaza of precisely cut, multi-colored stones, Monument Square. Ahead, the columns of the Boy Heroes and a winding pebbled path through a copse of eucalyptus trees opened onto the mirrored tranquillity of the Caso de Lago, a small lake in the very shadow of the parapets of Chapultepec Castle.

Trofimenko dove into the throng of tourists gathered around the Boy Heroes columns. The Homburg surveillance seemed to have vanished. Perhaps a handoff had been made. That could be worrisome...trying to pick up the tail again. He couldn't be sure. But in the crowds milling around the entrance to the Park, there was both sanctuary and cover, two things any field agent instinctively sought.

He decided to risk it.

By his watch, the time was five minutes to three. His instructions were quite clear. At exactly three p.m., Trofimenko was to stand on the top step--the plaza level--of the Boy Heroes columns, directly in front of the northernmost column. He was to wear a light blue or gray suit jacket and white trousers, and a fedora with a checked band around its base. He was to place a monogrammed handkerchief in the right chest pocket of his jacket. The monogram had to be visible. And he was to carry two items in his hands: a furled copy of today's La Prensa--masthead showing--in his right arm, tucked under the armpit and a small wax paper sack of pistachio nuts in his left.

All these details Trofimenko had meticulously checked, even as he rode trolleys and taxis, backtracked and ducked into and out of shops in an effort to lose his persistent Amerikantsy tail. Now, like the professional field agent he considered himself to be, Windward assumed a seemingly nonchalant 'people-watching' stance on the plaza level of the monument. Heads, arms, and legs flashed by. He decided to try a few pistachios and found them lacking salt.

"Pardon, senor, do you have a light?"

The voice startled Trofimenko out of his reverie. The questioner was a tall, gray crew-cutted man, thin moustache and full lips. His eyes were hidden behind sunglasses.

Windward instinctively reached for his lighter before remembering the response expected. He'd been shaken...Treeline's appearance had changed so drastically from their days at the Frunze academy. He forced himself to relax his arm muscles, slowly withdrew the lighter and flicked it on, cupping the flame against the breeze.

"Of course, senor. But you know what they say about smoking: every time you light up, a candle flickers out somewhere else."

Treeline puffed on his Marlboro for a moment and pulled away from the lighter, then took a deeper drag.

"Philosophy of life? Or just medical advice?"

Windward began to relax more. "Maybe a bit of both, senor."

"Let's walk." Treeline's command came quietly, almost sotto voce. The two men stepped off the monument plaza and headed deeper into Chapultepec Park, along the pebbled path.

After five minutes of silence, they came to the Caso de Lago. Treeline paused at a railing white with bird droppings. He stooped for a pebble and skipped it across the water.

"You were followed." Treeline made the statement matter-of-factly, unchallengeable. "Didn't you see it."

"I shook off my surveillance," Trofimenko insisted. "He wasn't at the monument--I made sure of that. Unless there was a handoff."

"There were three," Treeline scouted for more pebbles, checking the crowds filling in around the lake. "Two are still with us. No--don't look." He skipped a few more rocks into the lake. "We'll stay here for five minutes, then move on."

Windward was nervous. It was a critical mistake--poor fieldwork--and he knew it. But he had been sure of the Homburg. Treeline seemed to be reading his thoughts...an old trick that had once annoyed Windward...but that was a long time ago.

"Don't fret, comrade. They're watching to see if we exchange anything. We can lose one of them easily enough. Losing two is harder. They're set up in a moving grid of surveillance, handing off like a football pass. Not to worry. It just makes the game more challenging."

They chatted about Mexico for a few minutes. Treeline was posted to Washington D.C.--rumored to be a mole inside the American Atomic Energy Commission. Trofimenko didn't know his name.

"-ington is smaller, you know," Treeline was comparing the two capitals. "Duller too. There's no nightlife. Here--" he jammed his hands in his suit pockets--"at least something's alive. Street music. bazaars, beautiful women. In Washington," he shrugged, "only cold and dead statues."

"I'd like to go to Washington," Trofimenko admitted. "I'd like to see the Lincoln Memorial."

"Indeed. Lots of pigeons there. Schoolchildren too. Americans are funny about that. They build vast monuments to honor their past. Only they don't have a past. They live in the future."

"Ah," Trofimenko gave that some thought. "But the future belongs to Socialism, my friend. We all know that."

Treeline made a face, perhaps the barest hint of a smirk. "So they say." He straightened his tie, re-set the white Panama hat on his odd bullet-shaped head. "Shall we move on? The Americans will be getting impatient by now."

The two agents strolled the path around Caso de Lago, dodging screaming kids, barking dogs and couples in love. The afternoon was crisply cool, slightly clouded with the normal ash of the valley's polluted air stinging their eyes. The sky itself was salmon-hued, gauzy yet breezes stirred the lake to a slight tremble.

Trofimenko swallowed a strong urge to scan the crowd, check surveillance coverage. But Treeline seemed comfortable with the situation. He tried to act similarly.

"Your first stop will be at Los Alamos," the Washington-based agent told him. Another matter-of-fact statement, saying little yet portending much. "I have papers for you. Not here. The papers authorize you to enter Los Alamos as a ballistics technician. You'll be assigned to T-Division. It's a research lab. I'll give you the papers later. After we've eluded our American friends. You must commit it, all of it, to memory."

Trofimenko received the news equably enough. He was going to America. Into one of the most closely guarded places in the heart of enemy territory. After five years posted to Tokyo, he still did not think of Americans as the enemy. But he knew the Amerikantsy well enough; they ran Japan as a private fiefdom and made wonderful hamburgers. He didn't want Treeline to think him some kind of peasant.

"The Instance thinks America's bringing atomic bombs into Korea. I'm told there's evidence they'll use them against China." Instance was field code for Stalin and the top Party leadership.

Treeline sniffed. "Everyone's got a theory. We'll see what you turn up at Los Alamos. By the way, you're an 'Austrian immigrant.'"

"My cover?"

"Captured by the American Army at the end of the Great Patriotic War--they call it World War Two. You worked on weapons--bombs, that sort of thing, for Krupp. You were based in Feldhausen, near Munich. A munitions plant. Your wife and children are dead. You ran west, to escape the Russians." Treeline smiled at the 'bona fides' he had brought from the Washington embassy. "As if anyone would ever want to escape the workers' paradise."

Trofimenko saw they were approaching the City Zoo. Smells of wet straw and animal fur filled the air. Children screamed with delight. Behind them, a pair of black stallions clipclopped along the edge of the path. Two riders stood in their saddles, policia by their white helmets and black boots. Mounted patrol for the Park. The crowds parted to let the detail pass.

"How am I to get to America, comrade?"

Treeline led them up to the ticket kiosk and bought two passes for the Zoo. He turned to give one to Windward, checking surveillance with a quick scan behind them. "Only one now, friend. The Americans must be bored with us."

Trofimenko waited for the gate attendant to tear off the ticket stub. "Or they don't like zoos."

They went in, heading down a descending slope of wooden slat steps, toward an exhibit marked Primates.

Outside the exhibit hall, Treeline bought them some peanuts. "It's a covert insertion. Has to be. We haven't had time to build much of a 'life' for you. Three nights from now...Sunday night. It's already set up. You'll go across as an illegal...probably in the trunk of a car or something like that. There's a farm, actually a ranch, in Las Cruces. It's called the Flying Bar Ranch. The owner is a comrade. With a big appetite, I'm told. Josh Wiley. He'll set you up after that, money, identification, get you up to Albuquerque. There's another contact there. I don't know the identity."

"This is dangerous." Trofimenko didn't often voice such a thought, but there it was.

"You're supposed to be a trained field agent, Fyodor Maximovich. You used to know how to handle yourself in denied areas."

"No, I meant here, you and me, seen together. And under surveillance. The Americans probably know you. It's me they're wondering about. I've been in Japan the last five years. They're wondering why I'm here, why we're meeting in the open like this."

Treeline shrugged. "Moscow Center doesn't make mistakes."

"Of course."

Treeline and Windward went into the Primates exhibit. Orangutans and macaques screeched and shrieked inside filthy cages, banging the cage bars like maniac prisoners. They stopped near the railing in front of the Chimpanzees. Bonobo, read the plaque (Pan Pariscus). "Black with a white patch at the tail, hair parted in the middle...bonobos have a more slender form than P. troglodytes, their closest cousins."

"You're enjoying your visit to the capitolo?" Treeline asked.

"I've only just arrived. The city is huge, so lively."

"It is that." Treeline stared into the faces of the bonobos, mesmerized for a moment, completely still. The apes returned the curious stare. For a moment, Trofimenko wasn't sure...perhaps something had passed between them. The bonobos chatted with each other, pointing, as if they were outside and the Russians were encaged. "They're curious...see them talking? They wonder about us. Why are we here? What do we want? Same questions you and I have. The Americans too. There's not such a great gulf between us."

"I'll keep that in mind, comrade."

Treeline shook his head, shelled and popped a few peanuts into his mouth. "At least their games aren't so dangerous as ours. You've been briefed on your mission."

"I have."

"Fully briefed?"

Windward realized the crowd in the Primates exhibit was thinning out, moving on. Their cover was disintegrating. "I was briefed by Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria himself."

"Very well. We meet Granite tomorrow night. He'll explain the method of sabotage. You'll have to practice the technique--it's tricky, even a bit risky. But I'm sure you'll get it."

Trofimenko knew Granite was field code for Vladimir Illych Brylin, NKVD First Chief Directorate, glavnie upravlenie for Mexico. Brylin was rezident.

"I'll do my duty, comrade. I'm well trained."

Treeline smiled at that. "No one is well trained in sabotaging atomic bombs. Come...let's walk. Our guests are probably getting impatient."

They left Chapultepec Park altogether, returning to the horns and traffic and crowds of the Zona Rosa. Treeline and Windward walked several blocks north, along the Melchor Ocampo. They passed turquoise walls with red doors, the fruit and vegetable gardens of Jamaica Market and too many pulquerias to count. The cheap gin smell of the bars made Trofimenko's nose wrinkle.

In sight of the winged spires of La Independencia, Treeline suddenly grabbed Windward by the elbow and steered him quickly up a flight of stone steps. The building was gray, almost gothic with Aztec serpents coiled at the heavy glass doors of the entrance. Inside the Biblioteca Nacional, cool tile floors echoed with every step.

Treeline pulled Windward along to the elevator bank. He pressed "5", fidgeted until the doors sighed open. They went in and were momentarily alone when the doors closed.

"Remember this, comrade" Number twenty-two, Calle de la Reforma. That's the address. Tomorrow at five o'clock. Take a taxi. And be punctual. Now, repeat it."

Windward repeated the address. Even as he spoke, the elevator jerked to a halt. They had reached the fifth floor. Treeline stepped out even as the doors hissed open. The men exchanged a moment's stare. There was a flicker of the old smile.

"Tomorrow," he said. And vanished into the book stacks.

Windward pressed the button for Lobby and rode the elevator back down. He left the library, deep in thought, not really paying attention to the crowds jostling by.

A block behind, a white Homburg picked up the scent once again.

Number Twenty-Two Calle de la Reforma was a winding suburban street northeast of the city, a short walk from the dun-colored stone basilicas of Guadalupe and clear views south, from a slight rise, to the cloud-ringed summit of Popocatepetl, a 17000-foot volcano dominating the southern horizon.

The safe house was white stucco and red tile roof, laid out hacienda-style with generous sprays of bougainvillea and azalea decorating pea-gravel walkways leading up to the cool shadows of the front courtyard entrance.

Fyodor Trofimenko arrived by taxi precisely at five p.m. It was the third taxi he had taken since leaving the Soviet Embassy, a normal precaution against Amerikantsy surveillance. Trofimenko was uneasy with the obvious interest of the Americans. He felt like a fly having flown into a spider's web. Something about Windward had triggered the surveillance web the Americans ran in the Mexican capitolo and the beast was now fully aroused and stalking him.

Trofimenko could only hope the Americans' unwanted interest died off after he 'disappeared' into deep cover Sunday night.

Granite and Treeline were both in the tiled living room, nursing vodka margaritas, as Trofimenko wound his way through perimeter security--in this case, two tuxedoed but humorless agents from First Chief Directorate, no doubt 'cultural attaches' at the Embassy.

Granite was Vladimir Illych Brylin, first secretary and NKVD rezident. He acknowledged Trofimenko with a slight dip of his margarita.

"Fyodor Maximovich, you're like honey to the flies. Alexander Sergeyevich tells me you seem to attract the attention of the Americans."

Trofimenko helped himself to a margarita already mixed and chilled, then pocketed a fistful of peppers from a snack tray. "I followed normal procedure getting here. I switched taxis three times, changed directions twice with each taxi. The last driver dropped me off two blocks away. I saw nothing."

Alexander Karytinin sipped at his drink thoughtfully. "You didn't see anything yesterday either."

Trofimenko didn't like where this was going, especially with the rezident himself here. "I've done everything by the book. I don't know why the Americans are so interested in me."

"You're new. Something different." Granite surmised. "They don't understand why you're here. They don't have a file on you...yet. But it's only a matter of time before they do. The Americans aren't stupid. Soon enough, they'll connect you with operations in Japan. That's when it'll really get interesting."

"By then," Karytinin said, "you'll be just a memory. Already on station, in America."

Brylin put down his drink. "Let's get to work, comrades." He went to a breakfront full of china and pulled out a file folder from one drawer, handing it to Trofimenko. "Your identity and enough life history to get by. Read it and memorize. This file stays with me, in the diplomatic bag."

Trofimenko flipped through the few pages, scanning quickly. "There's not much here."

"We didn't have time to develop much. Come with me."

Brylin led the two agents deeper into the house, to a back room. It was locked but the rezident produced a key. Inside, the room was paneled in white pine. A tarpaulin covered something large in a sturdy cradle in the center. Brylin flipped on the lights--extra lighting had been rigged up over the cradle--and threw off the tarpaulin.

"Mark VI American atomic fission bomb. Implosion type. Yield...about twenty-five to thirty kilotons. Actually, this is only a high-fidelity model of one. What you're looking at, Fyodor Maximovich, is a five-foot slice from the center of the bomb. And this--" he fingered an opening in the surface, where a separate but well-fitted piece had been inserted into a cylindrical cut-out--"is the plug. The last insert to make the device critical." He produced a small wrench from his pocket. The wrench had an unusual angled head and socket design. Brylin bent to the inserted plug and began to un-torque the tiny screws securing the plug to the bomb. There were twenty-four screws, all small diameter, less than one-eighth inch. It was exacting work. Brylin was soon sweating under the bright lights. It took nearly ten minutes to lift out all twenty-four screws. He used the other end of the wrench, formed into a shallow taper, to lever out the plug. It resisted initially but finally yielded to firm pressure and slid up and out.

Triumphant, Brylin deposited the wrench and plug on a nearby table, wiping his forehead with a rag.

"Your job, Fyodor Maximovich, is to do this in less than one minute. Without the lights."

Trofimenko was amazed at the model's detail. He ran his fingers over the device. "An exact replica?"

"Down to the rivets. And that conduit you have your fingers on right now is for wiring for the fusing circuit. Part of the detonation system."

"We really have this much intelligence on American atomic bombs?"

Brylin chuckled. "Your comrades in First Chief Directorate have not exactly been idle the last few years. Your job, if it comes to it, will be to sabotage the real Mark VI's, render them incapable of nuclear fission. And to do so before the bombs leave America."

Trofimenko swallowed hard. This was a hell of a long way from paying off Fumei An's girls to suborn lustful American Army officers. "The bombs...how many? Where are they?"

Brylin laid out the mission. He found a map of America and unfolded it over the bomb model.

"Sunday night, Fyodor Maximovich...that is your deadline. By midnight, you will be an expert on quickly and quietly removing this plutonium plug. Once you've mastered that, I will show you how to insert a small pouch we've developed. Normally the Americans ship their atomic bombs with the plug removed. They are shipped separately as a security measure. But you will learn how to unscrew and remove the plugs in the field, just in case. The pouches I will give you contain particles of a substance called cadmium. In atomic terms, cadmium absorbs excess neutrons. I learned all this at Arzamas-16 last month. One of Kurchatov's men...Kapitsa, was his name, I believe."

"This substance," Trofimenko asked. "This cadmium...it is safe?"

"Safe enough for a baby. Don't worry about that." Brylin traced out a course on the map. "Sunday night, you'll be driven to a small airstrip about fifty kilometers north of here, in the desert. A small aircraft has been hired. You'll be flown to this town--Palomas--on the American border. Here, you'll cross over, disguised as an illegal. You'll wind up at a ranch in Las Cruces."

"Treeline's already described it."

"Josh Wiley will get you up to Albuquerque. We have another contact there. She runs an Indian pottery and crafts shop. From there, your cover as an Austrian weapons technician applies. The paperwork and ID's should get you into Los Alamos. Your contact in Albuquerque's code name is Scotch. Her husband is a metallurgist in T-Division."

Trofimenko examined the model more closely. It was shaped as a cylinder, capped off at each end with hemispherical domes. Wireway conduits were welded to the outside frame.

"The scale is accurate?"

"To within a few millimeters. You see here only the forward compartment, where the plutonium and the tamper and initiator are located. The tail cones and ballistic fins are missing."

"How many bombs are there?"

Brylin jammed his hands in his pockets. "The Americans are testing Mark VI's in the Pacific early next year. It's called Greenhouse."

"There are now ten on the test schedule," Karytinin explained. He described the cantankerous meeting in Washington, where Ranier-Tolkach devices were added. "There's evidence from another source, and from you, that somehow, some of these bombs are going to be diverted from the test. Some of them are going to be used in Korea."

Trofimenko well remembered the deep and somber voice of MacArthur on the Canary tapes; 'the babies were about to be born.' Now, he had been given the job of aborting the 'babies', neutralizing them before catastrophe could envelope the entire Far East. If the Americans used atom bombs in Korea or China, what would his own countrymen do? What would Stalin do? Trofimenko swallowed hard, felt the cool steel alloy of the bomb model. To even ask the question was to answer it.

"It would be best to do the sabotage work at Los Alamos, if that is possible," Karytinin added. "If there is an opportunity. In five days, the bombs will be crated for shipment. They will go by train, from Los Alamos to the Navy shipyard at San Francisco. After that, they'll be loaded onto a Navy freighter...the Chesapeake. It's about ten days' steaming time to the test site at Eniwetok."

"Whatever the Americans are up to," Brylin said, "we have to find out. If there's an operation to use atomic bombs in Korea, Moscow's given us the task of stopping it...here, if we can. Fyodor Maximovich, your mission's vital to the State."

"And risky," Karytinin said. "I hope Moscow understands that."

"Just don't fail," Brylin said. "None of my field agents has ever failed." And if you do, I'm authorized to terminate. But he didn't have to tell them that. "Here," the rezident extracted a small pouch from his pocket. He emptied the contents into the palm of his hand. Two sealed capsules. He gave one each to Karytinin and Trofimenko. "If necessary...you can save me the trouble."

Both men carefully pocketed the cyanide capsules.

Brylin checked his watch. "Comrades, a suggestion...let's have our dinner now. Pollo asado tonight, quite a dish. You'll like it. The Embassy spares nothing for its best people. And after dinner, Fyodor Maximovich, you come back to this room. You have four hours to become an expert at removing this plug and inserting the cadmium."

Two hours later, Trofimenko was thumbing a line of stinging sweat from his forehead. He just couldn't manage the tiny wrench and the casing screws in the dark. Frustrated, he flipped on the light switch. The room was stuffy and close and he concentrated a moment on regulating his breathing and steadying himself. There had to be a better way.

Perhaps, Brylin's test just wasn't realistic. Less than a minute. In the dark. The test was predicated on the assumption that Trofimenko, ostensibly an Austrian weapons technician, would have access to the secure vault where the bombs were stored. That seemed unlikely, he told himself. More likely the security would be extremely tight, and only a fool would try to breech it. Trofimenko figured he was no fool.

A better approach would be to arrange some kind of accident or delay on the train as the bombs were moved to San Francisco. Trofimenko gave that some thought. There were several possibilities. He decided to pursue this line of reasoning. Brylin had not directly instructed him to sabotage the bomb, only stop or delay the weapons from reaching the Pacific. Within that minute space of flexibility, much could be done if one were resourceful enough.

Alexander Karytinin appeared in the doorway. The agent cradled another margarita with both hands.

"We'll not see each other again, comrade. Not for a very long time, I'm afraid."

Trofimenko lay down his wrench. He leaned back against the bomb model, jammed his hands in his pockets.

"You're going back to Washington?"

Karytinin nodded. "Treeline resumes his post. Sending along whatever wisdom the Atomic Energy Commission comes up with. I suppose anything useful will come back to you. Probably through your contact at Albuquerque." Karytinin sighed, sipped at his drink. "At least, there are a few decent restaurants in Washington. And the Chesapeake Bay is near. Hard-shell crabs are quite a delicacy there, you know."

"I've developed a taste for sushi myself. That and American Coney Island hot dogs," Trofimenko told him.

"What is Tokyo really like?"

"Oh, it's coming along nicely. The place was really devastated by the war. But now buildings are rising everywhere. The war in Korea has helped the local economy. It's not such bad duty. It has its pleasures." He had Fumei An in mind.

Both men shook hands, then embraced.

"Until the Revolution is won, my old friend," Karytinin slapped Trofimenko hard on the back. "Frunze was a long time ago, wasn't it? Well, I suppose we all change, in some way. Occupational necessity, maybe. And we both know what is at stake here."

"I am always anxious when I return to the Rodina," Trofimenko admitted. "The capitalists are clever. A tough enemy." And they live quite well too, he told himself.

"Have faith. Socialism will triumph." Karytinin and Trofimenko regarded each other with the smiles of long-time field agents. Volumes of meaning passed without a word being spoken. "If not today, then tomorrow. Victory is certain."

"Indeed," Trofimenko agreed. "Tomorrow would be better, comrade. There are a million secrets I could learn in Tokyo. Give me enough time there and I'll have MacArthur himself phoning up Stalin."

They laughed. Brylin appeared. It was after midnight and Trofimenko was tired of dealing with plutonium plugs and tiny wrenches.

"It's time, Fyodor Maximovich. Get your bag. The car's out front. The plane will be at the airstrip in less than an hour."

The three of them toasted a final time, then said their goodbyes. Trofimenko climbed into the dark blue Hudson. Skvorets was the driver; he was one of the gorillas Trofimenko had encountered on perimeter security detail.

A splendid conversationalist, no doubt. Trofimenko thought dourly.

Skvorets was not a careful driver either. The Hudson bounced over the curb as it exited the compound and then accelerated up Calle de la Reforma. In less than ten minutes, they were thrumming along a northbound highway, heading into the flat black scablands of Mexico's high desert.

Trofimenko didn't relish the prospect of spending hours stuffed in a hot and cramped crawlspace under the bed of a produce truck as it bounced and jostled its way north to the border. He carried enough money to pay off the American smuggler whose truck would bring him across. The going rate was five hundred dollars American.

One thing was for sure. Fyodor Maximovich Trofimenko was just thankful he wasn't stuck in some icy prison in the bowels of the Gulag.

He was actually looking forward to finally seeing what America was really all about. And who could tell: under the right circumstances, perhaps, America would appreciate having another immigrant to welcome.

There. Now finally, at last, he had admitted the thing to himself.
CHAPTER 12

Thursday, December 28, 1950

St. Michael's, Maryland

Noon

An hour east of Washington, D.C., Highway 50 passes by the quaint colonial city of Annapolis, Maryland and crosses the Chesapeake at the Bay Bridge. The highway turns south not long after that and heads deep into the rolling farm country of Talbot County, the fields redolent with corn and a little tobacco in summer, brown and occasionally covered with snow in the winter. At Easton, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, Highway 33 branches west toward the Bay. Just through the village of Newcomer, the highway opens up again, bordered by pine forests and broad fields of grass, the occasional white clapboard farm house being the only evidence of man's presence.

Two miles shy of the town of St. Michael's, hard by a picture postcard inlet off the East Bay, the FBI maintained a safe house tucked behind a stand of pine trees along an otherwise unremarkable stretch of Highway 33. White clapboard main house, rusting barn out back, a detached garage connected by a columned breezeway to the big house, the facility had long been used by the Bureau for debriefings, classified conferences, interrogations and the occasional mid-summer hoedown in the heart of hard-shell crab country.

Today, the Director of the FBI was hosting a critical meeting of the inter-agency task force authorized by President Truman to look into the allegations of the atomic physicist Chambers Kimberly, allegations that bordered of the absurd to many who had heard them but not to J. Edgar Hoover. To Hoover, even the theoretical possibility that Russian agents might have penetrated Los Alamos again and were attempting to steal an entire atomic bomb were not so farfetched as to prevent him from launching a full-blown investigation. Hoover well knew he could ill afford to do anything less. Practically every month, new scares and scandals were surfacing about Communist penetration into the U.S. government. While Hoover did not necessarily believe every last accusation made by blowhards like Joe McCarthy, the very climate of the times encouraged prudence and vigilance in protecting America's secrets. That was the price you had to pay in dealing with the menace of world Communism.

J. Edgar Hoover was damned if any more Red spies would suck up America's secrets on his watch.

Hoover sat with his back to the bayside window of the house's upstairs conference room--actually a converted master bedroom paneled in heavily varnished knotty pine, with a tiny veranda overlooking the clanking masts of the sailboats in St. Michael's' east harbor basin. General Lawton Collins sat next to the director, stiff as a two-by-four, representing the Defense Department and the U.S. Army. "Lightning Joe" Collins had made a lasting name for himself as commander of VII Corps in the breakout from Normandy in June 1944. Now he was a full, four-star general, Chief of Staff, United States Army. He was determined that Hoover and the Bureau would not hog all the glory on this case.

Two other men also attended the planning meeting. One was Major Lyle Kitchens, a recent arrival from Brussels, detailed temporarily to Headquarters, U.S. Army from his usual billet at SACEUR, Supreme Allied Command, Europe. That was Eisenhower's command.

Kitchens was a cop. At least, he liked to think of himself as one. Assigned to the 1st Field Investigative Unit, 10th Military Police Company (Criminal Investigation Division), he'd spent much of his adult life tracking down crimes committed by Army personnel...overzealous supply sergeants with a little profiteering racket on the side, deserters and AWOL GI's homesick for Mom's cooking, even the occasional spy or traitor who turned up, handing over troop deployment schedules or unit TOE's to Russian or East German "uncles" with hard cash to pay and kind words for lost souls.

Not to be outdone, Hoover balanced out the meeting with Robert Blount, round, balding, nervous, flick-eyed Counter-Intel professional with a long resume of spy busts and national security convictions to his credit. Blount had "AD" written all over his face, a sort of naked ambition for assistant directorship that Hoover both encouraged and occasionally swatted down when it got out of hand. Robert Blount was all energy and motion, a compact engine of rifling papers and chain-smoking Pall Mall's and sweat stained cheeks and machine-gun questions.

Collins and Kitchens were not impressed.

Hoover ran the meeting like a typical Bureau case review, increasingly annoyed with the steady stream of objections and observations from Collins. The SecDef himself, General Marshall, had warned "Lightning Joe" about Hoover, and tasked the Chief of Staff with making sure the Bureau didn't step on any Departmental toes or steamroller the Army on its own turf. For General Lawton Collins, battling Hoover turned out to be twice as hard as the worst Nazi Panzer Division.

Hoover was, as usual blunt and abrupt. He laid out all the suspicions that Kimberly and the Atomic Energy Commission had, the possible plot by the Soviets or the Red Chinese to steal atomic bombs or otherwise subvert the upcoming Operation Greenhouse, and the possible plot to use atomic devices in Korea without authorization.

Over a working lunch of crab sandwiches and iced tea, the course of the investigation was mapped out and responsibilities divvied up. Hoover and Collins agreed that the Bureau would be the lead agency in those parts of the case being investigated within U.S. borders. The Army would cooperate and share any intelligence it developed on the domestic investigation and would take the lead on parts of the case extending overseas, especially in Japan and Korea. In this, both men pledged to work with the newly created Central Intelligence Agency and to fully share all investigative data.

Even as the pledges were made, though, both men knew that they would never happen. There was only so much prosecutorial glory to go around in spy and subversion cases. Hoover and Collins eyed each other warily over the tops of their iced tea glasses. Both knew they'd be fighting a helluva lot of battles before the case was closed.

Hoover had spread out a map on the table. "We've already put a tail on Dr. Ranier at Los Alamos. Twenty-four hours, three shifts, overlap and handoffs, the works. Atomic Energy Security Service is working the surveillance with us. Robert, you go to Los Alamos tomorrow and work up some daily reports on Ranier's activities, who he meets, what he eats, I want it all. AEC's worked up a cover story for you. You'll be installed as an inspector from Washington, reporting directly to Gordon Dean over at Atomic Energy. Stick close to Ranier. I want to develop enough evidence to pull him off the Greenhouse test and keep him from leaving the country. But we need evidence."

"I want a copy of the surveillance logs too," Collins said. "No sanitizing. No summaries. Give me the raw data. Everyday."

"You'll get it, General. I'll have my AD make a copy for the Army and courier it over everyday. Say about mid-afternoon, for the previous day's logs?"

"That'll do." Collins indicated Major Kitchens. "I've assigned the Major here to 5th MP (CID). They operate out of Tokyo, nominally part of SCAP. He'll be flying to Japan Friday."

"General, is that wise?" Hoover adjusted his spectacles. "If SCAP staff are under suspicion, should the Major be reporting to SCAP too?"

Collins didn't have one iota of patience for Hoover's meddling in Army matters. He swallowed his irritation hard. "Mr. Hoover, it's long-standing Army policy to detail CID investigators to theater commanders. I know General MacArthur's under some suspicion here but frankly, I don't buy it. In any case, MacArthur will not be informed about the investigation. The Major will report directly to me. Any connection between SCAP staff and Los Alamos, I'll find out about it."

"For the kind of diversion that Kimberly's talking about to work," Hoover noted, "there has to be come kind of connection, someone orchestrating the operation at the receiving end. The question is who?"

"Major Kitchens will be reviewing all service records at SCAP, as well as heading up the investigation, any surveillance operations and all reports and case work. I've got full confidence in him."

"The Major will need to work closely with Robert here," Hoover said. "On a daily basis, if possible. I just want to make sure no one's hoarding any evidence. There's too much at stake here."

"Mr. Hoover," Collins said, "the Army will do its duty. We are fully capable of running our part of this investigation."

"The President wants a daily summary. I'm setting up a task force command post at the Justice Department, seventh floor. We'll have secure lines, steno help, whatever we need."

"Pentagon's better equipped for this sort of thing," Collins said. "National military command center has telecon equipment, maps, helluva lot more gear to coordinate a campaign. We do this sort of thing all the time."

But Hoover wasn't buying. "The President has made the Bureau lead on this case. I want all the facts, all the operations, centralized at my end."

Collins figured it would be politic to concede this battle. Especially since he was sure the Army would eventually win the war. "Mr. Hoover, you're tougher than a roomful of Commies. I'll see to it that Signal Corps coordinates with your command post. You'll get a daily report from Kitchens here."

The remainder of the meeting was spent covering ground rules for sharing intelligence, passwords, and mapping out strategies for conducting the investigation. Names of key people targeted for surveillance or questioning were posted on a flip chart with lines connecting them to major allegations from Chambers Kimberly or evidence already developed.

The mapping and strategy session went on for two hours. By midafternoon, a network of relationships and expected lines of evidence had been laid out. Hoover and Collins decided a break was needed.

Major Kitchens had an idea. "What say we motor over to the Crab House and attack a few dozen crustaceans?"

Collins agreed. "Excellent idea, Major. This place is getting a little stuffy for me."

Robert Blount was up for it but Hoover demurred. "I want to work out a few more details. Why don't you two get to know each other better?"

Collins decided to stay behind too, to keep an eye on Hoover. "Go on, Major. Have a few beers. You guys will be in bed together on this case...might as well start now."

Blount and Kitchens left the safe house and caught a boat taxi across the east basin to the Crab House, a weathered cypress and pine shack overlooking St. Michael's harbor and its marina.

They ordered two pitchers and a dozen hard-shelled crabs each. Cracking crab claws and guzzling beer, the FBI agent and the Army investigator sized each other up in short order.

Both men were professionals but wary of each other and wary of the complexity of the plot they were dealing with and of the political minefields of dealing with their respective agencies.

They decided to work out a few ground rules for communicating essential information in the field, knowing full well that their bosses wanted nothing more than to massage the case to make themselves look good. They also both knew it was unlikely the hard and fast rules about investigative boundaries could ever be maintained.

"We do whatever it takes," Kitchens said. He licked his fingers and went back to cracking crab legs.

"Amen to that," Blount said. "How high you figure this thing goes?"

Kitchens just shook his head. "Hell if I know, pal. Maybe high enough for a nosebleed. I hope not."

"It makes me nervous, this atomic stuff. You don't really think Hoover's right...and the Reds are trying to filch one of our bombs?"

"Could be worse than that," Kitchens replied. "From what that physicist Kimberly said, it could be our own people trying to bag an a-bomb. I'm damned sure no good can come from that if it's true."

"You got any police background, Major?"

Kitchens finished off one pitcher of beer and started on the next one. He topped off Blount's mug too. "I interned with Philly PD before I joined up. Several years, mostly Files, and some records searches for the Crime Lab. That was real exciting...mostly fraud cases, I seem to recall. I had me an instructor's job all lined up at the Police Academy this fall--the wife and kids and me all live in Brussels, since I'm detailed to SACEUR. Tenth MP's. I was all set to take a trip back to Philly to sign the final papers when I get these emergency orders to report to D.C....Army Headquarters. So I fly over, get shown right into Lightning Joe Collins' office himself. Next thing I know, I'm here in the Maryland countryside, cracking crabs with the FBI."

"Same with me," Blount admitted. "Except I moved my family to Virginia two years ago. I'm assigned to 'WIFO', Washington Field Office. Counter-intelligence work mostly."

"Hunting Reds?"

Blount shook his head. "Not that exciting, I'm afraid. Loyalty checks, mostly. I was section chief under the AD for General Investigations. Then last spring, the AD detailed me to Counter-intel and I spent the next six months on this paperwork nightmare called the Federal Employee Loyalty Program. Talk about boring. My brain became numb after a month of that." Blount sipped at his beer. "Best thing that happened to me lately was having a second daughter born. Name's Christine. Now there's a job to keep you on your toes."

"I believe it." Kitchens put down the wooden mallet and wiped seasoning off his fingers. "You really think we got crackpot civilians trying to snatch an atom bomb? Or is this Kimberly fellow just blowing smoke?"

"Hard to say, Major. There may be perfectly good explanations for all this weird documentation out of Hanford and Los Alamos. Maybe somebody's just pissed at somebody. It happens. Nobody in his right mind would try the things Kimberly's alleging."

"I guess that's what we'll have to find out," Blount concluded. "Who's crying and who's lying. One thing I have learned in Counter-intel work: you can't always tell about people sometimes. Perfectly normal and rational people do the damnedest things sometimes and you never really know why. I've dealt with CI cases and spies and traitors for several years now. Here's my view: the cases take years to develop and people drift over to the other side for as many reasons as there are suspects. Everyone's got a different angle."

"Maybe so," Kitchens said. "Myself, I like to break it down into the three big things everyone likes to chew on: sex, money or politics. You start looking under the rug in most spy cases I've dealt with, in the Army, and you usually find one of those buggers staring up at you."

"Fair enough, Major. But we have to keep reminding ourselves who the enemy is. It's not the Bureau and it's not the Army. It's the Reds."

Friday, 12-29-50

Tokyo

10:00 p.m.

"Jesus H. Christ, sergeant!" Brigadier General Paul Craft banged his head on the ceiling of the Army Ford sedan. "What the hell are you trying to do--kill me?"

"Sorry, sir!" Master Sergeant Billy Wilkes apologized, swinging the wheel left to avoid a line of vendor carts parked along Aoyama Dori. "That bump came out of nowhere--damned Jap potholes!"

"I'm in a hurry, sergeant, but I would prefer to arrive alive. You have any idea where we are?"

"Pretty much, sir! That there's your Akasaka Palace--see the torii gates--"

Craft spied a floodlit wooden shrine rising like a ghost out of the late-night fog, shrouded in the deep shadows of juniper trees in the park.

"--and that pagoda thing up there on that hill is the Geihin Kan. State Guesthouse. Yes, sir, we're on Aoyama Dori all right. I'm sure of that."

"Great. Just keep your eyes on the road. I want to be in Shinjuku in half an hour."

"No sweat, sir. This late at night, we ought to be able to plow right through the traffic."

And a few other things, Craft thought. He hunkered down in the back seat and fidgeted with the combination lock of his attaché case. He was meeting Tetsuko tonight, meeting the Japanese industrialist on his own turf. Up in Shinjuku, Tetsuko had a small satellite office, below a candy factory, a personal hideaway unknown to his staff or the directors at Omisumi. Here, Tetsuko had all the records, the history of every crooked deal and payoff he'd ever made, facts, figures, dates, and times of every American Army officer he had ever bribed and what had come of it. Tetsuko was nothing if not meticulous. Craft forced his fingers to unclench the attaché case and relax.

Tetsuko had a little explaining to do tonight, Craft told himself. He needed answers and hard facts from Tetsuko, not just promises and sob stories, and most of all, he needed definite dates. Gallant Flag was in a critical phase now and things were going to start happening automatically and fast, if Tetsuko had done his job.

If he hadn't, Craft shook his head, even the Emperor Hirohito himself wouldn't be able to save him.

Sergeant Wilkes swerved again to avoid some kind of police barricade--more trouble at the Minami Club, Craft realized. The lounge was a raucous neon-lit dance and beer hall too often frequented by rowdy sailors up from Yokahama on liberty. Mix in a few platoons of bored GI's and the ensuing combustion often spilled out into the Aoyama Dori. MP's and Tokyo police had finally set up a precinct station on the corner to deal with the scores of drunk and disorderly cases every night. Friday night was the worst.

Wilkes turned into Shibuya ward and headed west onto Inokashira Dori. Traffic lightened up; they were heading into a commercial-industrial section of western Tokyo. The Army sedan clunked over the bridge at Miyashita Park, a sunken plaza of landscaped gardens, bonsai and graveled walks, negotiated the Shibuya split and sped past the still-lit columns of the neo-classical Seibu Department store.

"Slow down, sergeant. Keep your eyes open. This candy factory is supposed to be around here someplace."

Ten minutes later, they had located the glass-fronted, red-brick building. Red and white neon tubes spelled out I-S-A-T-O-C-A-N-D-Y in English and kanji script.

"Pull up there." Craft got out by the curb and sent Wilkes on his way. "Tetsuko can drop me off after we're done."

Wilkes saluted. "Sure thing, General." The Ford sped off and Craft noticed two dark-suited men had appeared on the sidewalk, leading up to the factory.

"Konichiwa," said the nearer man. He wore a black coat and tie under a black rain slicker. Rain puddled in the street; the Japanese capital had withstood an early evening deluge a few hours before. "You are General Paul Craft, of the United States Army?"

"I am."

"Pleased to come with me, please. Tetsuko-san is waiting inside." He beckoned Craft up the brick steps and into a cool, dimly lit tile foyer. They turned a corner and stood before an ornate, paneled elevator door. The door clattered open and the three of them stepped in. They went down--by Craft's count, at least three levels--and jerked to a stop. The door opened and Masuhiro Tetsuko greeted them.

"Tetsuko-san, can we just cut all the secrecy crap and get down to matters." Craft had no time or patience for games tonight. To hell with face and honor and Jap customs.

Tetsuko already had tea ready for Craft. He offered a cup. "General Craft-san, you are well, no? I am very glad you have come tonight. This is Osawa-san--" he swept his hand toward the man who had escorted Craft inside--a short man, with a shock of wet unkempt hair--"my chief of staff at Omisumi."

Hiro Osawa bowed deeply. Craft was forced to bow in return, then they shook hands. Japanese customs were not going to be denied.

"You were able to find my little office here, I trust, without much difficulty?"

Craft sipped at the scalding hot tea. "I managed. Nice cozy digs you have here. Your board of directors know about this place?"

Tetsuko's face beamed with conspiratorial amusement. "Alas, no. There are some arrangements, you see, that are best not discussed with the directors. Omisumi is a public enterprise and we have public duties and responsibilities."

"Speaking of responsibilities--you went to Formosa. What happened? You've haven't been keeping me informed."

"Oh, not to worry, Craft-san." Tetsuko led the General into a small U of chairs and sofas. Carefully sculpted bonsai pots decorated a simple wooden corner table. Several copies of Stars and Stripes were folded neatly next to the miniature plants, an odd mixture of traditional Japanese and American tastes, much like Tetsuko himself. "All is well and calm in Formosa."

"Damn it, I don't need a weather report. I want to know about the submarine...how's the refit coming? Will she be ready to sail on time? You know the schedule...you know what has to be done. Don't hold back on me now."

Tetsuko insisted Craft be seated. "Much more civilized, this way." He let Osawa serve more tea, then savored the aroma of the hot liquid, infuriating in his deliberateness.

"Very well, Craft-san. I know these tasks you've given me. I am not unenlightened."

"And--?"

"As I said, not to worry. Masuhiro Tetsuko is a true friend of America. I went to Taipei, as you know. I inspected the submarine. She is coming along nicely, and she'll be ready to sail in less than a week. The captain has assured me of this." Tetsuko made a face. "It was an expensive trip I made but--" he shrugged. "We will discuss business once you, my customer, are satisfied."

"What about Orient Star? She's your boat. She needed special rigging, special containment for the bombs. Is that done yet? You haven't been telling me anything lately."

Tetsuko waved a hand in the air. "Please, understand, Craft-san. You asked me to be discreet, to be cautious, and to maintain--what was your term?--'operational security.' I have tried to do these things. To your question about my ship, I say this: Orient Star is ready. She has all the gear she will need."

"I'd like to see her, if you don't mind. We're not handling bags of rice here."

"That is not possible, my dear Craft-san. Alas, she is on a freight run at this moment, on her way to Manila. She returns to Kobe next Thursday."

"Great," Craft fumed. He wanted to punch the Japanese industrialist in the face, but the Army took a dim view of harassing the natives. Why the hell had he ever thought to use Tetsuko for anything--well, the answer to that was pretty clear. For all of his faults--and he had plenty--Tetsuko had one redeeming quality. He got things done. Not quite as directly as an American might but then, that was the beauty of using him--it gave Gallant Flag some deniability, some cover, if the whole thing blew up in their faces. Which it still could. The real question was: who was using whom? If the worst came and the Army went hunting for scapegoats, Masuhiro Tetsuko would make the perfect sacrificial lamb and who in his right mind would try to save him? Crimes against the Occupation had no defense.

"The warehouse, Tetsuko-san. What about the warehouse? I need a safe place to stash the bombs for a day or two before they're shipped to Mishida."

"The warehouse is ready. All special arrangements you asked for are complete, including the lead sheet lining of the room, the special locks, the lighting, all of it. This you can see for yourself."

"I'm sure I don't have time. And Mishida? LaSalle told me the contractor was behind on the runway refinishing. I need a runway, Tetsuko-san, or my planes can't take off. Loading pits, hangar, five-ton crane, fueling stand and equipment, the works. We're running out of time. The planes will be there in four days."

Tetsuko held up a hand. "Not to worry, not to worry. All preparations are going fine. Have you ever had reason to doubt Tetsuko, Craft-san? Have I not been a faithful friend of America? I admire America very much."

"Yeah, for a price. As for going to the States, get that out of your mind right now. If Gallant Flag succeeds, you'll get the deal we agreed to. But my advice is to lay low. All hell's going to break loose once those bombs detonate over China."

Tetsuko studied the American general with sympathy. "You are concerned, this I can see on your face. But the great Makassar has already approved your plan, has he not? Surely, when a great general, a great conqueror, points the way to victory, the troops march with him."

Craft shook his head, tried some more tea. It was seasoned with some kind of mint. "Maybe in Japan. Maybe with your shoguns. In America, sometimes the troops get a little restless. Maybe a little jealous of the great general. They want him to succeed and they want part of the glory too. But you don't succeed in war without taking a few risks. That's what the troops don't like. That's what's wrong in Korea. The troops want the great victory without the great risks. Hell, Tetsuko-san, absolutely no one favored the amphibious landing at Inchon. Too risky. The tides were wrong. The beaches were nothing but concrete seawalls...the Marines will be chopped to pieces. Can't get air cover. Can't get shore bombardment. Can't get this or that. MacArthur wouldn't back down and finally, he got his way. And he was right. It turned this damned war right around...for awhile."

"Yes," Tetsuko mused, "until the Chinese entered the war."

"Now it's time for more risks. Another approach. The Reds have battered Tenth Corps and Eighth Army to hell and back. Sure it's risky. Mao and Stalin sure ain't going to like it when atom bombs start popping off over Manchuria and Peking's buried under radioactive rubble. But hell, we have the bombs. And if we don't do something big, something quick, the Reds are going to kick our ass right out of Korea for good. If they do that, Tetsuko-san, how long do you think it'll be before Mao sets his sights on Tokyo and the Japanese islands? Care to start learning a little Mandarin Chinese?"

This brought distress to Tetsuko's face. "As I said, I am a steadfast friend of America. I help America win the war."

"I don't mind telling you, pal, I have some concerns about security with this operation. MacArthur wants Gallant Flag ready to go in two weeks...things are getting dicey up North and there's been talk of evacuating Korea altogether. Mid-January at the latest--the whole deal has to be ready to go...bombs, planes, ship and submarine, Mishida, the warehouse in Kobe. That's a lot, Tetsuko-san. Give it to me straight: you can do this, right? I have to know the truth."

Tetsuko nodded. He went around the shoji screen separating his small office to his writing table and retrieved a small folder of papers. "Here I keep detailed records, Craft-san. This--" he showed Craft a page torn from a calendar--"is the timetable you gave me a month ago. Items completed have been circled. As you can see, there are many circles."

Craft studied the calendar page. "The bombs for Greenhouse leave Los Alamos sometime on or about next Tuesday. That's January 2. They'll be on a train and they'll be shipped to Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. Chesapeake departs on Thursday, the fourth. We'll have a couple of people aboard her. But that means the Sunfish has to sail soon enough to intercept Chesapeake on her return trip to the States. Give Chesapeake five days to make Eniwetok on the outbound leg. A day or so to offload her bombs. My contacts in Los Alamos say the first Greenhouse shot's scheduled for January 13. Sometime around that first shot, Chesapeake will be making her return trip with several bombs, the new devices. About two days' steaming east of the Marshalls, that's when Sunfish should intercept. Your captain knows that?"

"I have given him all the details and schedules you gave me, Craft-san."

"That puts Chesapeake smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, several thousand miles from the task force at Eniwetok and several thousand miles from Hawaii. A long way for any help to come."

"It is necessary," Tetsuko asked, "to sink this American ship? Many lives will be lost."

Craft had wrestled with that himself. There was no way around it. "We have to divert the Mark VI's Ranier's given us, in such a way as to keep suspicions away from the Far East. Away from Japan and SCAP and Korea. I don't like it either but we're in a war. I'm just trying not to think about all the thousand things that could go wrong with this little scheme."

Tetsuko was sympathetic. "I believe Makassar is a great man. He wants to do what is right."

"Yeah," Craft admitted sourly. "True genius is seldom appreciated in its own time. You'd think they would have learned from Inchon. Tetsuko, this is a critical time for us. If this whole plan is to work, getting those bombs off the Chesapeake and into Kobe has to come off without a hitch. Otherwise, this is all just a paper exercise."

The Japanese industrialist was quick to reassure the general. "Captain Li knows what to do. And I am paying the Sunfish crew more than enough to ensure their silence. It was difficult, at first," Tetsuko admitted, "finding enough men with experience to outfit the crew properly. But it has been done. Li assures me Sunfish is ready to sail. They know their mission."

"I'm sure Li's just itching to get an American Navy ship in his periscope sights again," Craft said. "In five years, he's gone from a mortal enemy and war criminal to collaborator in Gallant Flag. I'd like to meet him someday."

"You know men from this American ship, this Chesapeake?"

"I know the skipper. John Ward." Craft had tried to put that thought in a special locked compartment in the back of his mind, the kind of place that said DO NOT OPEN. But it didn't work. It never had. "He's collaborating with us. He knows about Gallant Flag, and he's all for it. He just doesn't know the full story."

Tetsuko was respectfully silent for awhile. "Like our kamikaze...sacrificed for the honor of their country."

"Maybe so.

Tetsuko's face brightened. "Perhaps Craft-san would like a little more serious diversion tonight. I invite you to Fumihara."

"What the hell's Fumihara?"

Tetsuko's smile broadened into a grin. "Ah, fabulous Fumihara. This is a club in Chiyoda ward. Not too far from the Ginza. But a quieter street, an alley off Minami Dori." Tetsuko sighed. "Best sushi in Tokyo. Sake is always strong, quite a bite." He winked. "And there is company. How would you say this: a sedative for troubled souls?"

Craft had to laugh. "Where did you hear that phrase?"

Tetsuko shrugged. "An Army officer. I think he was drunk."

"I'm sure if it. Tetsuko-san, don't you ever stop schmoozing? If you're talking about the place I think you are, it's strictly off-limits to American officers, isn't it? By order of His Majesty, General Whitney."

Tetsuko spread his hands wide in an embrace. "The food and drink are exceptional. And the companionship is, shall we say, warm and friendly. Perhaps, your General Whitney should try it."

"That would be a sight," Craft admitted. "I don't know, Tetsuko. I'm tired. There's a million things I need to be doing."

"My dear Craft-san, my hospitality is genuine. Are you not entering a time when clarity of mind and spirit are essential? When you must make important decisions?"

"You know the answer to that."

"Then, it is settled. In bushido, brave warriors always enjoy themselves the night before a great battle. They say it cleanses the spirit, tempers them for the battles to come. I have a limousine already waiting. Come with me. Be my guest."

It was tempting. And Tetsuko was right. There would be precious little time in the next few weeks to live a little. Hell, truth be told, in two weeks time, Brigadier General Paul Craft knew he'd either be the hero who turned Korea around or a hunted traitor whose name would be reviled for the ages. Either way, Craft knew he had reached a point of no return. Hero or traitor--and the line between them was pretty damn thin--Paul Craft figured at least he'd be remembered for trying to do something to help. He doubted his own conscience would give him any peace if he didn't.

If sidestepping the chain of command and bringing the ultimate weapon into Korea to bring the war to a quicker close was a crime, then Craft was comfortable with his guilt. Watching brave men die in Korea for nothing was worse.

"Okay, Tetsuko-san, you got yourself a deal. But only for awhile. I've got Saturday duty in my section tomorrow, so you'll have to get me back to the hotel before I'm completely wasted."

Tetsuko snapped a finger and Hiro Osawa appeared as if by magic. The industrialist told him to bring the limousine around out front. "Craft-san and I will be going to Fumihara tonight."

"Hai!" Osawa bowed deeply. He rushed off, knowing he would have to round up Tetsuko-san's driver from the pachinko game he was playing. Tetsuko's personal staff went everywhere he did, an itinerant platoon of drivers, bodyguards, secretaries, valets and assistants. Osawa was nominally chief of the staff. He had stationed them in a small warehouse room at the back of Isato Candy.

The limousine was an old maroon Hudson that belched smoke and misfired a lot, but Craft didn't care. Osawa held the door open and the general climbed in with Tetsuko. The car pulled out into light traffic, its rear taillights soon lost in the settling fog. Osawa waited until the taillights had vanished, then headed back inside.

He had an important telephone call to make, one he had been chewing over for several days. Tonight, he had decided to do it.

From the shelves behind Tetsuko's writing table, Osawa located a telephone. He cranked the handle for a ring tone, and dialed the number he had written down on a scrap of paper. For three days now, this single scrap of paper had been his most precious possession. He knew it might well save his life.

After several rings, a voice answered. An American voice.

"Economic affairs desk."

Osawa had already worked out a password through the Embassy staffer he had met at the bar Tuesday night.

"Three strikes..." Osawa said carefully, enunciating each word.

A slight pause, then a shuffling sound. The voice, when it returned, was quieter, a bit muffled. "--and you're out."

"Mr. Hightower?"

"Yes. It's me. I assume this is important, to be calling so late."

"It is very important, Mr. Hightower. I wish to meet again. Can we set a time? Soon?"

"Hightower" clucked his lips over the phone. "Tomorrow okay? Same place?"

"That will be fine."

"You have something for me now? Something concrete, that I can act on?"

"I believe I do, sir."

"Very well. Lucky Star Noodle Shop, it is. Back booth, like before. Say about 11 am?"

"I will be there, Mr. Hightower. I am looking forward to meeting you finally. This is very important."

"I understand. Tomorrow then."

The line went dead. Hiro Osawa put the receiver back in its cradle and carefully placed the phone back where he had found it. There must be no deviation. Tetsuko-san would spot any deviation. He situated the phone just so, nudging it a fraction of an inch, until he was at last satisfied.

Restless, shaking slightly with nerves, Osawa mixed himself some sake from Tetsuko's stash and drank it straight down. The fiery liquid burned, but it did the trick.

He knew that if Tetsuko ever found out he was ratting on the cozy relationship the industrialist had with certain high-ranking U.S. Army officers, he would be murdered and disposed of quite quickly. It had almost happened in Taipei. Osawa shuddered at the memory of the careening truck at the shipyard. That was no accident, despite the police reports.

Nonetheless, Hiro Osawa was quite certain of one thing: Masuhiro Tetsuko had to be stopped, stopped for the good of Japan and America. He knew now, with all the evidence he had been collecting, that Tetsuko and Paul Craft and possibly others on MacArthur's staff were deeply implicated in an unauthorized operation to use atomic bombs in Korea. Tetsuko had said as much, even bragged about it, telling Osawa how he would work hard to do all the things Craft wanted him to do. Then, when the operation was over, the time to collect payment would come. And Omisumi Corporation would be sitting pretty, astride the Japanese economy and her burgeoning electronics industry like an angry behemoth.

The prospects for Japan, and possibly America too, if any of that happened, were too terrible to contemplate.

Saturday, 12-30-50

Tokyo

11:00 a.m.

Bret Billings slurped up more soba noodles and checked the door of the Lucky Star Noodle Shop once again. Osawa was late and that wasn't a good sign. The CIA station chief decided he'd wait another half an hour. If Osawa didn't show by then, Billings would head back to the Embassy, and do a little digging on this Masuhiro Tetsuko.

Lucky Star was a tiny space tucked in between Opuma Bank and a bowling alley, two blocks east of the Chui Dori in a busy neighborhood of Chiyoda ward. You could see the eastern moats of the Imperial Palace through the glass front window. Americans inhabited many of the hotels in the area, so Lucky Star saw its share of uniformed Army officers and Occupation bureaucrats. Not much more than a long counter, some tile flooring and a few booths, Lucky Star was a popular hangout for GHQ staff. On any given day, flag officers milled thick as stew around the counter, slurping noodles and Kirin beer.

It was as good a place as any for 'Hightower' to ply his trade.

Hiro Osawa finally showed and jostled his way through the noontime crowd toward the last booth, the agreed-upon rendezvous point. Billings had never seen the man but his mental picture of Osawa wasn't too far off: thin, nervous, frowning, slick black hair with a lock low over his forehead. Osawa hesitated reaching Billing's booth, until the men made eye contact.

Billings looked up, swallowed the last noodle, and wiped his lips. "Phillies looked mighty strong last year."

Osawa's eyes narrowed, as he replied, "I'm a Dodgers fan myself."

Billings motioned him to sit down. Osawa did so; his suit was a rumpled black cotton affair, mostly arms and legs. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth, unlit.

"Mr. Hightower?"

Billings leveled an even gaze at Osawa. "Were you followed?"

Osawa's eyes darted around the lunch counter crowd. "I don't think so. Tetsuko-san has a security force he uses. Masai Torijima heads the unit. Mostly Yakuza, underground types."

"I've heard of them." Billings finished off his beer. "They must have a reason, if they're following you."

Osawa nodded, quick and furtive. "You know of Masuhiro Tetsuko?"

Billings said, "I've heard of the man. Big industrial tycoon, isn't he? Runs a holding company."

"Omisumi is the name. It's not a company. More like a family."

"You work for Tetsuko-san, I gather."

Another quick nod. "Hai. My title is special assistant for corporate affairs. Actually, I handle arrangements for his physical movements...transportation details, that sort of thing. And other projects he gives me."

"What's he like?"

"Tetsuko-san?" That required some thought. "He likes sake before a big meeting. He prefers to drive fast. The car must be well-heated too. Before he meets gaijin, like Americans, he listens to Glen Miller songs. And he admires MacArthur. Lately, he's been trying to smoke a pipe, and he practices strutting around like MacArthur."

Billings smirked at the mental image Osawa painted. "Tetsuko's a powerful man. You mentioned something when you called me. Some suspicions--"

Osawa's fingers shook as he tried to light up the cigarette he had in his mouth. He snapped the lighter shut, fumbling it onto the table, then withdrew a small black notebook from his jacket. Carefully, he placed it on the table, sliding it with the tips of his fingers toward Billings, as if it were a thing contaminated.

"Tetsuko-san's notebook, Mr. Hightower." Osawa explained what he had found, what he had learned, what he had done for Gallant Flag, his suspicions, the evidence, even the near-miss with the runaway truck at the Shaogun Shipyard in Taipei. Through it all, Billings listened carefully, not yet examining the notebook, preferring to study Osawa himself.

"I was going to try to contact your American security people at the Dai Ichi," Osawa admitted. "The Army people. But I thought better of it."

"Why?"

Osawa shrugged. "I guess I didn't know who was involved in this operation. How far up it went."

Billings flipped through the notebook. "Who did you intend to contact? I assume it's SCAP you're talking about."

"There's a deputy chief, Colonel Kades, in the Government section, under General Wright. I did try to call him. Then I drafted a letter--but I destroyed it. I wasn't sure. After that--"Osawa looked up from fiddling with his lighter--"I called the Embassy."

Billings remembered getting the strange note a few days before. His first inkling was that the note was some kind of hoax--maybe a bored GI, maybe something more; he hadn't given it a lot of thought until the telephone call. After talking briefly with Osawa, Billings had done a little a little homework and found one Hiro Osawa listed as an administrative assistant at Omisumi Corporation. That's when he began to take an interest.

"What should I do now, Mr. Hightower?"

Billings was still trying to absorb it all. Of course, it was highly possible the whole thing was still a hoax. Red pranksters were making life miserable for SCAP and the Tokyo Police, announcing illegal strikes, organizing marches in the Ginza, preaching to geishas on the evils of class warfare. Everyday, the Japanese capital seemed a little more chaotic, an antheap stirred to a seething frenzy by the war in Korea. Even if Osawa's story was some kind of fairy tale concocted by a Communist party organizer, it had the power to really stir up an already boiling pot.

But somehow, Billings didn't think Osawa was joking, or that he was some kind of closet fellow-traveler for that matter. It was possible that Osawa's attempted call to Colonel Kades had alerted someone--the wrong someone. There was no way of telling now. Time would tell.

Billings was stunned at the audacity of the operation, as it unfolded in Tetsuko's notebook and from Osawa himself. That members of the SCAP staff, perhaps even including MacArthur himself, would even contemplate something so bold, so risky--

"This thing could start World War III, if it succeeds." Billings wondered if the regular Army knew anything about it.

Osawa said he thought not.

They spent the next half hour detailing what Osawa knew of Tetsuko's role in Gallant Flag. Billings studied the notebook, which seemed to corroborate most of what Osawa said. "I'm going to need more evidence," he told Osawa. "As much as you can get me: receipts, invoices, telephone logs, travel records, construction budgets, details, details. I need details--if I'm going to have to take on the U.S. Army."

Osawa promised to get what he could. "Mr. Hightower, I must be extremely careful. Already, I'm under suspicion. Torijima has Omisumi security watching me night and day. They could be watching me now."

"There are ways to deal with that," Billings assured him. "You and I just need to stay in contact. Probably every other day, for now. The only question is: what's our next course of action?"

"Will you arrest Tetsuko-san?"

"Looks like there's enough evidence now. He's only broken about a thousand Occupation laws. But Tetsuko, big as he is, is only part of the story here. Someone, or someones, in MacArthur's staff has to be running this operation. That's who I need to be after. Trouble is: running surveillance ops against U.S. Army officers in Japan is risky business. The Army has its own intelligence operations here and my agency is a comparative newcomer. It's a cinch the Army won't take kindly to CIA running an op in their backyard. I better send this one back to Washington for a decision."

"Tetsuko-san is a powerful man, Mr. Hightower. He has connections."

"I'm well aware of that. I don't know how high his connections go. Look--" Billings laid out a plan. "Let's do this: I need you to keep doing just what you're doing. You're a great source right where you are. I want to meet regularly...say every other day. And I want you to keep a daily log for me--Tetsuko's movements and actions...who he sees, who he calls, where he goes. Plus I want you to make copies of any paperwork that could be used as evidence. We need evidence." Billings repeated, "hard evidence and fast."

Only hard evidence would convince Washington that this was a real plot, involving America's atomic secrets and not some feverish concoction from a lonely field agent.

"Maybe, if we put a little pressure on Mr. Tetsuko, we can shut down Gallant Flag from this end." Billings was thinking ahead. He wanted Japan Station to look good. But the DDO in Washington needed facts. Both would enhance the reputation of the Agency and help Billings' career in the process.

"On the other hand," he confided to Osawa, "if the SCAP staff wants to play hard ball, things could get nasty."

"When should we meet again?" Osawa asked.

Billings did some figuring. "Tuesday. Right here. Say about five in the afternoon. There'll be a crowd in here. That'll be good for cover. Same booth. Any details you can find, any evidence you can get. Especially Tetsuko-san's contacts. I'll give you some kind of password to let you know the meeting's on or off. If we're on, you be here with whatever you can bring. I'm going to talk with some contacts I have at the Dai Ichi, see what I can turn up."

Billings paid the bill, then waited ten minutes after Osawa had left, before he too departed.

He had a lot of work to do and not much time.
CHAPTER 13

Saturday, December 30, 1950

Tokyo docks

6:30 a.m.

Jiang Chen Li had been smothered inside a musty bag of soybeans ever since the Nam Po had left Taipei harbor two days before. When he was finally sure, from the distant rumble of the tug diesels and the bumping and scraping of the ship's hull against wharf bumpers, that the freighter had come to a final halt, he counted off two more maddeningly long hours to be sure the cargo hold was safe. He listened carefully but no doors squeaked open, no cranes or lifts started up. The hold was silent, save for the distant sloshing of drain water making its way down into Nam Po's bilge tanks.

Now was the time. With a field knife, he cautiously cut his way out of the bag and climbed out. The air in the hold was stale, machine oil and soybean dust, mostly but it was deliciously fresh compared to life in a burlap sack.

He rummaged around the hold, tripping over stanchions and pipe runs in the near dark, until he located a seam of daylight and found a water-tight hatch. It was dogged shut but not secured and he twisted the crank, opening it cautiously.

The hatch gave onto a metal grating, that headed down to a catwalk below the ship's deck line, roughly amidships. Through the mesh of the grating, Jiang spied a crewman's gangway crossing over the limpid, oily waters of Tokyo harbor to the wharf. A few minutes' study of the area produced only a few isolated dock hands, mustering wooden pallets alongside the gangway. The dock crew was making ready to unload and stack something.

Jiang Chen Li found a Nam Po crewman directly below the grating, puffing on a cigarette. The Chinese agent scuttled crablike across the grating and, when he judged the moment right, dropped onto the crewman in a quick ten-foot plunge. Stunned, the crewman crumpled to the dock. Jiang made quick work of the man with a sudden torque of his head, snapping his neck. The crewman went still and limp, gurgling to his death.

The dungarees were too tight and the shirt stained with oil, but the shoes fit. Jiang made the quick change, attached a nearby tool belt to his waist and headed down the gangway like he'd been aboard for weeks.

The wharf at Yamashita docks was lined with dingy buildings, mostly shacks and wooden sheds, but Jiang had other destinations in mind. He'd come to Japan to learn as much as he could about this thing called Gallant Flag.

Beyond intelligence, Marshal Peng had given him a secondary mission as well: sabotage any atomic bombs the Americans brought into Japan for use in Korea or China. Peng had been confident that Jiang could accomplish the assignment.

Jiang, considering what he was up against, wasn't so sure. Still, the Revolution demanded sacrifice of everyone. Jiang figured his own might be a bit more spectacular than others.

The mission called for Jiang to make his way inland as soon as he got out of the docks area. The Japanese Communist Party, the Kyosanshugi no, ran a network of safe houses throughout Tokyo. One cell, known as the Red Eye, was run by one Yoshi Konizawa, a reporter/editor for Asahi Shimbun, in Chiyoda ward, a few miles from the Imperial Palace.

Jiang Chen Li now had only to figure out some way of getting to Red Eye's safe house.

The Red Chinese officer found a train station several blocks west of the wharf. He consulted a tiny field map and chose a train bound for Maranouchi--Central Station. The trip took about thirty minutes.

Peng's staff G-2 had secured directions to Red Eye's safe house from Maranouchi. Jiang re-read the note as he exited the train station onto the Hibiya Dori. Heavy rush-hour crowds thronged the sidewalks, spilling out onto the streets. Jiang headed south. Minutes later, in sight of the old Imperial Hotel, he stopped for a fish sandwich and tea.

A few turns and one backtrack east soon led Jiang up to the lacquered blue door and canopy of the Sensai Apartments. He knocked, exchanged greetings with the tomarikyaku, an elderly woman of wrinkled dignity and suspicious eyes. The day manager showed him in and up to a third floor landing. She pointed out Unit Number Eleven, at the very end of the hall. Jiang thanked her and went to the door.

Konizawa himself answered, flinging open the door when all passwords were done.

"Konnichiwa, comrade...come in, come in!"

Jiang Chen Li came into a tiny, cluttered, sweltering room, strewn with papers and a mimeograph machine. Ink and newsprint smells were thick in the air, mixed with cigarette smoke.

"--we're frantic here, this morning," Konizawa explained. Two other men--both young and thin--and a middle-aged woman were hurriedly pulling fresh bills and pamphlet pages from the machine, collating sheets on the floor. "There's a rally at Kasumigaseki this afternoon--we're demonstrating against the American imperialists, right in front of Parliament." He snatched up a few sheets to proof the text. "These get distributed before the rally...we need five thousand, at least. And we could use some help--"

Jiang figured Peng's orders didn't cover political rallies and demonstrations.

"Long live the Revolution, comrade. I've got my orders. And you've got yours--"

Konizawa took off his glasses to clean a spot on the lenses. His face was florid, hair disheveled, shirt sleeves and fingers stained with ink. "That's what I don't understand, comrade Major Jiang. District said a Chinese officer, an Army officer, would come to Red Eye. I was to give him food and shelter,. And see he gets to a warehouse--" Konizawa picked up a volume of literature from a nearby shelf and pulled out a piece of paper "--a machine shop, actually. Placed called Akagi Tool Company. Itabashi-ku." Konizawa squinted at the paper. "Right behind Nihon Hospital, I believe it is. You're meeting--who is it?" He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "A Soviet agent, it appears. Birchtree. Interesting code name."

Jiang was growing impatient with this intellectual little snot. "By 2200 hours tonight, comrade. This meeting is vital to the war against the capitalist dogs."

"Of course," Konizawa agreed. "Of course. We're both soldiers for the Revolution."

You're no soldier, Jiang thought. "Look, I'm tired and hungry. I've not eaten for three days. Could you--?"

Konizawa jumped as if shot. "Of course, comrade. How rude of me. Come...." He led Jiang to a tiny box in one corner. Bread loaves and wine bottles were crammed into the box, itself half-covered with fading leaflets. Konizawa brushed the papers off and offered a loaf and a bottle.

Jiang accepted, quickly devouring the bread, topping off every few bites with a swig of the plum wine. He was hungrier than he realized.

The other members of Red Eye went about their business of collating pamphlets, paying him no attention. Konizawa helped but his curiosity had been piqued.

"How did you get to Japan, comrade?"

Jiang was still stuffing his mouth with stale, crusty bread. "A Chinese freighter. That's all you need to know."

Konizawa huffed, "Just asking, friend. You don't have to be snippy with me. We're fighting the same war."

"Then act like a soldier--" Jiang told him. "And follow orders. You have a bed...someplace I can sleep?"

Konizawa seemed hurt. "There's a mat in the other corner...we use it for quick naps...help yourself. Me, I've got a rally to run." He started to go back to the collating but turned back, with a snarl. "This is the real front lines, comrade. Right at the enemy's front door. Stay around and you'll see. We're not just sipping tea and reading Marx here. Red Eye's done a lot of damage to the Americans politically this year. We're winning the people over, bit by bit."

Jiang was already curling up on the dusty mat, tugging his dockworker's shirt over his head.

Akagi Tool Company was little more than a dark, dingy shack tucked behind a garage. The street was an alley, littered with dead rats, a few bottles and unremoved piles of brick and rubble. Itabashi ku was a part of northwest Tokyo still showing the scars of war. Piles of debris lined both sides of the Rengomatsu dori. The alley branched off into a dark abyss of broken glass and puddles of oily water.

Konizawa dropped Jiang off at the entrance to the alley.

"I'll stay here, to be sure," Konizawa offered. "This part of the city isn't safe these days. Gangs and shootings every night."

Jiang regarded the terrain as he would any patch of enemy territory. Fifteen years of experience against the Japanese invaders and the Kuomintang counted for something. You followed your training and instincts when running an op behind enemy lines. Concealment, movement under cover, planning your escape and evasion routes carefully. It was all simple fieldcraft for experienced recon units. Something this nitwit wouldn't know anything about.

"Do me a favor, comrade," Jiang told him. "You are exposed here. You could very well be under surveillance right now. Do us both a favor and go back to Red Eye and your rally. Print up your pamphlets and run your demonstrations and let me do my job. You don't belong here. I do."

Konizawa's skull had to be thicker than a brick. He glared back at Jiang. "Fine with me. Suit yourself. But remember: we're fighting the same war, comrade. My work is just as vital as yours. Come the Revolution, we'll see who's really needed the most."

Jiang had already slipped into the shadows of the alley. Konizawa's car sped off and the street was quiet once more, save for the chittering of rats, the dripping of rainwater.

He found a dilapidated front door to the tool shed easily enough. It sagged on one hinge. Just as he started to push the door open, a voice, thickly accented, issued from the darkness, somewhere behind him. Jiang froze.

"In June, the birch trees are in full bloom...."

Jiang thought for a moment. What the hell was the response? He carefully repeated each word of the challenge under his breath...yes, it was accurate. Then he remembered his response.

"But in November, comrade, the leaves are gone." Jiang had memorized the response. He prayed silently it was the right one.

He felt a shadowy form emerge from the recesses of a crumbling brick wall. A face materialized in the wan yellow light of reflected streetlamps. It was round, seemingly featureless, like a cartoon caricature of a face, really: two dots for eyes, a triangle of a nose, a slash of a mouth. Only a round black sock cap lent texture in the dim light. The mouth bent upward at the corners--a hint of a smile.

"I am Birchtree, comrade."

The men shook hands, then hugged, Russian-style. "Major Jiang Chen Li, 40th Field Army of the People's Liberation Army."

Birchtree acknowledged. "Peng's man, so I hear. A serious tactical mistake, comrade, especially for someone supposedly so experienced."

"How do you mean?"

"I could have easily dispatched you...with this--" he flashed the blade of a combat knife in front of Jiang's eyes. "--right in front of the door."

"I should have reconnoitered the area first." Jiang had to admit the Soviet agent was right. An elementary rule of field training he had overlooked--before any rendezvous, before any engagement, establish cover and ground first. Scout the terrain well. Plan your escape and evasion routes with care. Know the land. Sun Tzu himself had preached the very same two thousand years ago.

"Inside." Birchtree held open the splintered door to the shed and the two men went inside.

The Russian lit a small lantern, lay it on the sawdust floor and half draped a cloth netting over the globe, filtering out most of the light. Stools were located and set up. Birchtree studied Jiang with great interest.

"Peng said you're a spy. From Peking."

Jiang shook his head. "You've met the Marshal?"

"In a manner of speaking." Birchtree shrugged. "A briefing in Andong. Military equipment exchange. You know how those are."

"It's not true," Jiang insisted. "I'm attached to the General Staff. Peng thought I was a spy. Now he thinks otherwise. I reported directly to General Xie Fang, chief of staff. I had a mission to go to Korea, to the front lines, and send back intelligence on the real situation there. Xie didn't trust Peng to tell the truth."

"Why? Because he wanted more weapons? Peng just wanted to kick the Americans' ass. Now, you work for him, eh?" Birchtree laughed, a hoarse, cigarette-blasted coughing laugh. "The wolf hires the jackal to keep him honest."

"My mission is--"

Birchtree held up a hand. There was a long faint scar across the palm. "I know all about your mission, comrade. Let's just say it's been changed."

Jiang wasn't sure how to react. "Don't talk riddles to me. What are you saying?"

Birchtree's smile faded quickly. "You know of something called Gallant Flag?"

Jiang nodded. "I did a little snooping in Formosa. Old American submarine called the Sunfish. It was being prepped for some kind of mission in the Pacific. Paid for by Masuhiro Tetsuko, the capitalist tycoon here in Japan. Captain's stateroom had paperwork on something called Gallant Flag. I gathered it's an operation for Korea."

"It's more than that, my friend," Birchtree tapped out a cigarette--Turkish, Jiang saw--and lit up. He offered one to Jiang, who declined. "It's an atomic strike. Against Peking and a handful of military targets in Manchuria and eastern China. And if it succeeds, we could well find ourselves in a global war with the Americans."

Jiang remembered what he had seen and heard at the Shaogun shipyard in Taipei. It suddenly began to make sense.

"I'm not sure exactly how the submarine fits into such an operation." Jiang was nervous, even shaking slightly. An atomic strike? Peng had admitted to suspicions about the operation. He figured MacArthur was capable of it, and desperate enough to try it. But wouldn't there have to be approvals? And if Peng's suspicions were well-founded, Jiang had mission orders to find the bombs and render them unusable.

Now, the Russian was offering more evidence.

"What have you got for me, comrade?"

Birchtree went through three Turkish cigarettes, relating the background. "Trust me, comrades Mao and Stalin know all about this. They're working from intelligence of the highest reliability--top notch sources in America. State Security has sources right here in Tokyo, right in the middle of MacArthur's staff. It's incredible. And throughout Japan. Washington and Los Alamos too. We know of something called Gallant Flag. We're pretty sure it's being run out of MacArthur's staff here. There's good evidence MacArthur's circumvented the normal chain of command somehow. The Americans are using a test series in the Pacific--it's called Greenhouse--to smuggle the bombs into Japan. China is the main target." Birchtree stamped out the butt of his third cigarette in the sawdust. "Maybe us too. Stalin's not sure. You haven't heard the best part."

"What's that?"

"I've got orders--direct from Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria himself--to make contact. With you personally. Here in Tokyo. To propose a joint effort. We cooperate, you and I. I tell you what I know, show you my sources. You do the same. We share results, join up as a team, to figure out what the hell MacArthur's up to and stop it."

Jiang's head was swimming, too much information, too much to process. Too much to decide. Peng had never said anything about this, collaborating with the Russians. His reflexes seemed dull--the cigarette smoke, maybe?

"I should contact General Peng. There's nothing in my orders about this--"

"There's no time, idiot," Birchtree stood up and started pacing. "Forget your political indoctrination. Blah, blah, Russians and Chinese...comradely brothers, solidarity, it's just useless crap. Hell, my friend, there's a war on. Use your head. Something big's about to blow. You've got part of the answer. I've got another part. It's a safe bet there are other parts out there we don't know about. We're on the front lines of the biggest operation since Lenin walked into St. Petersburg. Call it fate, God, destiny, or just bad luck, but you and I have a mission to do and we can't ignore it. And we can only do it together. General Peng can't do anything from where he sits. Neither can Stalin. Nor Beria, Zhukov, nobody can take our place here. We have all the approvals we need. The situation demands it. Our orders are clear. Stop MacArthur from widening the war into a worldwide catastrophe. If you're a real comrade, like I think you are, and you see the Revolution's in grave danger, there's only one thing you can do."

Jiang stared at the pacing Russian, kicking up little clouds of sawdust with his shoes.

"Accomplish the mission."

"Exactly." Birchtree returned to the pool of light by the lantern and squatted down. "Tell me right now, comrade, and tell it to me straight. Are we going to do our duty as communists, do what we know is right?"

Jiang was torn. Doing right wasn't enough; his own experience with Marshal Lin Piao a year and a half ago had taught him that much. No, you had to be right too.

In the final campaign against the Nationalists for control of Peking, Jiang tried not to remember what had happened in July 1949. It was a critical time for Mao and the People's Liberation Army. Lin Piao would command hundreds of thousands for the final assault on the capital. The Nationalist lines of defense were steadily collapsing. Fresh from the Campaign of a Thousand Knives, Jiang had been attached to a forward recon patrol sent out to grab some prisoners from the faltering enemy lines.

On this mission, Jiang actually had too many intel sources. In his eagerness to get facts about the enemy's disposition, he had fallen for a Nationalist deception campaign, picking up 'planted' prisoners who relayed information on non-existent Nationalist forces and imaginary strategic moves. Jiang had become a little too arrogant and careless. He dutifully reported the facts back to his commander Colonel Wu and on to Marshal Lin Piao, who redeployed their own forces based on the deception. As a result, the hated Nationalists won some important early battles in their defense of Peking, battles which temporarily delayed the final PLA assault and which led to hundreds of needless casualties.

Hauled before Lin Piao for an explanation, a much chastened Jiang Chen Li admitted his errors. He was busted back to Captain and given simple administrative duties to do for Colonel Wu. It was a humiliating time for a man once toasted as a "hero of the Battle of a Thousand Knives,' the liberation of Shanghai a year before.

And so it was, that in the fall of 1949, at the very moment of Mao's greatest triumph, when the People's Republic itself was grandly proclaimed on the steps of the great Tien-an-Men, now Captain Jiang Chen Li was in the doghouse.

Only the unexpected assault of North Korea's In Min Gun into South Korea last June had saved Jiang, necessitating a hasty rehabilitation back into the warm embrace of Lin Piao's General Staff.

Was Birchtree right? Was there really any way to know? Jiang wrestled with the Russian's offer, knowing full well that such a change in his mission orders needed Peng's approval. Yet, wasn't it so that Peng himself was no Lin Piao? He was no rigid, calcified by-the-book commander. Peng demanded initiative in all his officers.

"My original orders," he confided, "were to find out if the Americans were planning on opening up a second front through Formosa. To draw pressure off their forces in Korea."

"A good recon man can bend the mission when the situation demands it," Birchtree said. "You have to be flexible. Tactics change, conditions change."

"But the truth of command does not." Jiang detested the mock trials, the self-criticism, the humiliations and punitive chores. Sometimes the Revolution feasted on its best young minds. There had to be a better way.

"The American submarine at Shaogun puzzled me," he admitted. "And the orders...a rendezvous in the middle of the Pacific? For what purpose? How could this help MacArthur in Korea? It didn't make any sense."

"The bombs...that must be how they're getting them into the war theater. Japan, South Korea, somehow MacArthur's devised a way to slip atomic bombs into the area, without arousing suspicions."

"Not possible," Jiang said. "American atomic bombs are too big. The Mark VI alone is twenty feet long, eight feet wide. It weighs ten thousand pounds. It won't fit on a submarine. Not without a lot of modification and I didn't see any such thing. There must be another explanation."

"Then we'll just have to find out."

Jiang realized what he had done. He had already bypassed Peng and assigned himself new orders. Another enemy deception? The recon man lives and dies with truth, the truth of what he learns about the enemy. As did others. Best to be right; failure was a path he couldn't follow again...not after Peking and Lin Piao.

"I've wondered for days why an old derelict American submarine was being refurbished by a Japanese capitalist tycoon in a Formosan shipyard to rendezvous in the middle of the Pacific. Now, there appears to be a reason." Birchtree agreed. "In some way, shape or fashion, this movement of atomic weapons begins there, in the middle of the ocean." The Russian reached up with his hand and grabbed Jiang's hands with his. "Welcome, comrade. As a team, you and I will defeat MacArthur's little plan and win the war."

Indeed, Jiang thought. If MacArthur hasn't already tricked us all once again.

The first thing Jiang needed to do, he realized, was to establish Masuhiro Tetsuko's full role in the operation.

"What do you know about this Tetsuko?" he asked.

Birchtree shrugged. "I've read the dossier from First Chief Directorate. Everything Moscow knows doesn't fill three pages. Tetsuko's a deal maker. He loves to talk, loves to bargain, and deal. It's in his blood. The dossier says he used to make monthly trips to Macao, to the casinos. I don't know how true that is. Tetsuko's an octopus. He's got a hundred tentacles, and they're into everything. His favorite tool is the bribe. Get you to do something, accept something, that could be slightly embarrassing. When you bite, he's got you. Then, it's a simple fisherman's job: pay out line and bring you in, inch by inch. Pretty soon, you're trapped in his big net. There's no telling how many American Army officers he's nabbed that way. Hundreds, maybe."

Jiang considered all that. An octopus, a fisherman, a deal-maker. Tetsuko would be quite a fat and juicy target to scout. With the right incentive, perhaps the industrialist could be made to bleed a little knowledge.

The men discussed tactics. Jiang finally accepted one of Birchtree's foul-smelling Turkish smokes. He coughed and wheezed his way through it.

It was obvious that a little more in-depth information about Tetsuko was needed.

"Suppose we do a little snooping, comrade." Jiang found the prospect of a little more field recon appealing. "Tetsuko's home. Omisumi's offices. We need a target list. What don't we know and who or where can we find it."

"Sound tactical advice," Birchtree said. "I could suggest a place a bit more comfortable. It's about ten blocks east of here...Shinjuku ward. Great rice and noodles. Even the sushi's decent."

"Sake good?"

"Warm and smooth. The least bit tart."

Jiang smiled. He was made for recon. The mission fit better than a pair of well-worn boots.

"Then let's go comrade. The Revolution's waiting."

Saturday, 12-30-50

Los Alamos

7:45 a.m.

The Atomic Energy Security Service office occupied a tiny metal Quonset hut just inside the main gate on East Jemez Road. For Klaus Krieg, immigrant Austrian physicist, the questions and in-processing period at the security office had been interminable, nerve-wracking and tense enough but having Colonel David Franks nearby to vouch for his bonafides had helped immeasurably. Franks gave the interrogating officers mind-numbing details on how he had contacted Krieg at the spearhead of the U.S. 3rd Armored Division, how he had met up with Krieg at an outdoor café in the middle of bomb-blasted Linz, Austria--mere hours ahead of the advancing Red Army--and how he had spirited the physicist back behind Allied lines to safety under cover of a tarpaulin and a pile of infantry weapons heading to a depot for scrap. The security officers duly noted Krieg's heroic ordeal, and went on about their questioning. At the end of a solid hour, they signed off on Krieg's paperwork and issued him badges, date-stamped work permits for T-Division and a few chits for the cafeteria. He could draw bedding, toiletries and other necessary items from the post exchange later in the day.

Of course, not a single word of what Franks and Krieg had told the security officers was true. Krieg was Fyodor Maximovich Trofimenko. Franks was American to the core. He'd also been a paid NKVD informant for nine years.

There was an alert briskness to the cold late December mountain air, as Franks drove the old Ford sedan into the Technical Area. A giant water tower loomed over a tidy grid of wood frame bungalows, painted Army green, Quonset huts and barracks-style apartments. Franks passed through a wire mesh fence of double-stranded barbed wire under the bored gaze of carbine-wielding sentries in watchtowers. They zipped into a parking area coated with dust from a pair of olive-drab bulldozers snorting and nosing huge mounds of dirt around a few dozen yards away.

"A new wing for the lab," Franks explained. "T Division's just getting too big for its britches. This way, Doc." Franks indicated a small cottage tucked between several barracks. "Dr. Ranier's probably in his office at this hour."

They found the Czech physicist doodling equations on a chalkboard as he sorted through papers on a table and stuffed piles of them into an attaché case. A massive green trunk lay open on the hardwood floor; the physicist had been packing for his Greenhouse trip half the night. He looked up when Franks and Krieg appeared in the door, dark circles under his eyes.

"Well, what do you want? I'm not through packing yet...another hour's worth of damned files to go through."

Colonel Franks introduced Krieg to Ranier.

"The professor is from Austria."

Krieg shook hands. "Universitat Wien, mein Herr Doktor. Physical chemistry."

Ranier went back to his paper-sorting. "You do radiological assays? That's what we really need around here. When we ask for a chemist, the Army sends us physicists. When we ask for a physicist, the Army gives us geologists. I suppose if I asked for the Moon, the Army would move Heaven and Earth and I'd get the Sun."

Franks shrugged apologetically when Krieg seemed mystified. "Dr. Ranier has had some problems with Procurement, lately."

Ranier swung his head toward a table of instruments. Scales and microscopes dominated the pile. "You want to be useful...that table's full of instruments out of calibration. The whole lot of them needs doing and I don't have time."

Krieg had had little preparation for lab work. Brylin's training hadn't covered that in Mexico. "Perhaps if I took a look...." He sat at the bench and studied the calibration diagram for a moment. "It's been awhile, you understand--"

Franks decided it was time to bow out. "I'll leave you two geniuses to your playtoys." He offered a slight shrug to Krieg, who smiled back, as if to say I'll figure it out. Franks left the lab.

"We need those scales for weighing plutonium samples. Purity and composition start with precise measurements of the weight."

"I'll do my best, doctor." Krieg fiddled with the weights and tinkered with the scales until he had the balance mechanism set about right. The weights were standard reference weights, blocks of precisely machined steel, aluminum, copper and other elements. The scales had to register each block properly. A few minutes' manipulation produced a set of calibrated measurements; Krieg duly recorded them on a log sheet.

Ranier examined the log, adjusting his glasses with a great deal of fuss. His lips moved silently as he scanned the measurements.

"It'll do. Physical chemistry, you said?"

Krieg was perspiring. The security office interrogation had been easier. "Yes. Electronic chemistry, actually. There was a lab at the university. I did studies on plating, electron sputtering and deposition in a vacuum. Very rewarding, actually. Until Hitler...and the Anschluss."

That got Ranier's attention. "You went underground?"

Krieg had memorized his cover story.

"I escaped into Switzerland. Spent most of the war in a drug lab in Basel. Toward the end, spring '45, I slipped back into Austria to try and re-build my lab. It was in the basement of a castle, just beyond the Ringplatz...beautiful part of Vienna. But the Russians were advancing and I had to get out again. That's when I met Colonel Franks. He was with the OSS at the time."

Ranier had stopped sorting papers. "The Russians." His eyes narrowed and a scowl developed. "Scourge of the earth. They've raped Czechoslovakia. Murdered my relatives, enslaved half of Europe. Worse than Nazis, if you ask me."

Krieg took a few seconds to stroll about the assay lab, turning over odd scraps of equipment, trying out the gloves in the sealed sample cabinet. "Oh, I think not, Doctor. Not by a long shot. At least, Communists have a conscience. Nazis are beasts, law of the jungle and all that. No vision for the betterment of man."

Ranier snorted. "I've dedicated myself to being as big an obstacle to the revolution of the proletariat as I can. Stalin's worse than Hitler. Now he's got the Bomb. We've got to do something. That's why I'm going west, to the Pacific test site."

Krieg stood by Ranier's table, idly flipping through papers, looking for key words or phrases Treeline had told him about. Ranier seemed lost in thought. "I'm leaving day after tomorrow, Dr. Krieg. Six months at Eniwetok."

"Please, call me Klaus." Krieg sensed the physicist was anxious to talk, to unburden himself of something. "Greenhouse, I presume."

Ranier nodded. "We're testing a new method out there. A new method of boosting fission yield. But--"

"But...what, Doctor?"

Ranier gave an imperceptible shudder. "It's a bit worrisome. The physics are quite advanced...will it work?" He shrugged. "A lot of time and effort--and reputations--are riding on the outcome."

"I'd like to hear more. About your new method."

"That surprises me. Most physicists around here think I'm an arrogant son of a bitch. They don't support anything new if they didn't think of it themselves."

Krieg was sympathetic. Ranier seemed to want to talk. "That's human nature, I guess. Same thing at Vienna."

Ranier was stuffing wads of notes into his briefcase, no longer sorting or reading any of them. "Take Greenhouse, for example. Mark V and Mark VI tests, four high-yield bursts, were the initial plan. The first shots should tell us a lot about how much energy we can get from thermally exciting atomic nuclei. It's the first step to real fusion. Then we add deuterium in the fusion process for the third shot. And the last of the original shots--Item Shot, I think they're calling it--we test fusion boosting of a fission device. That's where Ranier-Tolkach comes in."

"This is your new method?"

Ranier outlined the basics of the experiments on a nearby chalkboard. Krieg watched closely, amazed at how easily the Czech physicist confided in him. He made a few handwritten notes, asked a few questions, as Ranier sketched out the physics of the new method.

When he was done, Ranier added, "Most of my colleagues think all this is rubbish. 'Bad physics, it'll never work, too high a risk for the payoff, the reactions will be smothered in the first micro-second.' So you see, Dr. Krieg, I'm under some pressure here. If R-T methodology does work and we can get the boost in yields we expect, I'll have the satisfaction of seeing my colleagues have to eat their criticism."

"And if it doesn't work?"

Ranier's face clouded. "Then my colleagues will have the satisfaction of hounding me off the staff. I would be disgraced."

"Surely, that won't happen."

Ranier shrugged. "I've been humiliated and disgraced before. One simply picks up the pieces and moves on."

"I can't believe someone as knowledgeable as you would be allowed to leave the project." Krieg couldn't imagine the Americans would be so stupid. "You contribute so much to America's atomic weapons effort...helping keep them ahead of the Russians. That's vital. Now that Stalin has the Bomb, we've got to stay ahead in research. Our futures depend on it. Our freedom depends on it."

Ranier regarded Krieg with curiosity, weighing the import of the Austrian's words. "You sound like a recruiting officer for the Manhattan district. The truth is that Los Alamos has changed. Eight years ago, this place was full of men of passion, men of purpose. All of us knew what it meant to fight tyranny. You made sacrifices, did what you had to do, to defeat the Nazis. Now--" Ranier snapped his briefcase shut, "--now, we're all just individuals. Victory softened us, made us weak. When the Communists overran my homeland of Czechoslovakia, no one cared but me. It was just another story in the news. It wasn't personal. Eight years ago, every Nazi victory made all of us work that much harder. Now, Stalin swallows whole countries...Czechoslovakia, China, now Korea--and who cares? Oh, we build bombs. We test bombs. But now, it's just a research project. Everyone's got a theory to test, a new design to try out. That's what gets them excited. The personal connection to history, the personal responsibility to fight tyranny...it's gone. I guess that's what it means to be an American today."

"Then we think as brothers," Krieg answered back. He related part of the cover story he had memorized, how he had been spirited out of Vienna only hours ahead of Vasiliev's Seventieth Guards Army by the American O.S.S. Ranier half-listened, his mind pre-occupied with other matters.

"Look...Dr. Krieg, Klaus...there's something I need to talk with you about."

"What's that?"

Ranier fiddled with the briefcase lock, unfastening and re-fastening the clasp. Tolkach will say no. "We're having an outing tomorrow. In the mountains, Sangre de Cristo...two-hour drive from here. All the T-Division plasma physics group. Why don't you come with me? I'll introduce you...they're all like me, like you, victims, lost souls, chased out of their homelands by Nazis or Communists."

Krieg could hardly believe his good fortune. Already, Ranier had spilled enough to keep Moscow Center busy for weeks.

"Why not? I'm new around here...I'd like to meet your colleagues. Ask questions and learn."

Ranier laughed at that. "Be careful, my friend. Around here, questions are like bullets. Like weapons. You may get back more than you asked for."

"I'll try to remember that." Krieg extracted a small pad, began copying down the chalkboard diagrams Ranier had scribbled.

"Oh, don't bother with that." Ranier rummaged about the lab and pulled out a small spiral notebook full of equations and drawings. "Look this over tonight, while you're unpacking and getting settled. It's the whole theory behind Ranier-Tolkach. I'll be at the commissary tonight anyway. They're having beef stew--I won't get any for months and this will be my last time before I leave. Bring your questions."

"You have to leave?"

"I'm headed over to the machine shop. Some parts to see to, a scintillation counter, actually. I promised Weiskopf I'd work up something for his little experiment at Eniwetok."

Krieg handled the notebook reverently. "Then I'll see you for dinner. What time?"

"Six o'clock sharp. We wait any longer and all the beef stew will be gone."

Krieg shook hands with the Czech physicist. Ranier ducked out the door and was gone. Krieg decided to grab his luggage and find his way to the barracks quarters. Once he drew his bedding and personal toiletries, he'd lock the door and extract the small camera Brylin had given him in Mexico City. Ranier's notes were a priceless intelligence find. The sooner he got the film to his handler in Albuquerque, the better.

Albert Ranier found Edvard Tolkach outside the machine shop, taking a smoke. He told Tolkach about Krieg, what he had learned about the Austrian.

"We can use him. I'm sure of it. He calibrated those scales and calipers in no time. The assay lab needs someone like him. I think we should bring him in."

Tolkach wasn't convinced. "Are you sure your judgement isn't a little clouded, Albert? We can't bring a complete stranger in now. Are you crazy?"

"I'm telling you he could be useful. We need someone else here, while I'm out there in the middle of the Pacific. When the devices are shipped back and all hell breaks loose over how the cores could have been manufactured 'wrong', you're going to need all the help you can get. Covering up the assay and sampling results, getting the lab work and the documentation in order. I think Krieg could help us--someone of his stature and credibility--"

"You barely know the fellow. What do you know about him, anyway? We can't just trust Gallant Flag details to someone like that, brought in this late."

"I suppose you're right." Ranier was glum. He extracted a cigarette of his own and lit up. The two men watched a convoy of trucks barrel down Jemez Street, toward the dirt piles of the new lab wing. It was dusk on the Hill and the air was cold, wind flecked with sleet whipping dirt in eye-stinging clouds.

"Albert, it's getting to you...can't you see it? It's your conscience or something. We've all been under a hell of a lot of pressure lately."

"I am worried," Ranier admitted. "It's the Army that bothers me. Security briefings everyday now, loyalty oaths...I know they've been inside my apartment, looking for God knows what. The bureau drawers weren't fully shut...Edvard, I always shut my bureau drawers. What are they looking for now? What do they know?"

Tolkach's cigarette tip glowed in the dark. "It's the times. They're suspicious, they see Reds everywhere."

"They are everywhere, Edvard. Stalin's tenacious. The sooner we get those bombs to Korea, the better I'll feel. At least, we are doing something."

"We must keep the group small," Tolkach insisted. "The fewer people who know what's going on, the better. Now is not the time to unburden yourself to a complete stranger"

Ranier was still thinking about Krieg. "I don't trust the Army people. They've got informants all over the lab...I'm sure of it. Krieg could be a useful diversion, couldn't he? Give him a small project and let the Army follow him around, search his office and quarters. When the gadgets ship out, a little diversion could be helpful. Security will be tighter than ever around that time, all the way up to San Francisco."

"What are you suggesting...that we give Krieg something incriminating? So the Army won't suspect us? An absurd risk...it's preposterous."

"It isn't so preposterous," Ranier said. "Krieg's got lab skills. He's credible. He's a newcomer. You know how the Army flocks to newcomers...dogs to a shitpile. Krieg could doctor up some lab work, so even a Nobel prizewinner wouldn't find anything."

"Albert, you need a drink. That's what you need. To bring someone new in now is madness."

"I've already invited him to the outing tomorrow."

"You did what?"

Ranier spat out his cigarette. "I did."

"Albert--"

"Look, don't get so angry with me. The guards will hear you. It's a simple act of friendship toward a newcomer, comradely concern for a fellow scientist, that's all. You can understand that."

"It's suicide," Tolkach fumed, shivering coatless in the stiffening wind. "Albert--how could you? Well, we can't talk freely now, can we? You've seen to that. We can't discuss details tomorrow at all, thanks to you. Gallant Flag, Greenhouse, it's all off limits now."

"Now who's being absurd?" Ranier waited until another truck convoy rumbled by, bright headlamps bathing the construction site in a dusty glow. "All we have to do is devise some kind of test."

"A test? What kind of test?"

"I don't know exactly. Call it a test of loyalty. Another damned loyalty oath. Only this one's a serious matter. Call it a test to see just how willing Herr Doktor Krieg is...to put his life on the line, to face up to Stalin and his monsters and be a soldier in our private little war."

Tolkach had sunk back against a corner post of the shop, to shield himself from the wind. "You're a melodramatic fool, Albert. And a bad actor too. I guess, since you've already invited him, that I have no choice. And the others...I'm sure you didn't consult with them either, did you? This outing was supposed to be a last get-together, a strategy meeting. Now, it's-- God knows what it is. A confessional. A schoolroom. A pulpit for you to preach from."

Ranier held open the shop door, motioning Tolkach back inside. Heavy steam-heated air smothered them as they went in.

"Then, it's settled. I'll tell Krieg when I see him at the commissary. Tomorrow, we'll know the truth about Herr Doktor Klaus Krieg. Army informant or patriot for freedom; we'll find out for sure."

Sunday, 12-31-50

Los Alamos

11:30 a.m.

New Year's Day was cold and clear and cloudless blue, so bright the sky almost hurt your eyes, up in the high windy passes of the Jemez Mountains. Tolkach, Ranier, Krieg and a handful of physicists from T-Division piled into a black Mercury station wagon, a case of beer and some fishing gear thrown in the back and headed west at dawn along State Road 126, toward Nacimiento and the high mesa country.

They drove for an hour into the Santa Fe National Forest until cresting a red sandstone cliff a few miles short of Fenton Lakes. Tolkach parked the Merc and the men hiked for another hour up through dense stands of pine and pinon trees to the lakes and there, pitched a bare-bones fishing camp on the muddy banks.

Krieg was impressed with the bleak but spectacular craggy beauty of nearby San Miguel and the Jemez range. Like the Urals, only more snow, he thought to himself. He helped unload the tackle boxes and strung himself some bait for casting into the lake. An hour later, the sun a pale bright daub at noon, still low on the horizon, Krieg helped prepare the grill and a charcoal firepit to make ready for the two healthy trout Tolkach and a lab tech had pulled in.

The men settled in for a leisurely trout and beer lunch. Krieg wedged his back against a pine tree and savored the smells of charcoal in his nostrils, the trout flesh buttered and sweet in his mouth.

Albert Ranier was five feet away, crouching on his knees, stirring the glowing charcoal bricks, melting a slab of butter in a tin. He watched Krieg out of the corner of his eye, like an expectant father, silently encouraging his child's first faltering steps.

Ranier spoke first. "You chose chemistry at Wien, Dr. Krieg. Not physics. Why was that?"

Krieg wiped his mouth with a handkerchief, finished off a beer. He had studied some chemistry at the railway school in Khimki. Not his best subject, not at all. "I liked making things," he decided. "Seeing how things were put together, what they were made of."

"Do you believe Steinmetz' theory?" Tolkach asked. He stirred the charcoal, got a little spout of flame to flash. "Fractional nuclei, quantized protons and neutrons, and all that rubbish?"

Krieg had no idea what he was talking about. "To be honest, I haven't really considered that."

"Dr. Krieg's specialty is electrochemistry," Ranier announced. "University of Vienna. He's done studies in valence shells, transition metals, orbital swapping. Several papers in the Zeitschrift."

Adam Glamorgen was a Scot physicist with T-Division's wave physics group. "You think Teller's Super has a chance, Dr. Krieg? Teller-Ulam may bankrupt the whole lab, if the President approves it."

Krieg shrugged. The discussion had entered foreign territory and he didn't speak the language.

"I haven't given it that much thought, to be honest. I'm sure the President will make the right decision."

Winters, the lab tech, scoffed. "Teller's an ass. Politics masquerading as physics, if you ask me."

"Bethe given you an assignment yet?"

Krieg shook his head. "I only arrived yesterday. We've not met. I'm anxious to get to work. Especially with Dr. Ranier here."

That brought out a few chuckles. Glamorgen slurped some beer. "Albert's our resident genius. He'll be the first to tell you that, anyway. You seem kind of out of sorts, Dr. Krieg."

"Call me Klaus. I've been in transit for a few months. Out of the lab, unable to get back to my work." He related the cover story, how he had been in Vienna and had made contact with Shepard, the O.S.S. agent. How Shepard had gotten him out of Vienna just ahead of the Red Army.

"That's why I'm glad to be finally here, settling in. I'm looking forward to getting back into the lab, doing more work on fractional charge, that sort of thing."

Glamorgen thought about that. "Most of our group's working on wave propagation in two-stage devices...fusion boosting of fission reactions. Mix in a little tritium here, a little deuterium there, rather like a cocktail."

"One hell of kick to that cocktail," Winters said.

"Frankly, we need help with mixing ratios, and plasma instabilities. It's all wave physics really, just a bit further out on the frontier than usual." Glamorgen regarded Krieg with curiosity. "Have you any background in this area?"

Krieg was beginning to feel uneasy. "My real specialty is in valence shell studies...how many electrons can I get loose to make a bond? Not so much inside the nucleus."

Glamorgen frowned. "Pity. Our real problems are in the nucleus now, getting the detonation wave just right and breaking the nuclei apart at the right time."

Ranier didn't want any conflict so he stepped in. "Klaus has been through a lot, gentlemen. Since this is not an Army security briefing, why don't we save our questions for later--"

"No--" Glamorgen was insistent. "No--this is important. We all depend on each other. Everyone pulls their weight." He glared back at Ranier. "And since we have an uninvited guest, we may as well find out what he can do for us."

"I'm not sure--"

Ranier held up a hand. "Please, let us not argue fine points of physics--"

Glamorgan said, "Albert, you know perfectly well what I'm talking about."

Tolkach rolled his eyes. I told you this would happen, Albert....

"Please-, for our guest's sake--"

"Albert, this outing was set up to discuss business. How can we discuss business with a newcomer here? What were you thinking about...and just who are you, really, Herr Doktor Klaus Krieg? Universitat Wien...my ass. You don't know the first thing about physics...isn't it obvious, boys. The man's an imposter...probably an informant or an Army spy."

Krieg shifted, tensed his body, ready to fight back. "Surely, we can discuss this. I was assigned to Los Alamos by--"

"Look at him," Glamorgen went on. "Squirming like a rat...I say we go back to the Hill right now. We can't speak freely here, not with him here."

"Adam, this is outrageous!" Albert Ranier got to his feet. Glamorgen did the same. The men faced off over the open firepit for a few seconds, huffing like aggrieved animals, ready to charge. Tolkach got up too, gently led Ranier away from the smoking charcoal. "You really must apologize."

"For what, my good man? Just because you're blind to the truth about this gentleman doesn't mean the rest of us are."

Krieg knew he had to do something. Ranier seemed flustered, as if he had been slapped. Tolkach was just trying to stop a fight from breaking out.

"Dr. Glamorgen, forgive me. I haven't been entirely truthful. Not with you nor with you, Dr. Ranier." This was icy, ticklish territory. A single misstep....but then he had trained to change roles quickly. Field agents had to react, had to blend into the surroundings. "I do apologize, to all of you. You deserve more. You deserve a fuller accounting."

Glamorgen stood poised like a statue in flight, over the firepit. Then abruptly, he relaxed, brushed aside some dirt and sat down again.

"I'm listening, Dr. Krieg."

"Most of what I told you is true. I was offered a post here at Los Alamos by the Army. I'm not a physicist, but then you already know that. The Army, the O.S.S., made a deal and I accepted it. Come to America. We'll find work for you. I accepted the Army's invitation to get out of Austria and get away from the Reds. I hated the Communists. Behind the lines, they were already doing the very same things the Nazis had done. I just wanted a better life for my family." Krieg hitched up his legs, tucked his arms under them and stared at the dirt. "Actually, since I must be truthful, it was my idea to come here, not Shepard's. I begged. I didn't want my family, my wife and daughter, to be raped by the Red Army, there, I've said it...already, there had been reports, you see. Atrocities. I knew what was happening."

"Must we delve into these things?" Ranier pleaded. "This isn't the time or the place."

Glamorgen cut him off with a wave of his hand. "On the contrary, Doctor, what better time or place could there be? We've all put our lives on the line for you ,Ranier, for this little war of yours, personally taking on the Russians. Punching Uncle Joe Stalin right in the kisser. I want to hear Krieg's story. Find out just what kind of rat you've brought into our midst. So when we're all hanged for treason, I'll at least have the comfort of knowing what a genuine ass you are."

Ranier darkened. "No one forced you into this, Glamorgen. We're all men of conscience here...perhaps some more than others. And this isn't my war or your war, anyway. It's a war of principle."

"Right, I'm sorry I got the two mixed up. You are personally such a principled icon of virtue...how could I have been so confused?"

Krieg held his breath, listened to the arguments flying back and forth. What the hell was going on? What had he stumbled into?

Tolkach was appalled that the gathering had degenerated into this. To Krieg: "I suppose you can see this little group hasn't gathered to discuss plasma instabilities."

Krieg wasn't sure what to do or say. He had to be careful. "I seemed to have caused some kind of misunderstanding."

"Nonsense," Ranier blurted out. "It's perfectly understandable. You got out of Vienna and came to America with the same hatred of Communism I did. And for the same reason: you've seen it, you've seen the beast and know what it can do. Now you want to fight back."

Krieg found it politic to agree with that assessment. "I couldn't have said it better, Dr. Ranier. I--" he held out his hands, seeking understanding, "--I did this for my family, you see. In Vienna, in Linz, throughout Austria, the Russians came not as liberators, but as thieves. Thugs. They blew up anything that stood in their way. They executed anyone who questioned them. They took whatever they wanted...an entire country, strangled by Nazis, taken over by Reds marching in to liberate us, but when we were liberated, we couldn't tell anything had changed. A thief is still a thief, no matter his clothes."

Ranier was sympathetic. Glamorgen wasn't.

"We all have our reasons for being here," the Scot said. "It's not for anyone to say which is more important." He leveled a dubious stare at Krieg. "Or more believable. The only question now is: how much do we let out?"

Tolkach was dead set against bringing Krieg into Gallant Flag and said so. But Ranier sensed a fellow victim, someone to share tears and beers with. Glamorgen, sure that Krieg was an Army spy, was cautious, yet curious. How much did the Army really know? Winters and the other techs were quiet, mumbling among themselves.

Ranier made the decision for them, as he usually did. Krieg was a kindred soul, a pained soul, and Gallant Flag was balm for deep wounds. Later, alone with Tolkach and Glamorgen, he would rationalize his decision to bring Krieg into the operation as a humane, even compassionate thing to do. He's tormented, Edvard, and tormented people are capable of great things, whether evil or good. It's like a Godsend, the way he just fell into our laps.

Tolkach said little but his face spoke volumes and Ranier could read it well enough: Albert, Krieg is no Godsend. More likely, it's the Army who's dropped him into our laps. And that's just too suspicious for me.

He knew Ranier still had ridiculous ambitions of detonating an atom bomb personally in Moscow, preferably right in the middle of Red Square. Of course, it was preposterous, but so was Gallant Flag, when you really thought about it. Tolkach figured Albert would try to enlist Krieg soon enough in that noble adventure. It was something Tolkach wanted no part of.

May the atomic holocaust claim all of us before I have to tell Albert that piece of good news, he reasoned.

So it was decided, by argument and by innuendo, that six men in a small fishing camp by the shores of Fenton Lake would systematically reveal to Klaus Krieg, nee Fyodor Trofimenko, field agent code name WINDWARD of the Soviet NKVD, the most extraordinary details of Operation Gallant Flag. For the next two hours, much to his amazement and disbelief, the entire scope of the most audacious mission he could have ever imagined was made painstakingly, mind-numbingly clear to him.

When they were done, Krieg's mind was fogged with details he could no longer remember. He realized when he got back to Los Alamos, he would have to commit as much of this to written notes as possible, then get it to Treeline and on to Moscow Center. Before he could do that, however, he would have to hook up with his designated contact: one Hal Conley. Conley, if that was his real name, ran an Indian gift and pottery shop in Albuquerque. It would be through Conley that Krieg would send whatever he learned back to Moscow.

Ranier's disclosures had made for a somber camp. When he was done, there was silence by the lake. Only the smoldering remnants of the fire sputtered. It was getting dark.

Glamorgen spoke up. "Well, Albert, have you finally finished your little confessional? You'll have to excuse Dr. Ranier, I'm afraid. He's prone to these little outbursts. Guilty conscience, I suppose."

Krieg tried to be sympathetic. "It's a great risk you're taking. You must have done a lot of soul-searching. A lot of praying over the consequences."

Glamorgen was already gathering up utensils and pans. "Rubbish. We're all here for different reasons. Albert doesn't speak for me."

"Then what is your reason for getting into Gallant Flag?"

Glamorgen methodically stowed gear in an olive green duffel bag. "Ranier hates Russians. He's got it in for old uncle Joe Stalin. Me...I'm more practical. I like challenges. Look, I was here with Oppie in '45. We were all involved with the Gadget back then. Would it work? Would we make a mistake and blow up the world? That was our challenge. Now we've got all these bombs but Washington's too timid to use them. I hate to see all that work go to waste. Jesus, Mary and Joseph...we have the Bomb for heaven's sake. We're in a war in Korea, aren't we? Why the hell can't we use our weapons to win the damn thing? That's my take on this whole matter. I just want to see the things work like they were designed."

Krieg considered all that. The Scot physicist might well bear watching in the future, he decided. He was no ideological fanatic, just a bored engineer with a penchant for tinkering with nasty things.

The sun was setting as the men trudged back down the mountain and climbed into the car. They were quiet, somber, tired. Tolkach muttered something about needing to get back to the Hill in time to clean up. There was a New Year's Eve party tonight at the commissary. Costumes were expected. And Monday was a holiday. The labs would be only partially manned. But none of them really felt like celebrating.

Everyone was reflective, as Tolkach eased the old Merc down the twisting mountain road, wondering if Ranier had done the right thing.

Gallant Flag had a newcomer. The only question was now: what next?

The drive back to the Hill took several hours. In the parking lot outside T-Division's machine shop, Tolkach begged off the New Year's Eve party.

"I'm going to take a hot shower, get in bed and read papers," he announced to the others. With that, he slipped off to his quarters. The rest of the group eventually dispersed.

After his shower, Tolkach dressed in slacks and a sweater. All during the drive back from Fenton Lakes, he had been sorely troubled by what Ranier had done. Before heading off to the commissary, now lit up all cheery and warm in a light snowfall, Tolkach made a detour by the East Jemez Road gate. A tiny cabin nestled alongside the chain link fence. A few lights were on inside. Tolkach paused at the door: U.S. ARMY SECURITY OFFICE read a stenciled plaque. Was he doing the right thing? He knocked and went in.

Colonel Mitch Lord was on duty that evening, poring over crossword puzzles and sports scores from half a dozen copies of Stars and Stripes. Lord was tall, thin, a featureless face of dough just waiting for time to mold it into something. Save for the eyes, which regarded Tolkach as a dog with a bone might regard a stranger.

In the wee hours of New Year's Eve, much to his own surprise, Edvard Tolkach was more talkative than he really wanted to be. How best to get it out--that was the worry. He unburdened himself of every suspicion he had about Klaus Krieg. That took half an hour. Colonel Lord listened without visible expression.

"With Greenhouse coming up," Tolkach was saying, "I have to admit we've all got some concerns that Krieg isn't what he claims to be. I know he's passed all the screening and the background checks, but some things just aren't right. We all sense it."

Lord was skeptical. In Tolkach's presence, he leafed through the screening documents and interviews with Krieg, initially finding nothing amiss.

"Don't see any red flags here," Lord scanned the transcribed pages. "Everything appears to be in order. Sure you fellows aren't just a little nervous about the tests?"

Tolkach shook his head. "That's just physics, Colonel. This is personality. Or maybe politics. Much harder to figure out. I can't really explain it but all of us have this feeling about the man."

"Tell you what..." Lord sat up straight in his chair, which creaked badly. "I'll leave the physics to you eggheads over at the Lab. You leave personalities and politics and security matters to me. That way, the world will be a lot safer for everybody."

Tolkach had expected to be patronized. It wasn't surprising. It was the Army way. "And Greenhouse?"

Lord shook his head. "Don't you think we've learned anything at all these last few years, Doctor? After Klaus Fuchs and all that spy stuff, we totally revamped all our security procedures. The Army's got Los Alamos and the Hill well under control now. It's tighter than a whore's ass, believe me. Greenhouse is quite secure; you can go to bed tonight without worrying about that. Save those giant brains for physics, Dr. Tolkach. The Army will see to it that all the Greenhouse warheads make it to their final destination."

Monday, 1-1-51

Tokyo

4:30 a.m.

For all its Yakuza contacts and anxiety about physical security, the Omisumi Corporation proved to be an absurdly easy nut for Jiang Chen Li and Birchtree to crack. The building's main entrance plaza along the neon chaos of the Meiji Dori was well enough guarded as were most of the side alley shipping doors and the rear loading docks. Corporate security was mostly a protection racket anyway. Yakuza provided the muscle. Tetsuko and Omisumi the money. Mutually parasitic, Birchtree had theorized.

But it hadn't taken long for the two Red agents to locate a storage access point below a pair of wooden trap doors, "out back" beyond the loading docks along a wing of the main building. It was a tool shed for utilities and sundry tools, from the looks for the shelving in Jiang's flashlight. But a little reconnoitering of the shed produced another door that, when forced, opened up into a larger room full of office supplies and metal carts.

In no time, Jiang and Birchtree were in.

The mission was simple enough: a tactical plan Jiang himself had employed countless times against the Kuomintang dogs over the long years of China's civil war. Basic recon to scope out the enemy's intentions. Scout his forces. Get a feel for the terrain. Draw up the enemy's order of battle. Only in this case, the battlefield was a large office building in Tokyo's Shinjuku district.

Birchtree led the way out of the supply closet into a long tiled corridor. Emergency lanterns provided some light, enough to navigate by.

"Tetsuko-san's office...." the Russian whispered. "Probably upstairs...penthouse, I imagine. That would fit his ego."

"A reasonable assumption, comrade."

The two men scouted several corridors until they found a stairway landing.

"Let's try this," the Russian suggested. The door was locked but Birchtree produced a pen knife with a heavy-gauge loop of wire on one blade. He forced the door in short order and the men climbed. Six levels up, they reached the top.

"Still on the same wing," Jiang observed. The corridor seemed empty but you didn't take chances in recon work. Jiang put his ears to the tile, listening for footsteps. He heard nothing. "Clear," he announced. The men made there way cautiously, staying low to avoid silhouetting themselves in the crimson glow of the Isetan Department Store lights across the street.

"Tetsuko-san's" office--?" Jiang asked. "You have some idea of where it is?"

"Not really. Has to be the biggest one, I figure." Birchtree nosed into each office and closet as they came up, expertly picking locks as he did. Twenty minutes later, at the front corner of the wing, overlooking a moonlit expanse of green trees in the Shinjuku Imperial Gardens, they found a vast suite of offices. In the anteroom of the suite, a table had been carefully arranged with flowers, bonsai pots and photo albums laid open--photos of Masuhiro Tetsuko with a parade of dignitaries, even MacArthur himself.

Birchtree snorted. "A shrine to the newest emperor. Look at all this crap. I'd say we've found the right place."

The inner office with the largest desk and more photos on the walls proved to be Tetsuko's. With flashlights wrapped in gauze to lower the light level, the two Red agents set about the task of rummaging through all the industrialist's papers.

Drawer after drawer, cabinet after cabinet, produced nothing helpful or particularly incriminating in his desk. Two safes were found. One was a small wall safe behind a closet door, the other a tinier steel box on the top shelf of an armoire in a formal dining room off the main office.

"I don't have all my tools with me," Birchtree admitted. "Mark the locations on this--" he handed Jiang a sheet of paper he'd been using to roughly sketch the office layout. "If we have to return, at least we'll know where to look."

A few minutes later, Jiang tapped the Russian on the shoulder. "Look at this, comrade. I found them in a box on that shelf."

The men flipped through a stack of carefully written kanji pages. It was a ledger of some kind, a list of tasks with costs and completion dates. Birchtree translated--crudely--as they scanned the pages.

"--it's talking about some kind of warehouse. Kobe is the location. Here's the street address. This appears to be some kind of list of what's stored in the warehouse--"

Jiang pointed to an entry off to one side. "What's this?"

Birchtree shook his head. "I'm not sure...warehouse...receiving some goods...there's a freighter. Orient Star--"

"The date there--"

"I see that. Sixth of January. That's Saturday, isn't it?"

"Next Saturday."

Birchtree continued translating. "--goods from the ship Orient Star arriving on sixth January. From Hawaii...that's what it seems to say."

"What kind of goods?"

Birchtree scanned on, his lips mumbling the translation as his fingers followed the characters. "It says 'machine parts.' And look at this...this is strange. The column here is for point of origin. Here--" the Russian stabbed a finger at several characters. "--the point of origin is listed oddly: 'U.S. Navy contract transport--transfer at sea.'"

"Transfer at sea?" Jiang repeated. That didn't make sense. "Machine parts transferred at sea?"

"Seems like our friend Tetsuko-san means to keep careful track of something here. You don't transfer cargo at sea without good reason, at least not commercial cargo."

"Such as?"

Birchtree shrugged. "The customer requests it. Something's being hidden here. Transferring cargo at sea is not something you'd try unless it was very important."

"This is contract carriage," Jiang pointed out. "You're saying maybe the American Navy's hired Tetsuko-san to carry cargo and wants to load him up away from port?"

"To hide something. Something big. Otherwise, you just bring the goods in through Yokohama. Or Kobe. Much easier and cheaper that way."

"War materiel?"

"Probably. The question is what. Tetsuko-san's keeping good records here so he can send a bill back to the Occupation authorities. He's done a hell of a lot of business with the American armed forces the last few years. Obviously, they trust him."

That got Jiang to wondering. He described the refurbished American submarine he had seen at the Shao Gun yard in Formosa. "Tetsuko paid for the whole project."

Birchtree flipped through more pages of the ledger, spot-translating. "What the hell does Tetsuko-san need with a refurbished American submarine?"

"Maybe to transfer war materiel at sea?"

Before they could explore that idea any further, Jiang heard a door open in the outer office. Birchtree doused the light and the Red agents hit the floor, just as a pair of Omisumi security guards dashed into the office.

"Tatsu! Tatsu! Hands up!" The office lights flickered on and the two guards brought their weapons--both Browning 9-millimeter--to bear on the back wall.

Birchtree mouthed and hand-signaled directions to Jiang, who nodded back. The Russian scuttled on his stomach behind a nearby credenza. Jiang rolled under the desk.

"Tatsu--!"

"Now, comrade!"

Birchtree came up firing, short bursts from his Makarov, double-tapping the closest guard with direct hits in the chest and throat. The guard's mouth was an open 'O', blood spurting and gurgling out in a sheet, as the rounds spun him about and he pitched backward against a statue. Both guard and statue crashed heavily to the floor.

At the very same instant, the other guard discharged his own weapon--nearly half the thirteen rounds lit off in one zip burst--brrrraaaappp--sending books and papers and wood chips from the shelves flying. Jiang squeezed out the front of the desk, leveling his own Makarov at the guard's torso and triggered a short burst of his own, angling his shots upward. Several rounds stitched a bloody line across the guard's belly and he grunted, blood and viscera spraying the linoleum. Before he could pitch forward and finish falling, Jiang drilled him twice in the head, forcing the guard's now-limp body into a corkscrewing kind of collapse.

"Go!" yelled Birchtree. The Red agents didn't pause to admire their handiwork. Instead, they lunged for the door and sprinted down the corridor toward the emergency stairs. As they slipped down the stairs, taking three flights at a time, shouts and more footsteps sounded above them. The gunfire inside Tetsuko's office had aroused Omisumi security and lights were coming on all around the building.

Birchtree had parked the old black Dodge on an alley off Meiji Dori, next to the Shinjuku Bunka Cinema. They climbed in and the Russian started up, revving the engine hard, then turning out into light traffic along Meiji, headlamps still off. He quickly accelerated south, through several traffic lights, past the Gardens, then swerved around some construction barriers and plowed through a knot of drunken sailors staggering along the street on New Year's Eve liberty. They swerved from lane to lane, heading south toward Shibuya, toward Yoyogi Park. After a few minutes, the Russian finally dared to breathe and switched on the headlamps, slowing down.

"Looks like we have company," Jiang warned him. Since leaving the Shinjuku Gyoen, two sedans had attempted to keep up with the Dodge, matching speeds, making every turn.

"I see them," Birchtree said. "But not for long." The Russian made a sudden lane change, just through the square at Aoyama Dori, narrowly missing a bus full of late-night party-goers loading up in front of a hotel. They turned back northeast, toward the Meiji Gardens, zipping from lane to lane.

"Still with us!" Jiang could tell the first black sedan by light reflecting off its hood ornament. The Hudson wallowed as it careened around a crowd spilling out of a pachinko hall, then sped up again, falling in no more than three car lengths behind the Red agents.

"Omisumi security, most likely. Or Yakuza contract, which amounts to the same thing."

"Can't you lose him?"

Before Birchtree could answer, automatic weapons fire rang out. Jiang ducked down in the seat as several rounds cracked the side mirror. More rounds spanged off the rear bumper and trunk lid, starring the back window. Birchtree swerved into another lane. Jiang saw the muzzle flashes behind them but the rounds went wide.

Soon enough, they reached Meiji Gardens, and ran into heavy pedestrian traffic around the gate...more New Year's Eve revelers. Birchtree turned suddenly and crashed through the wooden outer gates, heading right into the park. Paper lanterns went flying as the Dodge chewed up a trail, crisscrossing stone walkways, then going briefly airborne at a tiny stream. The Dodge plowed nose first into the opposite bank, briefly stalled, then the Russian gunned the engine and they clawed their way up the bank. Behind them, one of the pursuing cars had crashed, flipping sideways at the bridge, then rolling over and into the stream.

But the second car leaped the stream and accelerated after the Red agents.

Birchtree swore under his breath. He steered a twisting, fishtailing course through the park, scattering vendor carts everywhere, narrowly averting a head-on collision with the huge cypress wood torii gates of the Inner Meiji Gardens. The Dodge spun sideways, then straightened out.

They exited Meiji Gardens and swerved back out into light traffic at Akasaka.

"He's still with us!" Jiang said. Behind them, the second black sedan burst out of a row of chrysanthemum bushes onto Akasaka, pancaking hard right in the middle of the street. Traffic swerved and horns honked as the driver swung the car around and upshifted to close the distance.

"No he's not!" Birchtree floored the accelerator and the Dodge leaped ahead through traffic lights and crosswalks. They were heading east on the Gaien Hisashi Dori, east at over a hundred miles an hour through thickening traffic, toward the Ginza and the center of Tokyo.

For the next few minutes, the two vehicles raced zigzagging through late-night traffic across town. The Russian downshifted momentarily at the Sakurada Dori split, to negotiate crowds spilling onto the street from late-closing Kabuki shows, then bumped up onto the sidewalk to pass a knot of rickshas and pedicabs collecting in front of a hotel. He hung a hard left, then hard right, trying to lose their pursuit in a confusing warren of narrow lanes near Shiba Park, but it was no use. The black Hudson hung on their tail relentlessly and matched every turn.

The gap was closing again. More shots rang out but the rounds were off the mark. Jiang did a tactical reload of his own Makarov, ejecting one magazine still with several rounds and slamming another cartridge home. He twisted around in his seat and sat perched on the window sill, facing backward. Trying to get a bead on the Hudson was hard with Birchtree's erratic driving but the Chinese agent squeezed off several rounds nonetheless. At least one creased the Hudson's front windshield; Jiang saw the glass craze and the car suddenly slowed and swerved sharply left, narrowly missing a traffic light stand.

"That'll teach him to ride our bumper," Jiang slipped back inside.

"Here he comes again," Birchtree said. "Stubborn little prick...let's see what we can do about that--"

The Dodge and the Hudson raced east into the Ginza.

Birchtree slowed down to finesse heavier traffic in the center of Shimbashi district. Hotels and shops and restaurants lined both sides of the Sotobori Dori and New Year's Eve had brought thick pedestrian crowds into the street. The Dodge slowed to a crawl, then the Russian turned abruptly through a parking lot surrounding the Shimbashi Dai Ichi Hotel, plowing through barriers and gates, and headed down Kokusai into a pocket of narrow lanes and alleys, a residential enclave in the shadow of several high-rises. The streets were dark and pot-holed, still lined with wartime rubble, barely wide enough for the Dodge to negotiate.

Over top of the apartment blocks flashed the yellow and green neon signs of the Sanwa Bank.

The Russian turned once again and ran straight into a tangle of poles supporting some kind of canopy or bunting which promptly collapsed on top of the car. The Dodge braked to a halt, knocking cans flying. Somewhere behind them, dogs began to bark and birds screeched.

The two Red agents sat in the car for what seemed like an eternity. There was no sign of the black Hudson, though lights began to flicker on in the darkened apartments. A door slammed.

The Russian agent climbed out, followed by Jiang. They reconnoitered their surroundings, then realized the Dodge seemed well hidden under all the tangle of poles and canopies.

"Maybe we lost him," Jiang said.

The Russian nodded, kicking away cans and mops and odd scraps of lumber. "We can only hope, comrade."

A few moments later, two men padded out of their apartment doors in robes and slippers. One look at Jiang's Makarov sent them scurrying back inside, muttering obscenities as they slammed doors behind them.

"Tokyo Metropolitan Police will be here soon now," the Russian observed. "The American occupation authorities have been pretty strict on showing firearms in public. We'd best be on our way."

"I haven't seen our friends in the black Hudson lately," Jiang said.

"Probably got lost in Shimbashi, same as we did. These damned Tokyo streets don't have signs or addresses or anything."

"So where are we?"

The Russian sat on the Dodge's front bumper and checked his watch in the neon glow of the Sanwa Bank sign. He lit a cigarette. "Hell if I know. Nishi Ginza's my guess."

"You figure those guys were Yakuza?"

"Probably under contract to Omisumi." Birchtree smiled as he extracted the papers they had lifted from Tetsuko's office. "A little touchy about unannounced visits, I would say. But we have these, at least. We may yet have to go back. Those safes may contain something useful."

"You drive well, comrade," Jiang said. "Perhaps a little fast for my taste. But you seem to know Tokyo well."

"For a gaijin," the Russian observed. The tip of his cigarette flared orange in the night. "I've been here, maybe, five years. I came in with the first Soviet delegation, Allied Council, right after the surrender. I'm just beginning to learn my way around."

Jiang poked around inside the Dodge, found a few spent rounds from the Yakuza guns, then re-loaded his own Makarov. "It's good for comrades to work together. You were right. We'll crack this capitalist plot yet. Tetsuko's the key."

"Mmmm." Birchtree was thoughtful. "I'm wondering about Kobe. And this submarine you saw. The Americans have somehow paid Tetsuko to pick up something at sea and ferry it to Kobe. The question is what? Bombs? Supplies? A secret weapon? More prostitutes?"

"There's talk around Peng's command that MacArthur wants to create a second front. Have Chiang's troops send an expedition to the mainland. Maybe even bring atomic bombs into Korea."

Birchtree whistled. "That's bad. God help all of us if the Americans try that."

Jiang chuckled. "I don't believe in God. A western addiction, if you ask me."

The Russian was quiet for a few moments, then finished his smoke and flicked the butt away. "Same with me, at least officially."

"And personally?"

"In my kind of work, I would never turn away a source. Every puzzle has its pieces. And every piece is important. If the Supreme Being turned out to have the most critical piece, I'd be on my hands and knees trying to recruit Him too."

Jiang half laughed. "You're either wise or foolish, comrade. I'm not sure which."

"Me neither." Birchtree climbed back in the car and fired up the engine. Jiang pushed away the fallen timbers and New Year's Eve bunting, then climbed in himself.

"Let's get back to the safe house, Major. Get some rest tonight. Tomorrow, we'll set out for Kobe and see what this warehouse is all about."
TIME January 1, 1951 Man of the Year

"American Fighting-Man: Destiny's Draftee"

The man of 1950 was not a statesman; Dean Acheson and his fellow diplomats of the free world had, in 1950, notably failed to stop the march of Communism. Nor was 1950's man a general; the best commander of the year, MacArthur, had blundered and been beaten. Nor a scientist, for science--so sure at the century's beginning that it had all the answers-now waited for the politicians (or anyone else) to find a way of controlling the terrible power that science had released. Nor an industrialist, for 1950, although it produced more goods than any other year in the world's history, was not preoccupied with goods but with life & death. Nor a scholar, for the world of 1950 was surfeited with undigested facts and sought it's salvation not in the conquest of new knowledge but in what it could relearn from old, old, old issues. 1950's man might turn out to the aging conspirator Josef Stalin, but as the year closed, that dreadful prospect was far from certain; if he was winning the game and not just an inning, Stalin's historians would record that 1950--and all other years from the death of Lenin--belonged to him. Or 1950's man might turn out to be an unknown saint, quietly living above the clash of armies and ideas. Him, too, the future would have to find.

As the year ended, 1950's man seemed to be an American in the bitterly unwelcome role of the fighting-man. It was not a role the American had sought, either as an individual or as a nation. The U.S. fighting-man was not civilization's crusader, but destiny's draftee.

The Peculiar Soldier. Most of the men in U.S. uniform around the world had enlisted voluntarily, but few had taken to themselves the old, proud label of "regular," few had thought they would fight, and fewer still had foreseen the incredibly dirty and desperate war that awaited them. They hated it, as soldiers in all lands and times have hated wars, but the American had some special reasons for hating it. He was the most comfort-loving creature who had ever walked the earth--and he much preferred riding to walking. As well as comfort, he loved and expected order; he yearned, like other men, for a predictable world, and the fantastic fog and gamble of war struck him as a terrifying affront.

Yet he was rightly as well as inevitably cast for his role as fighting-man in the middle of the 20th century. Now matter how the issue was defined, whether he was said to be fighting for progress or freedom or faith or survival, the American's heritage and character were deeply bound up in the struggle. More specifically, it was inevitable that the American be in the forefront of the battle because it was the U.S. which had unleashed gigantic forces of technology and organizational ideas. These had created the great 20th Century revolution. Communism was a reaction, an effort to turn the worldwide forces set free by U.S. progress back into the old channels of slavery.

The American fighting-man could not win this struggle without millions of allies--and it was the unfinished (almost unstarted) business of his government to find and mobilize those allies through the U.N. and by all other means. But the allies would never be found unless the American fighting-man first took his post and did his duty. On June 27, 1950, he was ordered to his post. Since then, the world has watched how he went about doing his duty.

He has been called soft and tough, resourceful and unskilled, unbelievably brave and unbelievably timid, thoroughly disciplined and scornful of discipline. One way or another, all of these generalizations are valid. He is a peculiar soldier, product of a peculiar country. His two outstanding characteristics seem to be contradictory. He is more of an individualist than soldiers of other nations, and at the same time, he is far more conscious of, and dependent on, teamwork. He fights as he lives, a part of a vast, complicated machine--but a thinking, deciding part, not an inert cog.

"In Our Time..." A British officer who has seen much of the U.S. fighting-man in Korea last week gave this shrewd, balanced appraisal:

"Your chaps have everything it takes to make great soldiers--intelligence, physique, doggedness and an amazing ability to endure adversity with grace. The thing they lack is proper discipline. They would be better off with a little more training in the art of retreat. I know they like to say that the American soldier is taught only offensive tactics, but if Korea has proved nothing else it has proved the absolute necessity of how to retreat in order. Your marines know how, but your Army men just don't. In our time, you know, we were able to make quite a thing of the rearguard action.

"Also, it seems to me that you are a little too reluctant to take casualties for your own good. I've seen an entire American division held up all day because a regimental commander was unwilling to risk what at most would have been ten or 20 casualties. I don't want to sound blood-thirsty, but 20 casualties in a light action today may frequently save 100 or so tomorrow.

Like all British observers of the U.S. Army, this observer was both envious and appalled at the bulk and variety of U.S. equipment and its 'amenities." One Briton in Korea says he saw tanks held up for hours by beer and refrigerator trucks. Another, who had been with U.S. troops landing in Southern France, said last week. "In France, I thought someone was just having his little joke when they brought the office wastebaskets ashore from the ship. But damned if they didn't do the same thing in Korea."
CHAPTER 14

Monday, January 1, 1951

Tokyo

8:45 a.m.

Major Lloyd Gilruth waited patiently in a cold light drizzle at Tokyo's Atsugi Field as the Air Force C-47 was steered to its ramp position. The pilot feathered the big Lycomings one at a time and Gilruth moved a little closer when the metal stairways were placed against the fuselage. Gilruth was assigned to General "Pinky" Wright downtown, nominally SCAP's G-3. He'd motored all the way out to Atsugi to meet a VIP guest that the Old Man's chief of staff, Doyle Hickey, had mentioned at the end of the 0700 hours briefing that morning.

A VIP guest Hickey wanted very much to get rid of as fast as possible.

Gilruth soon spotted his quarry descending the stairs, duffel bag and attaché case in hand. Major Lyle Kitchens, ostensibly 1st Field Investigative Unit of the 10th MPs, was a lean, almost gawky fellow, dark brown crewcut, with a whippy, seemingly uncoordinated way of walking. Even through the drizzle, Gilruth could see tightly compressed lips and a skeptical squint to his eyes that seemed about right for a military "cop."

Gilruth wasn't exactly sure why Kitchens was in town and neither was Hickey. The order said it was a fact-finding mission for Washington, to report back on pending CID and disciplinary cases due to the rapid influx of soldiers in Korea and Japan.

Fair enough, thought Gilruth. But he didn't believe a word of it and neither did Hickey or anyone else at SCAP. Why else would "Lightning Joe" Collins himself have signed the orders if Kitchens weren't an out and out spy for Headquarters U.S. Army?

Gilruth came up and introduced himself. Kitchens snapped off a desultory salute.

"Car's over there, Major. Can I help you with bags?"

Kitchens declined. "I can manage. It's just good to be on the ground finally. Long haul from Guam in that egg-beater of a flying crate over there."

The officers piled into the Army Ford sedan and sped out of the airbase complex, hitting the Hibayashi Highway into Tokyo in the middle of a convoy of Army trucks.

"Headed to Yokohama docks, most likely," Gilruth said. "Ammo and supplies for the front."

Kitchens had explicit orders from Collins and the SecDef, General Marshall, not to reveal the real purpose of his visit. According to the paperwork, he was detailed to Far East Command's 5th Military Police Company, but that was just a bureaucratic fig leaf. The truth was he was in town to ferret out what he could about some lame-brained scheme to hijack a few atom bombs from a Pacific test. The less that became public, the better, not the least of which was the suspicion that members of Doug MacArthur's own staff were somehow involved.

Kitchens didn't personally believe such a cockamamie plot was even possible but then orders were orders.

"Where's the Old Man hiding 5th MPs these days?" Kitchens asked.

Gilruth swung the Ford onto a traffic-clogged Hibiya Dori and pointed out the long eastern ramparts of the moat surrounding the Imperial Palace grounds. "South end of this street, Major. Old insurance company building called the Dai Ichi. SCAP's been there since MacArthur landed right after the surrender."

"Old Man likes to keep an eye on the Emperor, is that it?"

"Something like that. Actually, Far East Command's put 5th MPs under the Adjutant General section. You report to Colonel Charles Kades, deputy chief of staff."

"Right up there with the big boys in this Dai Ichi."

"Yep. You're in the basement."

Kitchens chuckled. "Nobody likes to show off their dirty laundry, Major."

Gilruth swung the car into a side lot, negotiated the white-helmeted MPs at the gatepost, and parked. "You in town to clean up the docks, Major? We've had drunk and disorderlies by the hundred down there since the Navy eased up on its liberty regulations. MacArthur's really on the warpath about it."

They got out and went inside, saluting their way through a bevy of junior officers.

"Something like that, Major." Kitchens was more interested in hooking up with his CID contact, Major Parks Donogan. "Quite a backlog of cases, I hear."

Gilruth steered him through a maze of halls and cubicles and bullpens, up and down several flights of stairs. At last, they came to a door with a stenciled brass plaque: 5th Military Police Company.

"Here you are, Major. Our very own police precinct station."

The two O-4s saluted again. "Thanks for the lift, Gilruth. What about my briefing today? My orders say I'm to see the Old Man and fill him in."

"I'm working on that. You'll have to go through Hickey's office. He'll set it up."

"How do I find this General Hickey anyway?"

Gilruth smirked. "No one 'finds' General Doyle Hickey. If he wants to see you, he'll find you. Remember, Major, you're on holy ground here."

Kitchens knew a wise guy when he saw one. He opened the door and went in.

Major Parks Donogan had been expecting Kitchens. The heavy-set florid officer nearly knocked over his chair getting up. They exchanged salutes, then handshakes.

"Heard you had arrived, Major. Gilruth phoned me to say Hickey assigned him liaison and limo duty. Sorry I couldn't be at Atsugi--" he shrugged sheepishly at the piles of papers and files stashed in every corner of the tiny office. "--we're a bit snowed under around here. I hope you brought an updated set of Uniform Code books. Ours are pretty dog-eared these days. Here--" he cleared away piles of papers and notebooks from a beat-up metal desk by the wall. An oil portrait of MacArthur was mounted on the wall over the desk. "--this is your place. Home sweet home--sorry again for the mess. You'll be wanting to see our casebook of pending actions, I presume. I'll see if I can find it--" Donogan had red hair, damp with perspiration. The tiny office was sweltering; a steam radiator clanked away in a far corner.

"Actually, Major, I'd rather just get settled in. There's a few things I need to fill you in on. Got a coffee pot going anywhere?"

Donogan flailed about the room until he uncovered a stainless steel pot perking away behind a stack of file folders. "I'll juice it up a bit," Donogan promised, dumping the old coffee and making a new batch. "Only take a minute. Make yourself at home."

Kitchens dumped his duffel bag and attaché case on the desk. He flipped through some case files while Donogan busied himself with the coffee. At last, the Irishman seemed to have matters under control.

Donogan regarded Kitchens curiously. "How come your orders got signed off by Lightning Joe, Major? If I may say so, that's like having your confession heard by the Pope himself. A bit of overkill, if you ask me."

Kitchens just wished Donogan would sit still and shut up. Donogan was supposed to be his liaison and primary contact, basically home base for the investigation. Jesus H. Christ, Kitchens thought, the man's going to pop an artery before the coffee's done.

"Major, let's just say I'm not here to work off your backlog of cases. I know a cover story was put out to that effect. But I have specific orders from General Collins and the SecDef about one particular case. Something known as Gallant Flag."

Donogan scrunched his face and thought for a moment. "Nope. Never heard of it."

"I'm not surprised. But understand this: by order of the Chief of Staff, all your pending cases now have lower priority than my case. Gallant Flag is number one on the docket, and you're to assist in the investigation in every way possible." Kitchens extracted a sealed envelope and handed it over. "It's all there, in black and white."

Donogan sat down in a creaking chair and opened the envelope. The contents detailed the basics of Chambers Kimberly's allegations; the case notes were all there, including Army and FBI responsibilities and lines of authority.

Donogan scanned, then whistled. He handed the envelope back carefully.

"This is on the level, Major?"

Kitchens repocketed the envelope and tried out Donogan's coffee. It was all he could do to get the bitter liquid down. Donogan had left old grounds in the pot.

"Very much so." He went over the status of the investigation and the details of the agreement with J. Edgar Hoover. "We're in bed with the Bureau on this one. The investigation's split geographically...Army's handling this end, the Bureau anything domestic. Hoover's set up a task force in Washington, command post and everything. I'm working with a Bureau type named Blount...Robert Blount."

Donogan couldn't believe it. "You really think somebody's trying to hijack some a-bombs and sneak them into Korea?"

"Hell if I know." Kitchens lit a cigarette and started rummaging around in his attaché case. "Some people think so. And they've got the brass thinking that too., I just have to tiptoe carefully around here. I'm supposed to meet with General MacArthur today, kind of smooth the waters a little. Of course, I can't tell him half his staff is under suspicion. That's what makes this case kind of ticklish. I'm nominally reporting to some of the same people I'm supposed to investigate. How the hell do I handle that?" Kitchens took a deep drag on the cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray.

Donogan was sympathetic. "I'm not too anxious myself to stir up a hornet's nest in the Dai Ichi. A word of advice?"

"Shoot."

"Dai Ichi means 'Number One' in Japanese. And it fits too. Half the Old Man's staff considers themselves numero uno and the other half considers themselves royalty. McA runs the place like a royal court and he's the emperor. It's a tight clan, this Bataan bunch, and running an investigation like this isn't going to be easy. How much are you allowed to tell the Old Man when you two meet?"

Kitchens shook his head. "Nothing. Orders from Collins and Marshall. They've given me orders with a cover story--the one you already heard--and I've got a canned story for MacArthur to go with it. If the Old Man needs any more detail, I'm supposed to refer him to Headquarters. That ought to go over real well. Gilruth already thinks I'm a spy."

"The others will too," Donogan said. He sighed, propped his feet up on a pile of notebooks. "Looks like Washington's given you a tough nut to crack. Where do we start?"

"The files, I guess." Kitchens didn't relish the prospect. It was a part of a CID officer's duties that he liked the least...the legwork, the stultifying case research that often made the difference between winning and losing. "First order of business is to establish the bona fides of all SCAP staffers. Their backgrounds, their service records and so forth, to see who may be in contact with this Albert Ranier from this end.

Donogan's eyes widened. "That's going to take some doing. I'll have to go through G-4 for the records. And he reports right to Hickey."

"Gilruth mentioned him...chief of staff for the Old Man?"

"More like vice-regent...or maybe prince in waiting. Another of MacArthur's toadies. I'll see what I can do...maybe I can think of something. But Hickey's going to be mighty suspicious if some hotshot CID officer shows up from the States and suddenly requests the service records of his whole staff."

Kitchens saw what Donogan was driving at. "Maybe we just do one section at a time. But it's got to be done. We know how the bombs are leaving the States for the test site. We don't know how they're getting here, or into Korea, for possible use. Someone here is in charge of this end of the mission. We just have to find him."

"There is someone else who could possibly help."

"Who's that?"

"Fellow named Bret Billings. Over at the Embassy. Turns out he's chief of station for the Central Intelligence Agency. New kid on the block but he's helped CID before on cases. He might have some useful background."

"Good idea." Kitchens was about to lay out his own case files on the desk when the door opened.

It was Gilruth.

"Your lucky day, Major Kitchens. I've just come from a meeting with General Hickey. General MacArthur has a few minutes on his schedule this afternoon. He'd like you to come up to the sixth floor about 1530 hours."

Kitchens looked over at Donogan, who shrugged. "Tell the General I would be delighted. I'm looking forward to meeting General MacArthur."

Gilruth sniffed. "I'll come back at 1520 hours. You'll need an escort to go upstairs." He shut the door.

Can't trust the peasants to behave around the King? Kitchens thought. He went back to his unpacking.

Donogan suddenly sat up and began clearing file books from his own desk. He wouldn't be needing these cases for awhile. "Looks like your reputation had preceded you, Major. An invitation to the court of his majesty."

"More likely someone smells a spy and they want to sniff me out." Kitchens glanced up at the portrait of MacArthur on the wall. Top dog always knows what's going on in his pack, if he expects to stay top dog.

Promptly at 1520 hours, Gilruth came for Kitchens. The CID officer had, by then, gotten a lift over to his quarters at the Imperial Hotel, unpacked, showered and shaved. He had just returned to the CID office and had started explaining some of Kimberly's major allegations to Donogan when Gilruth showed up.

The two O-4's said little on the elevator ride up to flag officer country at the Dai Ichi, the sixth floor.

General of the Army Douglas MacArthur sat bent over a writing tablet at his desk when Gilruth showed Kitchens into the office.

It was a simple, even spartan office, wood paneled with plain wooden chairs. MacArthur's seat was elevated slightly, the better to look down on his subjects, Kitchens figured.

MacArthur stopped writing, briefly looked up to faintly acknowledge Kitchens and Gilruth, then went back to his writing. An olive green blotter, a black telephone and an ink well were the only items on the desk.

"Be seated, Major." MacArthur tore off the sheet he had been writing on and carefully folded it, inserting the page into an official Army mailer. He handed the envelope to Gilruth. "That'll be all, Gilruth. See that Colonel Bunker gets that."

Gilruth saluted his way out. "Yes, sir." He left.

MacArthur regarded Kitchens coolly, smoothed back his slick black hair, now thinning a bit on top, and steepled his fingers on top of the blotter.

"I must confess, Major Kitchens...I read your orders from the Chief of Staff with great interest. Maybe even a little concern." He withdrew some papers from a drawer; Kitchens recognized the stamp of Headquarters. "I wasn't aware we had such a backlog of cases downstairs. Usually, the Department of the Army doesn't like to get its official hands dirty in disciplinary matters at the theater level. Perhaps, the Chief of Staff feels that Far East Command has lost control of its personnel."

Kitchens wet his lips. MacArthur had a way--maybe it was the deep, almost quavering voice--of making you feel like your own father was lecturing you. "Begging the General's pardon, sir, but my understanding of my orders is that I'm on a fact-finding mission only. I'm to report back to Washington on pending CID cases due to the recent influx of soldiers in this theater. There does seem to be a backlog, sir; the Judge Advocate General was ordered by General Collins to start clearing this backlog at once. There's some concern about the unusually high numbers of disciplinary cases in Korea and Japan and how it will look to our Allies. In fact, sir, I'm supposed to fly over to Korea--Pusan, actually, in a few days. Meet with the Eighth Army's S-4 personally on the matter."

MacArthur sat back in his chair, his face grave and fatherly. "Major, have you ever been in combat before?"

Kitchens was little surprised at the question. "Well, uh, actually, sir, I served in Sicily and Italy with the 10th MPs. Slightly wounded at Palermo...German .88 exploded on top of me and I got a few shell fragments in the shoulder. Nothing serious."

MacArthur nodded. "Most of the boys I've got out here have never seen combat before, son. They're green and they're scared. Situation like that, when we're throwing untested leadership into the face of hell on earth--which is what a Red Chinese human wave assault is really like--is tailor-made for discipline problems. Blind man could see it. Any normal human being would be scared. These boys are fighting and dying and they don't understand why the country doesn't stand behind them. Frankly, I don't either--"

Kitchens was well aware of MacArthur's reputation. Talking with the Supreme Commander was like conversing with a marble statue...you didn't have a normal conversation. The Old Man talked--sometimes at length--and you listened. An occasional "yes, sir" was all the response needed.

"--just keep in mind," the Supreme Commander was still going on about the fortunes of war "--that discipline comes from proper and sound military leadership. And the military leader's task is made immeasurably easier when the principles for which he is fighting are made perfectly clear...as they have not been in this case. Do I make myself clear, Major?"

Kitchens said, "Yes, sir." The Supreme Commander seemed to require little else in the way of conversation.

MacArthur squinted down at him with suspicion. "I know a spy when I see one, Major, but since the Chief of Staff has seen fit to drop you in my lap, I've no choice but to be as hospitable as I can. I wouldn't want the folks back in Washington to think Far East Command is a band of ruffians. If there's any staff or supplies, including help with transport, you may need, you ring up Doyle Hickey. He's my chief of staff and he'll take care of you."

"I appreciate that, sir. But Major Donogan seems to have the CID office here under control. I'm hoping he can provide everything we need." He didn't elaborate on the real reason he had come East, though he knew MacArthur was dying to know.

"I expect any and all my staff to cooperate and assist you fully, Major. If that doesn't happen, I want to know about it."

"Yes, sir, I understand."

With that, the Supreme Commander abruptly stood up. The 'conversation' was clearly over and Kitchens scrambled to his feet as well.

"Come--I'll introduce you to some of the staff. They should be having a little end-of-the day briefing in the war room about now." MacArthur led Kitchens through several outer offices to a conference room, lined with tables and maps. Top Secret signs were plastered everywhere. One table was surrounded by ropes and metal stanchions with a prominent Most Top Secret banner hanging from a light fixture overhead. Maps and ashtrays were scattered across the table. Inside the barriers, several O-5s argued over figures scrawled on a legal pad.

MacArthur made quick introductions and, in short order, Kitchens made brief salute and handshake acquaintances with Major General Charles Willoughby, SCAP G-2 and General "Pinky" Wright, the G-3. Wright introduced his own staffers in attendance, including Brigadier General Paul Craft and Colonel Larry Wilcox. Kitchens winced when MacArthur described him as a "commoner here in Camelot, checking our closets for dirty laundry. Craft seemed especially fascinated with the CID case officer from Washington. The assistant G-3 never took his eyes off Kitchens the whole time he was in the war room.

MacArthur dragged the major through several other offices, showing him off like a prize catch. In quick succession, Kitchens met General Courtney Whitney, chief of SCAP's Government Section, Doyle Hickey, chief of staff and Colonel Laurence Bunker, MacArthur's personal secretary.

When they were done, the Supreme Commander escorted Kitchens back to the elevator personally.

"I had a reason for making all those introductions, Major."

"I assumed you did, sir."

MacArthur folded his arms behind his back and started pacing the hall. Staffers gave him a wide berth as he traced out a course up and down the hall. "I wanted them all to see your face and get to know you personally. That's the best way I know of to scotch rumors. God knows this place is fertile enough ground for rumors."

"Yes, sir."

MacArthur suddenly stopped pacing, right at the guard post to the War Room, lightly fingering a well-worn American flag attached to a standard. "My old command, Major Kitchens...this flag flew at Corregidor, when Wainwright had to surrender the command." His lips quivered for a moment, and he seemed lost in the pain of a private memory. "We hoisted this flag aboard the Missouri in Tokyo Bay in '45, when the Japanese signed the surrender. It's been with me ever since. May she always fly proudly--"

Kitchens found the moment expedient to keep quiet.

"I don't know the real reason you were sent here, Major." MacArthur's face hardened but he continued to play at loose fibers around the frayed edges of the old flag. "The Chief of Staff has his reasons. Washington does not always see fit to confide in its theater commander--which is one reason we're in the predicament we're in now. It's hard to fight the most important battle in the history of the world with one hand tied behind your back. I know Washington has suspicions about Far East Command and what we're doing out here." He turned abruptly and faced Kitchens. His face seemed sad, resigned.

"I trust you will convey the truth of whatever it is you see, Major. Exactly as you see it. Washington needs that much, at least...they seem to have lost confidence in me--"

"General, I doubt that very much. General Collins simply asked me to come out here and help out in some investigations."

MacArthur considered that. His mood seemed to brighten. "Very well. As you wish, Major Kitchens. Since we are now all officially under suspicion, you may return to your duties. You'll have nothing but complete cooperation from my staff. You may rest assured of that."

Kitchens saluted and the Supreme Commander tossed off a perfunctory salute, then disappeared into the inner sanctum of the war room.

Kitchens punched the elevator button, well aware that the silver-helmeted MPs at the guard post were drilling eyeballs in his back, and escorted himself back to the basement office.

Donogan had already buried himself in stacks of case notes from Washington. He looked up, bleary-eyed when Kitchens swept in.

"Well, well...angel descended from Heaven. How'd it go?"

Kitchens plopped himself down in his desk seat and went right back to sorting out case files from his attaché case. "Hard to say. Now I know how Moses felt when he went to the mountaintop."

"The Old Man chew you out?"

Kitchens shook his head, began to idly finger a ballpoint pen, clicking it open and shut. "I'm not sure. He's suspicious as hell. That's for sure. Promised all kinds of help. Then lectured me on duty, honor and sacrifice." He shook his head. "I'm still not sure what that was all about."

"Hey, while you were out--" Donogan waved his hands over the case notes "--I took the liberty of calling this Billings guy over at the Embassy."

"And?"

"We're meeting him at the Lucky Star Noodle Shop. It's a greasy dive a few blocks from here. 1700 hours...just a half hour from now, in fact."

"I could use a bite to eat," Kitchens admitted. "Major Donogan...good thinking. I'm anxious to get started."

Donogan's face beamed. "On cracking this big case?"

"No," Kitchens said. "On a really big Japanese dinner. I'm starved."

Lyle Kitchens quickly learned that Bret Billings knew a great deal about the Japan end of Gallant Flag. Billings was tall, sandy blond crew cut and built like a linebacker, which he had once been. Generous too. He ordered a third round of Kirin beer and brushed off Kitchens' half-hearted attempts to pick up the tab.

"His name is Osawa. Hiro Osawa. Some kind of administrative assistant to Tetsuko. Tetsuko...now there's a real work of art for you." Billings described what he knew about the Japanese industrialist. "Osawa's title is something like executive assistant for transportation and logistics."

"Sort of a glorified valet?"

Billings nodded, played idly with a huge ring on his left hand, a trophy from the '39 Rose Bowl (USC 7, Duke 3). "Something like that. Osawa's been a pipeline for us for some time. An ear right in the middle of Tetsuko's operations."

Kitchens slurped the rest of his third bowl of noodles and polished off a beer. The trip from the States had taken a lot out of him, inasmuch as he'd started out at SACEUR in Brussels. Drink enough beer, was his personal prescription, and you'll sleep like a baby, no matter what the time zone.

"I gather this Tetsuko chap must be a key player."

Billings nodded, let the kyuji drop off another round of drinks and went on. "You don't know the half of it. Tetsuko-san's an octopus, with lots and lots of tentacles poking around where they shouldn't be. It's been conservatively estimated that Masuhiro Tetsuko has bribed or pitched over half the American military force here in Japan, at one time or another. I mean, the man is relentless."

Kitchens listened to Billings' long litany of prosecutable offenses the Army could dump on the industrialist. When the CIA officer was done, Kitchens whistled. "Jesus, if this was Philly, your Tetsuko would be under the jailhouse. What gives? Why does the Army let him go?"

Billings rubbed his fingers together--the universal gesture for money. "Favors. Money. Plus he gets things done. Half the military construction in Japan's contracted out to Tetsuko or his cronies. And with Korea going hot, there's more and more everyday."

"So what else does this cat Osawa say about Mr. Big Pockets?"

Billings related the conversation he had had, in the very same noodle shop, Saturday morning. "The notebook he showed me, if it's legit, has details that would send Tetsuko to the firing squad tomorrow, if they got out. From what Osawa told me, what I saw in his notes, and what I've picked up in my own snooping, we got the makings of a first class doozy here. Bona fide disaster in the making."

Kitchens agreed. "Plenty of evidence Stateside too. Not all of it corroborated. But enough to make the brass sit up and take notice. That's why I'm here."

Kitchens, Donogan and Billings compared notes for a solid hour. Two more beers. The CID officer was developing a pleasant buzz.

"It's inside SCAP." Kitchens was sure of that. "And we can probably narrow it down even more. I'm thinking it's almost got to be a military man, someone from a general staff section, rather than a civilian. SCAP's got several hundred civilians attached but civilians don't transport atom bombs halfway around the world."

"You thinking GHQ?" Donogan asked.

Kitchens said, "I'm thinking we start there. Chief of Staff, G-1 through G-4, Public Affairs, Prosecution, Legal...that's the group we ought to watch."

"I'm supposed to meet Osawa again tomorrow," Billings told them. "Here. Maybe he knows or could find out some names. The Tetsuko notebook he showed me, if it's real, didn't point fingers specifically at anyone inside SCAP."

"It just makes sense," Kitchens said. "To run an operation like Gallant Flag, you need access. Authorized access. The Army operates like a big chest of drawers. Everything's compartmented. And you can't get from one drawer to another without written permission, usually in triplicate. So we look for who inside SCAP, who in GHQ, has authorized access to atomic stuff...who's liaison with the Air Force, for instance. Who's liaison with the Navy. Or the Atomic Energy Commission."

"How do you propose to do that?" Donogan asked.

Kitchens already had some ideas. "Two thoughts on that, Major. One: I accompany Mr. Billings here when he meets with Osawa tomorrow."

"And the other?"

"The old standby of every cop and detective the world over, in uniform or out: midnight snooping." He patted Donogan on the shoulder. "I'd suggest you get some shuteye this evening, Major. You and me will be paying a little nocturnal visit to the Dai Ichi in the wee hours of the morning, tomorrow. Who knows? We just may get lucky and run right into our culprit."

Monday, 1-1-51

Tokyo

8:15 a.m.

Douglas MacArthur stood for a few moments in the middle of the war room. Knots of staffers buzzed around the stifling room, making plans, deploying forces, drawing and redrawing phase lines on topographical maps of the front.

MacArthur studied the southward bubble a new Red offensive had just created in Eighth Army's sector in the west. Won't be long now, he told himself. Seoul was less than fifty miles south of the front. The South Korean capital would soon be overrun by Communist armies for the second time in six months and there was little he could do about it. Sunday morning, less than twenty four hours ago, six Chinese divisions and three North Korean divisions formed up from the remnants of the In Min Gun shattered the UN line and pressed south in human wave infantry assaults, a total force of some 300,000 men.

Battle reports across the entire two-hundred mile front were nearly unanimous: the Reds had the manpower to force the 38th parallel and re-take Seoul in less than a week.

Only a miracle could save Eighth Army now.

MacArthur went looking for Paul Craft. He found the assistant G-3 in a small map room cum library adjacent to the war room.

"See me in my office in five minutes," the Supreme Commander ordered. "We need to talk."

Craft acknowledged and began gathering up the maps he'd been poring over. They were not maps of the Eighth Army front. Craft rolled the plans under his arm and ducked into the office of the Supreme Commander, who paced restlessly, glaring from time to time out the window at the misty, snow-covered Fugiage Gardens of the Imperial Palace outside.

"Shut the door, Paul. We need a little privacy."

Craft pulled the door to, and came to a small table at MacArthur's insistence, rolling open the maps he had removed from the map room. They were maps of eastern China, maps of Manchuria and the Soviet Far East.

MacArthur continued to pace as Craft spread out the maps.

"I don't trust him," MacArthur was saying, as much to himself as to Craft. He paced like a caged animal, anxious, taut, resolute, his fists turning over and over behind his back. "Do you?"

"Begging the General's pardon, sir?"

"Major Kitchens. I'm suspicious of the man. He's a threat...a threat to everything we're trying to do here. I want you to be careful, Paul. Kitchens is a spy, sent here to keep an eye on me. Washington doesn't trust me anymore. Not since they figured out I'm telling the truth. Truth isn't what they want to hear."

Craft was sympathetic. Since Thanksgiving and the first Chicom onslaught, they had all been under a hell of a lot of strain. "I can have the Major tailed, sir."

MacArthur stopped pacing and looked up. He seemed reluctant. "He reports to the Chief of Staff. That could be dangerous. Who else has Joe Collins sent over here that we don't know about?"

"It could be just as dangerous not to know what Kitchens is up to. Besides, sir, my surveillance asset is an expert, a real pro. Lots of experience. He's an asset we make use of to keep an eye on Jap government and industry big shots."

The Supreme Commander held up a hand. "Spare me the details, Major." His eyes closed, then re-opened, clearer. "I'll approve it, as long as it stays covert. I don't want anyone reporting back to Washington that I'm not cooperating, or following orders. God knows, I'm in enough trouble as it is."

Craft said, "I'll see to it right away, sir. We'll have the Major blanketed by nightfall. He won't be able to fart without us knowing it. Daily log, sir?"

"Weekly's fine, Paul. I see you've been in the map room. Some good news for a change, I hope."

Craft unrolled several maps and used a couple of books from MacArthur's bookshelf to weight them down. Then he launched into the real reason for the meeting--a quick summary of where Operation Gallant Flag stood.

"The devices are just about ready to ship to the Pacific now, sir. Greenhouse starts up this month in the Marshalls. There were some delays in processing--with the added devices--and Security needed to be beefed up at Hanford and Los Alamos. The first elements of Joint Task Force Three steam out of San Francisco this week, I believe."

MacArthur listened gravely, arms folded, one hand tugging thoughtfully at his chin as he scanned Craft's map of the Marshall Islands and the central Pacific.

"Go on, Major."

Craft continued. "Facilities are ready now in Kobe to receive the diverted bombs. I estimate the devices will be there in about ten days. A lot depends on the Greenhouse test schedules."

"You have a secure base to launch the mission from?"

"We do, sir. Okinawa. Actually, an outlying island called Mishida. It was an Army Air Forces divert strip in '45. It's being refurbished now. The beauty of this base, sir, is that the Air Force has completely forgotten about it. It's not on anyone's chart. Also, volunteer crews and five aircraft have been located. As yet, they know little about the operation. But that will change, soon."

"What about these volunteers...how's their spirit?"

Craft smiled. "The men are really gung-ho, General. They want to strike back hard against the Chinese and the Russians...as soon as possible."

MacArthur was pleased with that bit of news. "One thing bothers me, though, Major. Operational security. Either the Russians or the Chinese or both have been trying their damnedest to penetrate the Dai Ichi. We were lucky to find that bug last time. I don't want a next time. Is that clear?"

Craft indicated that the entire Far East Command complex was being swept for bugs every day now. "We don't know yet what kind of sensitive information may have been compromised but G-2's looking into it. I'm sure Gallant Flag is safe, sir. We've been extremely careful in open staff meetings to deal with the operation in only general terms."

MacArthur wasn't so sure but he accepted Craft's analysis of the situation. In his own mind, Craft wasn't nearly so sanguine. Privately, he was worried about what the Chicoms or the Russians might know. But they were in too deep now to back out of Gallant Flag. One look at the collapsing front lines of the UN forces in the western sector emphasized that. It would take something dramatic to turn the situation around. Something dramatic and soon.

"General Craft, I want you to look into another idea I've had: airdropping radioactive waste along the infiltration routes from Manchuria into North Korea. Seems to me we could stop the Reds cold, right at the border, if we could just bottle up some of those routes."

Craft was skeptical but cautious in assessing the idea. "I can put your proposal to Dr. Ranier, sir. Through intermediaries. Getting enough material in theater and handling it properly could be problems. But I'll pass the idea on."

"Good. I'd like to explore any alternatives."

"Sir, Gallant Flag is the best approach. The bombs will have the greatest impact, an immediate impact. Quick results are what we want."

MacArthur, somewhat pensive and reflective, agreed. "The quicker the better, Paul. Washington's tied my hands. If we don't do something drastic, even Ridgeway may not be able to save the situation."

1-1-51, Monday

Moscow

1:15 a.m.

Seven thousand miles away, by the light of a single lamp over a paper-strewn desk in the Arsenal Building of the Kremlin, Josef Stalin was thinking the same thing. Stalin was not alone in the tiny office. Foreign Minister Molotov was there with him. Marshal Zhukov too. Vodka and konyak bottles littered the gilt carpet. The men had been drinking all night.

Stalin eyed the winking red-lit star of Spasskaya Tower through the parted curtains, on-off-on-off, like a metronome, cycling every five seconds. Heartbeat of the Kremlin, some poetic lackey had once said.

The Generalissimo crumpled sheets of paper and tossed them at a wastebasket. "I have only one question, comrades. Suppose we can't stop this mad scheme to use atomic bombs in Korea? What do we do next?"

Zhukov, hero of Stalingrad and Marshal of the Soviet Union, was forthright. "We respond in kind. If the Americans wish to widen the war, we can too. I say we move against Berlin. Get rid of this thorn, once and for all."

Molotov agreed. He rubbed his pince-nez glasses with a cloth. His eyes were red and weak, ferret's eyes. "Truman humiliated us with the airlift in Berlin. If Truman uses atom bombs against China, he gives us the perfect excuse to finish Zhukov's work and seize all of Berlin. Perhaps we should even seize all of Germany too. Crush this abomination called the 'Federal Republic.' Give NATO a black eye before Europe re-arms and we have to fight them all over again."

Stalin poured two fingers of Georgian brandy and picked through a half-eaten plate of shashlik and peppers.

It was an appealing thought. But it was risky. "We only have a few operational atomic bombs yet. I've been on Kurchatov's back once a week but his men are working night and day as it is. The plants at Chelyabinsk are refining uranium and plutonium but it will be several years before we have more than a few devices. The Americans have their Strategic Air Command bases in England and Germany. Surely they will have atomic bombs with their B-29s there."

Zhukov growled. "There are ways to deal with these bases, Josef Vissarionovich. Spetsnaz forces are already in place, trained in sabotage."

"That doesn't solve the immediate problem." Stalin wagged a finger in Zhukov's face. "We must do something to take Truman's attention off Korea, something to keep the Americans from concentrating their attention there." The Protector of all Russia shuffled through the papers on his desk, until he found a map of east Asia. "It's no secret MacArthur wants to open a second front against China. We can do the same, right here in Europe."

The men discussed Beria's latest intelligence on the Gallant Flag plot. Stalin weighed the arguments carefully, calculating each man's angle, each man's strengths and weaknesses. There were several options, as he saw it.

"We could arrange to sabotage the bombs before they leave America. We know how they are being transported and we know when."

"And we have the agent Windward in position," Zhukov remarked.

"Such weapons will be well guarded," Molotov said. "Can this agent be certain he has sabotaged the right bombs--the ones to be diverted?"

"A potential problem," Stalin admitted. "Another option would be to sabotage the diverted bombs in Japan or Korea, or wherever they are to be stored until the mission."

Zhukov said, "We have to find them first."

"True. There are other options. We could learn what we can about the actual mission, or missions--targets, routes, and so forth--try to intercept the planes. Or we could simply threaten Truman through back channels that the Soviet Union will respond in kind if the plot goes through." Stalin finished off his brandy and slouched down in the chair, kicking off his boots. "Of course that assumes Truman knows of this plot."

"He must," Molotov said, "since Treeline's told us the FBI is now involved and the Americans are investigating themselves."

"What do you make of this so-called investigation?" Zhukov asked.

Stalin made a face. "Dezinformatsiya. Merely a diversion, nothing more. The Americans are sensitive about having their atomic secrets stolen. But you can't trick a bear once he has the scent."

"Why not do all these things?" Molotov suggested. "That gives us a number of options."

Stalin, anxious to do something to help Mao in Korea, liked the idea.

"Marshal Zhukov, you are hereby authorized to begin mobilizing your armies in Germany and Poland for offensive operations. Bring them forward, fully equipped and ready for combat. Develop plans for seizing Berlin. That should send a strong message to Truman and the Americans."

Stalin scribbled his orders down on a pad and tore the page off, giving it to Zhukov. "I'll also alert Beria. He can authorize Windward to attempt sabotage of the bombs in America, as long as the agent is careful not to get caught. We don't want another Klaus Fuchs or Julius Rosenberg on our hands. Beria's already worked out the details."

Molotov agreed. "The Americans will soon see that we are not weaklings. We won't stand idly by, in Europe or Asia, while the imperialists and colonialists threaten our revolutionary gains."

1-1-51, Monday

Anjin, Manchuria, People's Republic of China

5:30 a.m.

Corporal Ray Skiles wiped sweat and dirt from his eyes, took a few breaths and went back to hacking at the wall of dirt and limestone two feet from his face. Luke Noland was gouging at the wall hard too, working on a seam still protruding from his side of the tunnel. Behind Skiles and Noland, Ned Betters did shovel duty, scooping and pawing loose dirt back behind him to the rest of the tunneling crew. Somewhere behind them, scoop by scoop, bucket brigade style, the dirt was passed back to a mound growing at the rear end of the tunnel.

It had been a long, arduous, sweaty night but Skiles had to admit that Noland was a pretty good worker, for an Army doggie. The tunneling crew had been at it for five days now, and the way Noland put it, they were five days closer to getting out of Prisoner Re-education and Corrective Labor Camp Number Seven. Five days closer to freedom, that had been Noland's sotto voce chant all night long.

Skiles and Betters were sick and tired of hearing the little ditty.

So far, a week's work had brought them decent progress. Every night, half an hour after Sergeant Big Tooth, the Chicom camp guard responsible for Charlie Barracks hand-signaled lights out, a five-man tunneling crew working two-hour shifts had set to work with crude shovels fashioned from floorboards and bedposts. Most nights, the crews worked until sun-up, or at least until the barracks lookouts whispered the approach of Sergeant Big Tooth and his playmates the next morning. Then the tunnel opening was covered over with tables, chairs and bedding and the entire barracks dropped off to semi-exhausted stupor, which lasted perhaps half an hour.

So it went every night.

Nearly an hour ago, Luke Noland had pronounced himself satisfied with the tunnel's progress. That was before the last crew had run into a little problem and the night's digging ended early, while dead-tired brains went to work on some kind of solution.

For four nights, the tunneling crew had burrowed into the clay, dirt and limestone earth of Camp Seven's inner perimeter grounds and navigated toward the outer perimeter wire and woodpost fence mostly by dead reckoning. By five o'clock on the morning of the fifth day, the tunnel was about halfway between the north wall foundations of Charlie Barracks and the inner barbed wire fence, a distance of some sixty feet. The tunneling crew had tried to keep the dig level by measuring the incline of the floor with a small bowl of water and had managed to stay relatively straight and even for most of the week.

Now however, at a depth of twelve feet, they had run into a bank of dirt marbled with hard and dense limestone. Of necessity, Noland ordered a slight jog to the left, to deflect around the vein of rock and keep on digging as long as they could. The problem was the crew had been digging for almost two hours before anybody realized what Noland's little tactical "jog" would mean.

The shape and extent of the limestone mass had now caused them to deflect the tunnel toward one of the guard towers.

Leave it to a friggin' doggie to screw things up, Skiles muttered to himself. He and Noland had whispered arguments and swore at each other under their breath for nearly half an hour before word came that Big Tooth had just taken his customary leak in the open air latrine and was now headed right for Charlie Barracks.

The men scrambled back out of the tunnel and covered up the floor opening as fast as they could. It was a close call. Fortunately, Big Tooth stopped to chat for a few minutes with the guard tower detail. The four Chicoms had an animated talk for nearly ten minutes, all of them breathing steaming clouds of vapor in the freezing air, before Big Tooth begged off and made his way to the barracks door.

Skiles lay on his side, trying to catch his breath and lay still enough to simulate sleep, as best he could.

Noland was three feet away, still breathing hard himself from the frantic climb out of the tunnel. Noland nudged the Marine corporal in the small of his back.

"We'll continue this discussion after the gooks leave."

Skiles gritted his teeth. "It's your screw-up, doggie. You're the one that called for us to jog left."

"At least we got a few more feet dug. Happy New Year, you jarhead prick."

"Fuck you very much."

At that point, Sergeant Big Tooth came calling on the exhausted crew of Charlie Barracks.

The way Luke Noland figured it, if they could keep up their present rate of digging, in another week or so, they ought to be outside both fences and clear of the whole enclosure. The original plan was to go about fifty feet beyond the outer fence, to the vicinity of some trees and brush they had spotted and breach the surface there. The work was hard, exhausting and filled with tension. The tunnelers had to be extra careful to keep the noise of their shoveling down.

For digging tools, they had fashioned crude shovels, picks and chisels from floorboards and wooden chair legs, sharpened and whetted on the stone edge of the latrine basin. One of Noland's biggest fears was that they would run out of flooring and chair legs before the job was done.

Big Tooth made his usual cursory inspection of the barracks, finding nothing amiss and kicking at a few sleeping grunts for good measure. It was still early and the Chicoms knew it was New Year's Day; the camp commander Liu Si-lingh had graciously permitted all his unwilling guests to sleep in an extra half hour before rousting everyone out for muster and roll call.

Big Tooth hmmphed and exited Charlie Barracks, slamming the door behind him. Moments later, arguments flared again. Noland and Skiles went at it like dogs in heat.

When he was reasonably sure the rest of the barracks was pre-occupied with taking sides and egging the two men on, Sergeant Ned Betters, U.S. Army Second Infantry, got up ostensibly to use the head. After making sure no one had followed him, Betters worked open a small piece of wall board under the sink and wriggled out head first into a snow drift. He quickly replaced the wall board and then half crawled, half-ran through the morning twilight toward the inner fence.

A guard tower spotlight caught him in its harsh glare but moved on after a few moments. The guards were well accustomed to the sight of the staff sergeant coming and going. Betters reached the fence, felt his way along the barbed-wire run and found a simple wooden gate. A fur parka-dressed Chicom soldier was there to open the gate. Betters nodded curtly and slipped away through the gate. A hundred yards west, lights were already on in the compound of Liu Si-lingh. The camp commander was up early, padding about in his quarters while outside, the night guard detail was handing off the watch and changing shifts. The small ceremony was briefly interrupted by the hesitant approach of Ned Betters.

Spotting the American, two guards motioned Betters up the steps and into the camp commander's quarters.

Betters shivered in the doorway until Major Liu finished pouring his cup of green tea and acknowledged his presence. Liu was still in his skivvies, white long johns and mustard britches, with boots and an officer's fur cap with red star insignia. He motioned Betters inside.

"A good night's work last evening, Sergeant?"

Betters stood at semi-attention. "Another ten feet, sir. But there was a little problem...happened about five this morning."

"Ah," Liu sipped his tea, sat down in a chair behind his desk. "A problem, you say. And what kind of problem did our brave crew of excavators encounter last night?"

Betters related the stone outcropping they had found and Noland's decision to change the direction of the tunnel.

"The men were still arguing when I left. I'm not sure what will happen."

Liu considered that for a moment. Could he really trust Betters? Was this American scum telling him the whole truth?

"What else, Sergeant?"

"There's nothing else, sir."

"Are you certain of that, Sergeant?"

Betters squinted like he was in pain. It was like Liu to test a man, tease him and try to trick him. You had to watch what you said; the Chicom major twisted what you said like a Philadelphia lawyer and used it against you.

"Yes, sir...that's all there is."

Liu regarded Betters coldly. A rat was a rat in any man's army. Liu had no use for rats but he also had a duty to keep Camp Seven's record intact. Nobody had ever escaped alive.

"Then we have a bit of a dilemma, don't we, Sergeant?"

"Sir?"

Liu lit a cigarette, got up and began pacing the room, passing back and forth in front of the American.

"How long should I let this futile attempt to leave my camp go on?" Liu stopped next to Betters and glared up at the taller American from the side. Betters easily had ten inches to a foot over the Chicom. "What would you do in my place, Sergeant?"

Betters sensed a trap. Liu always had a few extra rations for the American after he made his reports...a few Hershey bars, some coffee, a rotting apple. He looked forward to the treats, like a dog. Best to say nothing--

"--Sergeant, I asked you a question."

"I'm sorry, sir...I...you should follow orders, I guess, sir. That's all any of us can do."

True enough, Liu thought. He returned to his desk. "You understand the escape will fail?"

"Yes, sir."

"And the penalty for attempting escape is execution by firing squad. Your actions will cause some of your friends to die, Sergeant. How does that make you feel?"

Betters licked his lips. His back and shoulder muscles burned and ached from the night's shoveling. "It's like that in war, sir...I guess some of us have to die. The lucky ones."

Liu spat on the floorboards. He wanted to shoot the rat right here and now but he needed Betters' information.

"You are worthless, Sergeant Betters. You are a spineless vermin stooge of Wall Street. Capitalist dogs are the worst kind...they earn nothing. They only take."

Betters froze, expecting a hand slap to the head but Liu remained seated. The 'Mayor' was too disgusted to waste the effort.

When the American didn't respond, Liu grew angry and slammed a hand down on his desk. Then he fished in a bottom drawer for a few ration treats.

For his information, Liu gave Betters a small pack of dried American corned beef and a tin of pears. The ration kits had been retrieved a few weeks ago in an errant American supply drop near Hungnam, as the Marines were trying to escape the 40th Field Army's pincer attack at the Chosin Reservoir.

Liu tossed the rations at Betters' feet.

"Get out, Sergeant! Go back to your stupid escape attempt."

Betters scooped up the tin and beef pack and stuffed them inside his poncho. It wouldn't do to have the boys of Charlie Barracks discover the treats. Betters had a place he stashed Liu's handouts, for quick snacks when the rest weren't looking; it was a corner of the latrine, where he'd loosened a few boards and hollowed out a drop in the snow just outside the barracks walls.

"--I do expect another report tomorrow morning."

Betters half-bowed, backing out of Liu's office and left. He scurried across the snow-covered grounds and wriggled back through the opening in the latrine wall.

Had anyone seen him?

Betters did his business in the latrine, burying the rations, and fell into bed, or what passed for bed--a folded poncho and a few torn sheets. He hoped no one had witnessed his little nocturnal side trip; the barracks was alive that morning, sounding like a snake pit with all the whispered arguments about the tunnel.

Things were heating up again between the Army and the Marines.

But one man had seen Sergeant Betters. Corporal Stan Benecky was in another room, on the other side of the latrine, stashed in a corner full of bloodied sheets, still recovering from having his foot amputated. Benecky had been awake all night, his leg throbbing with pain, itching, burning. He'd pried loose one of the wall planks far enough to sniff a little cold fresh air, catch a slit-eyed view of the roll call grounds and "City Hall.'

Benecky was fully awake and had seen everything.

Now he knew the truth. The men of Charlie Barracks had long smelled a rat. Betters was one of Liu's stool pigeons; now Benecky had the proof.

Corporal Stan Benecky's dismembered leg still ached like hell but the Marine resolved to let Skiles and Noland know what was going on that very morning. Shit, he shook his head. How much did the gooks really know?

One thing was for sure: they'd have to speed up their digging and find a way to get rid of Betters without arousing the Chicoms' attention.

Benecky absent-mindedly whetted a sharp corner of a sliver of iron fence wire he'd fashioned, a personal knife he was saving for when the time was right.

Really, the right thing to do was pretty clear. The best course of action would be for someone just to kill Betters right away. Be done with it. That would solve their problem once and for all.

Stan Benecky threw back the blood-stained sheet and stumbled up to his one remaining foot, fence wire sliver in hand. He began to limp toward the room where Betters and a few others were dozing.
CHAPTER 15

Tuesday, January, 2, 1951

Central Utah

6:15 a.m.

Fyodor Trofimenko, nee Klaus Krieg, glared out the right-side passenger window of the Beech J-50 Twin Bonanza. They were level at nearly eight thousand feet, the orange ball of the sun just poking up over the San Rafael range several hundred miles to the east. Directly below them, the winding track of the Union and Pacific's Santa Fe and Provo Line made a westward jog around Mount Belknap and the Fremont Indian reservation before turning north for the straight shot into the Great Salt Lake valley. Red sandstone cliffs crowded a narrow valley at the crook of the Fishlake Forest; lights speckled through faint early morning haze as hundreds of homes, cottages and cabins nestled up to Highway 133 winked on and off, stirring to life on the second day of the new year.

"You sure you want to continue with this, mister?" The plane's pilot, Ralph Day, owner and sole proprietor of Albuquerque's Daytime Aviation, glanced over at his oddball passenger for about the twentieth time, shaking his head. "Hunting for a train in this wilderness has got to be the most cockamamie, screwball idea I've ever heard of. Why don't you just call up the railroad? See if you can get a schedule or something?"

Trofimenko was certain they were following the right track. But no train had appeared since they'd intercepted the track just south of Moab and that was worrisome. It wasn't like the U.S. Army to be late when making a special delivery. And in this case, the special delivery was in fact nine Mark VI atomic devices for Operation Greenhouse, destined for loading aboard the U.S.S. Chesapeake at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, San Francisco.

"So I'm a train buff," Trofimenko muttered. He adjusted his binoculars, silently cursing the light haze. "I like to follow tracks, study the terrain, the towns and so forth. I get ideas."

"At night?"

Trofimenko shrugged. "If you don't build models, you wouldn't understand...can we go a little lower...get below this haze?"

Ralph Day chewed nervously on the stem of his pipe and did as he was asked. Paying passengers had been hard to come by lately and charters nonexistent. Day had figured he was about two weeks from having to mothball the aircraft, maybe a month from defaulting on the loan, if business didn't pick up. But if some nutcase wanted to rent the twin-engined blue and white beauty for sixty-five dollars an hour and follow railroad tracks all over the desert, so be it. Money was money.

Day chopped the throttles to the 340-horsepower Lycomings and put the aircraft into a shallow dive, leveling out at five thousand feet. Gentle thermals rocked them as the pilot eased November-Five-Six-Eight-Three-One Lima into a five-degree bank, straddling the black scar of the Union-Pacific line below them.

And that's when Trofimenko spied the Army train, inching its way laboriously northward at forty-five miles an hour. His heart thudded with the sight and he scrambled to put his binocs on the three engines up front.

"--it's our baby, all right," the Russian agent announced. The white star and olive drab coverings were unmistakable.

ARTC-118, known informally as 'The Sierra Bullet', had departed the trackside loading pavilion at Los Alamos' North Gate a few minutes after midnight, about six hours before. The train ran on the Union-Pacific's standard three-foot gauge track of its Santa Fe-Provo Line, twenty eight box cars in all, neatly bracketed by three black diesel engines at the front end and two more bringing up the rear.

Heavily guarded by two full platoons of riflemen detailed from the 12th Military Police Company, the train had proceeded northbound on the Santa Fe Line during the night, taking a shortcut spur onto the Provo North branch at Montezuma Creek, Utah, shortly before four a.m.

And in the very center of the military train's twenty-eight sealed and armored box cars rode four lead-shielded, compartmented special cargo cars locked down with welded padeyes and hundred-pound iron bolts.

These cars each mounted three of Operation Greenhouse's nine Mark VI devices, firmly bolted to padded, shock-attenuating foundations and minus their end caps and final plutonium 'criticality' plugs, but otherwise fully functional, war-capable atomic bombs, complete with all fusing and firing circuitry.

It was Fyodor Trofimenko's job to stop the train from ever reaching Hunters Point.

"Can we go a bit lower, pilot?"

Ralph Day shrugged and dropped the Twin Bonanza down another two thousand feet. He chopped their airspeed back to a notch over 175 knots indicated, and began executing a series of lazy, shallow-angle banks, crisscrossing the tracks to give his passenger a better view.

Anything for a buck, Day thought sourly. Three seconds later, the Beech aircraft was rocked by a rolling thunderclap of shock waves. Outside the cockpit windows, black smoke blossomed out of a red-orange flower-petal burst and shrapnel from the 75-mm anti-aircraft proximity shell tinkled against the glass.

"What the fuck--!" Ralph Day yanked the wheel hard right and gunned the Lycomings. The Beech stood on her wingtips as more shell bursts pocked the morning sky behind them. "That's a goddamned Army train--!"

They spiraled away east of the track. Day righted the aircraft and leveled off at six thousand feet, sweat beading up on his forehead. His hands were shaking as they squeezed the wheel. He glared over at his passenger for some kind of explanation.

Trofimenko instead produced a pistol, Tokarev 7.62-mm automatic, and leveled it at Day. The pilot alternated between furtive glances over at the weapon and keeping an eye on his instruments. Behind them, more shells from the train-mounted 75-mm guns peppered the sky.

"Are you crazy!" Day yelled. He banked again to put some distance between them and the train. "What the hell's the matter with you?"

Trofimenko switched the weapon to his right hand and, with his left, fumbled with the padlock securing a wooden crate in the back seat. Finally, one-handed, he sprang the lock and shoved back the cover. Inside were several dozen standard U.S. Army time-fused detonation grenades and a few satchel charges packed with C-3. He fished out several grenades and arrayed them on the floor of the cockpit, holding them with his feet.

Ralph Day's neck hairs tingled at the sight of the explosives. He knew he should have sworn off this gig the moment Trofimenko had walked into the offices of Daytime Aviation at B Hangar. The guy had made his skin crawl from the moment they had taken off.

"You ain't no damned train nut, mister!" Day leveled the aircraft and fought back the coppery taste of panic. "Put that thing down, will you?"

"Please return to course, Mr. Day." Trofimenko saw they were now on a heading that was taking them away from the rail line. "Now. And reduce your altitude...to about five hundred feet. That should do quite well."

"No way, pal. You trying to get us killed? That's a friggin' military train we're following down there. And those are real shells they're firing at us. Those boys are deadly serious."

"So am I," Trofimenko said. "Gently, please...make the turn--" he placed the barrel of the Tokarev against Day's temple and cocked the weapon "--and drop us down. Make a pass over the front engines of that train."

Day figured he'd better comply. Of course, it was unlikely his oddball passenger would really be so stupid as to pump eight rounds into the head of his pilot, unless he himself was a trained pilot. Still, Day found himself obeying the Russian, turning the Twin Bonanza around anyway, in spite of his better judgement.

"--now reduce altitude, please. Those shells are fused for higher altitude. If we pass below our original altitude, it should take them a minute or two to adjust the fuses."

The guy had it all figured out. What the hell was he trying to do: grenade an Army train?

Trofimenko readied a few of the grenades, cradling them in his lap, while switching hands, keeping the Tokarev trained on Day's head.

As expected, the train's anti-aircraft defenses opened up again. Pops and cracks sounded above and around them. Shell bursts littered the sky like miniature thunderclouds. Ralph Day gritted his teeth and put the aircraft in a dive--Jesus, the last time I did this, Japs were shooting at me over Saipan--notching up the rpms of the Lycomings to scoot past as fast as he could.

"You sure as hell ain't no train modeling fancier, mister!"

Trofimenko unlatched the side door and shoved it open against the 150-knot slipstream. It cranked out a couple of inches. "Very observant of you, Mr. Day! Kindly slow the aircraft down, please!" He had to yell over the roar of the air. The plane started to buffet, shaking hard, as Day fought the controls.

"What the--?"

"--slow down! NOW!" The Russian agent jammed the Tokarev barrel into the side of Day's temple again.

"Yeah--sure thing, mister--" He chopped the throttles. Their airspeed dropped off suddenly to 140 knots, just above stall speed, and the Twin Bonanza shuddered, clawing at the air, then bucked when a staccato salvo of shells bracketed them. A loud crack! split the cockpit and shell fragments spanged off the fuselage and windows, crazing the glass with star-shaped pits.

"--Jesus--"

Trofimenko shoved harder against the side door and it cranked out another inch. Wind roared around the opening. Below them, sandstone cliffs flashed by, then tiny farms and a winding road.

Trofimenko squinted, shielding his eyes in the screaming wind. There--the rail line...the Army train dead ahead. The aircraft rocked with more shell bursts and Day struggled to hold the wings level and keep them in the air. Trofimenko glanced over his shoulder, keeping the Tokarev aimed in Day's direction and counted down the seconds. Just there! Now! He pulled the ring pins of the three grenades, one after the other, and let them drop through the opening....

The Russian agent knew the plan was a long shot. Originally, Trofimenko wanted to create some kind of diversion on the ground that would stop the train, then drop a few explosives from the air. Just do enough damage to keep the train from continuing on to San Francisco, that's all he needed. But after the meeting with Brylin and Treeline in Mexico, there wasn't enough time to work the operation that way. The last few days had been a blur for Trofimenko as it was.

Instructions in Mexico. The ride over the border. Insertion into Los Alamos--that had been nerve-wracking. Meeting Ranier, Tolkach and the others. Learning the details about Gallant Flag. And now arranging a plan to stop the bombs in America...Moscow Center had assigned him that task, with no guidance on how it was to be done, and little time left to do it.

It was typical of the Commissariat, typical of the lamebrains at Number 2 Dzerzhinsky Square that the most impossible tasks were assigned with no thought as to how they might be accomplished. Recruit a hundred sources by next week. Gather intelligence on tank strength in Germany and get the numbers to Department A by tomorrow. Change the moon's orbit and make a report by 0800 hours.

Clearly, Moscow Center was staffed with beings who had superpowers, like the American comic book hero Superman. Yes, that had to be it. 'Strange beings from another planet.'

Trofimenko had dropped a great deal of money on Ralph Day's desk the day before. That had gotten the pilot-owner's attention.

"Train fancier, huh?"

Trofimenko made up a story on the spot, insisting they leave Albuquerque at night and follow a specific rail line heading north out of Santa Fe. When Day seemed dubious, the Russian had seen fit to sweeten the pot with a few more dollars. Americans were like that. The leathery-faced pilot with the cowboy string tie knotted with a metal clasp had had no further questions.

Of course, the whole idea of stopping an Army train with a few grenades was preposterous. But Moscow Center was serious and an assignment was an assignment. Trofimenko had leaned hard on his Santa Fe contact, the pottery shop owner Harry Conway, for answers. It was Conway who had somehow scared up the grenades and the C-3 satchels from friends in the military surplus business. Trofimenko didn't ask how. Obviously, someone else had been leaning on Conway just as hard.

Now the best he could hope for was to somehow damage the track, maybe put enough of a scare into the Americans that they would halt the train, offload the bombs, maybe send them back to Los Alamos.

Just as the Twin Bonanza roared by overhead, the three grenades went off. The first detonated in the air, a hundred feet over top of an armored boxcar. The second and third grenades inflicted minor damage on the third engine, knocking off an exhaust smokestack. As Day pulled up and banked left to get the hell out of Dodge, small-arms fire opened up from the train itself. Sharpshooters from the 12th MPs let fly a volley of shots from BARs; a few had crawled up on top of the rear cars, spraying rounds into the air from their prone positions.

Ralph Day put their aircraft in a steep climb, ignoring the Russian's Tokarev, which was being held desultorily in Trofimenko's left hand while he grabbed for more grenades. Day leveled them off at two thousand feet and was about to make a direct turn south for the New Mexico state line when a green and black streak of tracer fire stitched a seam across the sky directly in front of them.

Instinctively, Day threw the Bonanza into a sharp right bank. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted the source...there overhead at ten o'clock...he was stunned to see another aircraft, B-26 by the looks of it, turning to match headings. Thirty-caliber machine gun fire erupted again, spitting tongues of flame from the nose turret of the aircraft, as rounds swept in front of them. Something hit the Bonanza's tail; Day immediately felt the jolt and found the controls sluggish. Trofimenko had lowered his own pistol in the confusion and was craning forward to see who else was firing on them.

Ralph Day saw his chance and didn't hesitate a second. With the aircraft still heeled over in a steep bank, the pilot reached out with his right hand and knocked the Tokarev out of the Russian's grasp. The angle of the cockpit and the suction of the windstream did the rest.

The pistol clattered across the floor and slipped out through the door opening. For a split second, the Russian glared back at Day, calculating possibilities, weighing the risks. Day stared ahead, both hands on the yoke, concentrating on getting them turned south. He wanted to put as much distance as he could between them and the Army train.

Whatever this crackpot passenger had planned, it sure as hell wasn't going to include getting shot out of the sky.

Trofimenko suddenly grabbed two more grenades and hauled one of the satchel charges up front. The aircraft was vibrating badly and Day struggled to keep her wings level. The B-26 had already shot away part of the Bonanza's stabilizer and Day quickly found he had no bank or turn control at all.

Trofimenko pulled the ring pins on the grenades. He turned to face Day.

"Turn the aircraft around! NOW!" The Russian had two fingers over the pin caps, preventing the strikers from reaching the grenades' primer and C-3 explosives.

"Are you friggin' crazy, man?" Day wrestled with the controls, adding rpms here, trimming there, just trying to stay in the air. "That's an Army train down there and we're about to get shot out of the air for messing with them!"

Trofimenko unbuckled his belt and slid across the seat. He grabbed a third grenade from the crate, unbuckled Day's belt and looped the end of the belt through the grenade's ring pin. Then he fastened the belt back, tensioning it so that any attempt to unbuckle would separate the ring from the grenade.

Day stared down wide-eyed in disbelief.

"You will turn the aircraft around, Mr. Day! If you don't, you and I will die a very unpleasant death. Blown to bits and scattered across the desert. Now, do exactly as I say. Turn the aircraft around."

Day didn't have time to make a dispassionate analysis of the situation. He was tied to a live grenade in the cockpit of his own plane, carrying a nut case with two more live grenades who seemed to have some kind of death wish. And they were being stalked by an Air Force B-26, probably escorting the train and flying top cover and surveillance, ready to shred them with cannon fire the next time the Bonanza filled the gunner's crosshairs.

All this for a few hundred bucks and a chance to keep the business afloat another month.

It's not every man who gets to choose his favorite style of dying, Day thought.

He nudged the yoke over--"hey, okay, I'm gonna try to turn this baby around...just keep your shirt on, pal--" and chopped the portside engine to force them into a roll. Not a textbook maneuver but what the hell...it might work. Slowly, the Bonanza veered left and dropped in an air pocket. Midway through the turn--if you could call it that--Day pulled back the yoke to coax a bit more lift from his wings and goosed the engines. It didn't help that Trofimenko still had the door nudged partially out into the windstream. The Bonanza shuddered and wobbled, seeming to skip sideways, then Day ran the throttles fully forward, blasting them through the rest of the turn.

Now they were on course again. Heading right for the Army train at a hundred and fifty knots. Ralph Day allowed himself a slight breath, felt the grenade bump against his ribs, and decided he could skip breathing for awhile.

Even as Day wrestled with the yoke to stay level at eighteen hundred feet, Trofimenko held his own grenades out clear of his body, waving them around the cockpit while he pulled the satchel charge into his lap and prepared the fuse box.

"Down!" he said. "Down lower...like before...."

"We're gonna get riddled, pal--"

Trofimenko waved his grenades in the reluctant pilot's face. "Down...NOW!"

Day complied. His backside felt terribly exposed. As the Bonanza descended for another bombing run, Day craned his head around, peering out every inch of glass, looking for the B-26 he knew had to be nearby. He flinched as the first anti-air rounds from the train popped overhead. Flak bursts tic-tac-toed the sky all around them.

The Russian was fully concentrated on getting the satchel ready for the drop. Above and behind them, the B-26 had circled north and swung around again. The turret gunner was a clean-shaven kid named Ray Heath, fresh out of gunnery school with an expert marksman's rating in the Invader's .30-caliber nose weapon. Heath waited patiently--short, even breaths just like they taught you in gunnery school--letting the physics of aerial maneuvering walk the target aircraft right into the crosshairs of his gunsight. He had to wait only six seconds.

"Skipper, I've got a good bead on him right now...."

Eight feet above and behind Heath's turret station, Air Force Captain Will Mack shook his head in disbelief. What on God's green earth was this knucklehead pilot trying to do? The Douglas B-26B Invader--Tango Charlie One to the air traffic control authorities monitoring on frequency one-one-oh megacycles--had been detached from its normal training regimen only two days before and flown from Fourth Air Force's 198th Bomb Group at Hamilton Field, California to a godforsaken outpost in the middle of Utah's Great Salt Lake, a place at once remote yet infamous as the final Stateside training ground for Paul Tibbets, the Enola Gay and the 509th Composite Group.

Wendover Field was the name and escort/top cover was the mission. For Captain Mack, flying route patrol for an Army supply train across the desert was about as exciting as cutting the grass. At least, until this puzzling Twin Bonanza had showed up at dawn.

"--you are authorized to fire on the target, gunner." Mack let the Invader settle in behind the Bonanza and trimmed her for a near approach pass.

Heath counted down the seconds as the Bonanza slid into his sights and squeezed the trigger.

The first burst of rounds clipped the rudder and left wing of the aircraft, which immediately rolled hard left. Only frantic efforts by Ralph Day righted the plane; he found he had to stand on the rudder pedals and crank in nearly thirty degrees of right bank to keep a straight heading.

Heath's next burst shredded metal skin alongside the fuselage, holing the baggage compartment underneath the cabin. Debris fluttered out into the windstream as the Bonanza shed a cloud of metal, baggage, and miscellaneous parts into the air.

At the same moment, with Ralph Day boxing the control yoke, a ripple of 75-mm shells blasted away part of the door on Trofimenko's side, nearly pulling the Russian out of the cabin. His belt saved him--that and a quick grab for the landing gear handle. Shrapnel sliced into the cockpit windows and tore into the starboard-side Lycoming, severing an oil line. A stream of fuel and oil spewed out of the engine nacelle, white clumped with streaks of black.

The concussion stunned Day and Trofimenko. The satchel charge, already primed, slipped from the Russian's grasp.

"I can't hold her!" Day yelled.

The Russian lunged for the satchel--it fell too soon--but the bomb was already caught in the windstream. It arced behind them and fluttered down, impacting several hundred yards east of the tracks in a bright orange ball of flame.

"--you must--"

"No way!" Day cried. "We're getting the hell out of here--"

The next burst of rounds from Heath's .30-caliber cannon tore off the Bonanza's right wing skin like a peeled onion. Metal shrieked and cartwheeled away in jagged sheets, exposing wing girders and struts. The big Lycoming sputtered, coughed and seized, throwing its eight-foot prop.

Day just managed to kill the engine before fuel could spray into the hot wreckage.

The Bonanza veered right, dipped and began a slow clockwise spiral away from the train. Taken by surprise--Day had decided not fight the spin right away...it got them out of the line of fire faster than any maneuver he could have devised--the B-26 overshot and roared past them just a hundred feet overhead, slapping the Bonanza with its heavy wake and prop wash.

Day let them spiral for a few tense seconds, momentarily grateful the Russian seemed dazed by the attack, then jammed the yoke hard left, ran his good portside engine up to maximum rpms, and dropped the nose. It was risky but it was their only chance. They needed speed and lift quickly to counter the spin...the only place left to go was straight down.

Four hundred feet above the desert floor, Ralph Day tasted bile and knew the truth of the old saying about second chances. He had ceased breathing for the duration and his head and lungs screamed for oxygen. He pulled hard and steadily on the wheel, cutting his one good engine back slightly and gradually, gritting his teeth, managed to ease the seven-thousand pound flying bomb of an aircraft out of the dive. When he had finally managed a wings-level attitude, though they were buffeting enough to shake more parts off the aircraft, Day took a deep and welcome breath and glanced down at the altimeter. Two hundred and fifteen feet, screaming across a rocky flatland of desert at nearly two hundred knots and it felt like a giant was squatting on the rightside wing. Already Day's arms and shoulders ached from having to hold hard left bank; the Bonanza had little rudder and minimal aileron. Most of the right wing skin was gone and the aircraft rocked and bounced like a stream of boulders rolling down a mountainside.

But, somehow, they were still flying. Ralph Day allowed himself the slightest hint of a smile. His first flying instructor had always said he had the piloting instincts of a cow.

Goes to show you, Mr. Hammonds, that even cows can fly if they're desperate enough.

Day steadied them on a generally southerly heading, more or less paralleling the dusty brown slash of Utah 133, and chanced a glance over at his screwball passenger.

Trofimenko clung to his seat like a child at a Frankenstein flick. Gray-green spit dribbled from the corners of his mouth and his eyes were screwed shut. Ahead of the Bonanza, a forested slope was growing larger by the second; Day found it on a terrain map: Summit Mountain, elevation 9900 feet.

They were heading right over the tops of Dixie National Forest. Pines and pinon trees flashed by two hundred feet below them.

"I'm pulling out of here, pal...." He glanced down at the grenade still fastened to his shoulder strap. Somehow, in all the wrenching maneuvers, the thing had stayed pinned and not gone off. Day wished he hadn't looked down.

"--fly...fly south," the Russian croaked.

Ralph Day didn't need any more encouragement to do that. Now, somehow, he had to get November Five-Six-Eight-Three-Oh-One Lima turned back southeast and then get a vector back to Santa Fe. If they had enough fuel and if they could stay in the air, they might be able to limp back. Day didn't want to call in a May Day. That would only bring in the authorities. And authorities always brought questions. Embarrassing questions.

There was no way he would ever be able to explain his passenger or why November Five-Six-Eight-Three-Oh-One Lima had repeatedly violated restricted airspace over an Army supply train.

Where the hell was their company? Day searched the skies around them for the B-26. Nothing. They had dropped down to treetop level to avoid being blasted out of the sky and Ralph Day figured the successful maneuver was probably worth a few Distinguished Flying Crosses, if anybody had asked. Now with the last of the satchel charges gone, only a few grenades remained of their deadly cargo.

Day eyed his own attached grenade with mounting concern.

"I don't suppose you would be so kind as to untie this damn thing, would you? If I were to twitch or sneeze or something, we could wind a ball of flame in about three seconds, at this altitude. I'm having to fight the wheel enough as it is."

Trofimenko was grim, still clinging to his seat. The side door rattled in its frame. He rested two grenades in his lap, thumbs still on the pin caps.

"Fly south."

"I am flying south. Back to Santa Fe."

"--no...to Mexico. Fly south to Mexico."

Day shook his head. Wind whistled through bullet and shrapnel holes in the cockpit. "No way, man. We're shot up like a pin cushion. I'm having to lean on the wheel to keep her level as it is. We need to return to base."

Trofimenko seemed to shake himself out of his daze. He realized he was still clinging to a pair of live grenades. "Mr. Day, you're not in any position to demand anything. Steer a heading due south. If we can make Santa Fe, we can make Mexico."

Day was about to argue the point but Tango Charlie One made up his mind for him. The B-26 had tailed them south after the Bonanza's aborted pass over the train and was now in a shallow dive from six thousand feet, having finally spotted the smaller aircraft skimming the treetops of the national forest twenty miles east of Cedar City, Utah. Captain Will Mack was maneuvering the bomber for another guns pass.

Day somehow heard the growl of the Invader's twin Pratt and Whitney radials over the cockpit whistling and put the Bonanza on a twisting, jinking course across the very tops of the forest's thick stand of evergreens.

Heath's first burst sent green and black tracer fire slashing into the treetops.

For the next two hours, there followed a harrowing game of cat and mouse through and around the forests and mountains of southern Utah. The trees passed by, replaced by steep, ruddy canyons, the first ramparts of Zion National Park. Tango Charlie One dropped down to a thousand feet, still in hot pursuit, as Ralph Day steered an evasive course through the hard scrub and sandstone cliffs, switching back several times to throw the pursuit off. It never worked and by the time they had made the Arizona state line, the sere Black Hills ahead of them, Day and his passenger were rapidly running out of ideas.

Day fought back panic...and too many sharp maneuvers, mindful of the grenade he was still wearing.

He stole a glance over at Trofimenko, whose eyes were half closed. Was he dozing? Day knew he couldn't just grab the grenades, not if the pins were gone. And any sudden lurch might loosen the ring of the grenade on his seat belt.

He was stuck, a prisoner in his own aircraft.

Ahead, the crumpled folds of the Grand Canyon loomed on the horizon.

Tango Charlie One dropped back a mile or so behind the Beech. Will Mack was amazed the smaller aircraft was still in the air. One hell of a pilot, he surmised. Damn lucky too. It was a cinch they couldn't stay airborne much longer, not the way they were streaming off oil and parts. It was just a matter of time before November Five-Six-Eight-Three-Oh-One Lima landed, one way or another.

Mack put in a call to Southwest military sector control at Nellis, a few hundred miles to the west. He described the situation, what had happened, the condition of the target aircraft. "He's losing parts of his aircraft. Looks like a striptease act. What do you want me to do?"

Sector Control came back a few minutes later. Continental Air Forces ran the sectors, dividing up the nation's airspace into slices. The dispatcher was brusque, no-nonsense.

"Tango Charlie One, I have your vector here. Continue pursuit of target for the time being. Tenth Sector is scrambling more aircraft now. They should be forming up on you within the hour. Advise your status and any changes in target ASAP. Sector out."

Will Mack wasn't upset about the orders. In fact, he was rather pleased that their normal duty cycle had been interrupted by something as exciting as an unknown Beech Twin Bonanza making strafing runs on an Army train. Sure beats flying border patrol and top cover missions. He advised the crew of their orders, then trimmed Tango Charlie One for best cruise and settled in for a long day.

Tenth Sector was nothing if not thorough. Captain Will Mack was impressed. Within an hour of the call-in, Tango Charlie One had been joined by two other B-26B's, Tango Echo One and Tango Echo Two, and a pair of antique F51D Mustangs that Continental Air Forces had scrambled out of Nellis.

Mack chatted on the air-to-air circuit with all the newcomers. He soon found Tango Echo Two carried a VIP crewman...one Special Agent Charles Race of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Albuquerque Field Office.

Race elliptically described the national security cargo aboard the Army train. "We have reason to believe the target aircraft was there to sabotage the...uh, cargo aboard that train. Possible Soviet involvement, too. Captain, we want to bring that Beech down inside American territory, with the crew alive, so we can question them. This is now a critical national security mission."

Mack knew a cover story when he heard one and he'd been around security procedures long enough to know when to keep his mouth shut. But he did have one question.

"How the hell am I supposed to bring that aircraft down without shooting it out of the sky?"

Race's voice was tense, impatient. "You're a trained pilot, Captain. Use your training. I just want that plane and crew for evidence in my case. Intact. Is that understood?"

Mack acknowledged and signed off. Dead ahead at three thousand feet, the black speck of November Five-Six-Eight-Three-Oh-One Lima wobbled on, trailing a plume of oily smoke halfway across the sky. Lake Havasu City and the California border lay off to the right, cut by the burnished green-brown ribbon of the Colorado River. Ahead of them, the rocky lumps of the west Arizona high country marched off to a hazy, dusty horizon.

Mack chewed on a stick of gum. Bring the aircraft down, my ass, he mumbled. Tango Charlie One was a medium bomber assigned to Fourth Air Force, not an aerial nursemaid.

Mack spoke to his co-pilot, Lieutenant Jenkins. "Jenks, you think this cornball's trying to make it to Mexico?"

Jenkins was engaged in trying to open his fifth Hershey bar of the flight. "Looks that way, Captain. I would too if somebody caught me strafing an Army train."

"You heard that G-man over on Tango Echo Two. How the hell are we supposed to bring that sucker down without getting anybody killed?"

"Beats me, skipper. Maybe we just play Sky King and ram the son of a bitch."

But Captain Will Mack hadn't heard what Jenkins said. He already had an idea. And it started with an episode of Sky King he'd heard on the radio.

Mack radioed Tango Echo One and Two and the two Mustangs to discuss his strategem. There were plenty of objections: it was risky, it might backfire, a lot of flying skill would be needed and there was no guarantee the Beech pilot would react rationally.

Charles Race was nominally in charge of the pursuit. "Look, guys, we don't have time to vote on this. We've got to catch up to the joker first and hope he doesn't fall out of the sky before we get there. We're only an hour away from the Mexican border. Let's do it."

By consensus, Tango Charlie One would take the lead. Surrounding the errant aircraft in a moving "box" and forcing him down would take every ounce of Will Mack's nerve and skill.

The first step was to catch up to November Five-Six-Eight-Three-Oh-One Lima and bracket her in the box. That alone took almost ten minutes. By the time the fleet of pursuing aircraft had passed by Imperial Dam and the tawny wasteland of the Yuma desert stretched ahead, the three B-26's had closed on the Beech and assumed positions overhead, below and directly behind the smaller aircraft. The two F-51's then closed and lay off the Beech's nine and three o'clock positions, abeam of her wings and well within visual hailing distance, station-keeping at one-hundred and eighty knots.

It was Charles Race's voice that sounded over the radio, broadcasting on the standard civilian frequency of one-two-five megacycles.

"To the pilot of the Beech aircraft...tail number November Five-Six-Eight-Three-Oh-One Lima...this is Special Agent Charles Race of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Do you read me, over?"

There was a bleep of static, but no voice return. Tango Charlie One had the top cover position. Not perfectly situated directly over the Beech's cockpit, Will Mack found he could see inside the smaller aircraft's cabin. A struggle appeared to be underway...Mack saw arms flying, then something fell from the partially opened cabin door--

\--and the object detonated right above Tango Echo Two's cabin directly below. For a split second, nothing happened, though all the pursuing aircraft had seen and heard the explosion.

"What the --?"

Tango Echo Two suddenly peeled hard right and dove out from under the Bonanza. At the very same instant, Tango Echo One and Tango Charlie One also banked away, putting as much distance between themselves and the Beech as they could. The F51's scooted off, circled around and formed up as a pair right behind the Bonanza, both sighting their 0.5-inch Colt-Browning machine guns on the shot-up tailplane of the target.

"--Jesus H. Christ!...what the hell was that!--"

Charles Race's voice cracked as it came back on the air. "Beech aircraft...cease fire at once! Cease fire at once! Beech aircraft November Five-Six--"

But the Bonanza suddenly shuddered and pitched nose down toward the desert floor.

"--stay with him!"

The Mustangs closed and let fly a volley of tracer fire, narrowly missing the Beech as it plummeted. They nosed over too, now in their true element, and headed down, firing clipped bursts of 53-2 rounds.

"Hold it! Hold it!" Race yelled. "All units...cease fire! I say again...all units...cease fire, cease fire!"

The Mustang pilots backed off, still in descending pursuit, but held their fire. Down they screamed, as the Beech wobbled, nearly in a spin, jinking and twisting, ahead of them. One thousand feet...eight hundred...six hundred....

The Mustangs began to pitch up, certain the target was only seconds from impact. Both pilots gunned their big Packard Merlins and leveled off less than a hundred feet above a ridge of sand dunes. Saguaro cactus whipped by their perspex cockpits at dizzying speeds. Behind them, the Twin Bonanza had pancaked out of its own plunge and settled in scant yards above the desert floor, clipping a dune with the shredded remnants of its left wing.

Its pilot fought the controls, somehow managed to right the aircraft into a more or less wings-level attitude, then climbed on a spurt of engine rpms back up to three hundred feet.

Will Mack, flying a zigzag course a thousand feet overhead, could only whistle and shake his head at the antics he had just witnessed.

Five minutes later, miraculously, with parts of its port wing and rudder shot away, November Five-Six-Eight-Three-Oh-One Lima, flying at an altitude of exactly three hundred and ten feet, made the Mexican border, passing in sight of the mud huts and tin shacks on the outskirts of Mexicali.

Mack got on the radio. "I don't know what the hell that was, men, but this joker's just begging for a few .30-caliber rounds up his ass."

Race's voice chirped over the circuit. "Hold your fire, hold your fire. That's the Mexican border we just crossed."

Tango Echo One cut in. "So what...we're in hot pursuit, aren't we? I say we smoke that bastard's remaining engine and let the chips fall where they may. If he's half the pilot he appears to be, he can bring her down."

"No, no, no...look, I'm in charge of this mission," Race insisted. "We got legal problems just being in Mexican airspace without authorization."

"I can fix that," Mack suggested. "Just get on the horn to Mexican air traffic control. We got the frequency."

The debate went on for several minutes. Below them, the Beech limped along over the burnished moonscape of the Sonoran desert, barely three hundred feet above ground. Ralph Day kept one eye on the fuel gauge--it was bumping EMPTY--and one eye on the terrain at their feet. It wouldn't be long before simple physics would force them to land. Below, the desert was a rubbly hardpan of cactus and rolling dunes. Not a lot of good landing sites down there. The Gulf of California lay like a royal blue mirage off to their left. Maybe they could ditch in the shallow surf instead.

"Look," Day said. "We're going down soon, like it or not." He kept his eyes on the ground below, scanning for flat spots. Beside him, Trofimenko was fidgeting nervously with his one remaining grenade. He'd dropped the other one almost on top of the American bomber.

They were in Mexican airspace but the Americans had maintained their pursuit across the border, giving the Beech a little distance but keeping the aircraft under close surveillance all the same. Waiting, the Russian realized, like vultures. If Day could manage a safe landing, the Americans would almost certainly put down too and make an effort to grab the Bonanza's crew. That, he reminded himself, could not be permitted.

Trofimenko fingered the small amulet he wore around his neck. Brylin had given him the cyanide ampoule a week ago, for just such an occasion as this. But Windward had no intention of being so gallant. No, let Day put them down, preferably near a town or ranch. Trofimenko figured he could disappear into the local pool of obreros easily enough. The trick would be to manage the disappearance.

First, he would have to dispose of Ralph Day.

"--and I'd like to get rid of this...this thing here--" Day was still talking, indicating the live grenade still fastened to his seat belt. "We may be in for a rough landing and--" Day never finished the sentence.

At that same moment, November Five-Six-Eight-Three-Oh-One Lima's one good engine sputtered out of fuel and quit. The cockpit was silent, filled only with wind noise, whistling through the bullet holes.

Ralph Day felt his heart knocking hard on his rib cage.

_''we're going in, pal! Hold on to your britches--"

The Russian quickly saw the problem. Day was right--if the landing was rough, the grenades could go off. He dropped the second grenade he had been holding out the still-open side door and it tumbled aft, caught in the windstream. The grenade's striker was rusty, however, and never sprang forward against its primer cap. The grenade fluttered harmlessly to the desert floor, a dud.

Day pinned his arms around the wheel to force the Beech into a wings-level attitude. Thermal updrafts gusted the plane and it wobbled and sank lower and lower. Dry arroyos crisscrossed the desert hardpan below them and low tufts of sage and wiry brush flashed by. Day mumbled off altimeter readings, mostly to himself--" one hundred...ninety feet...I'm having trouble holding her...seventy feet...I'm dropping my gear now...." A big clunk shook the aircraft as the landing gear dropped into the slipstream. The Beech vibrated badly and Day prayed she would hold together for another thirty seconds.

Fyodor Trofimenko slid across the seat and carefully unfastened the grenade he had attached to Day. Carefully holding the striker back with his thumb, he unlatched Day's belt--avoiding the pilot's contortions as he wrestled with the controls--and slid the bomb out. He transferred it to his right hand, reaching out quickly to steady himself--

"--thirty feet...it's gonna be a hard one...got to clear that ridge--" They were rushing up on a low shoulder of rock hiding a small village on the beach dead ahead--

\--then in one motion kicked open the side door and pitched the grenade into the air behind them. An instant later, the aircraft was slammed by the explosion. The grenade detonated alongside the Beech's shattered rudder and tailplane, shredding what was left of the control surfaces. November Five-Six-Eight-Three-Oh-One Lima pitched violently, then began sharp left roll...just as the nose landing gear bogey clipped the stone ridge and threw them down hard nose first into the softer sand beyond the ridge. The aircraft shuddered and walloped the ground hard, shearing both wings and buckling the gear struts. Momentum slewed them counterclockwise and the Bonanza began shedding skin, wheels, engines, anything left as it skidded and bounced to a grinding, metal-shrieking, groaning halt.

The cockpit was still upright, still intact, less than two hundred yards from the ramshackle tienda of Senor Jose dos Mesos, principal owner of San Felipe's general store and proud skipper of a small fleet of shrimpers just finishing up provisioning and outfitting for another day's run through the briny but fertile shallows of the northern Golfo de California.

Ralph Day and Fyodor Trofimenko sat stunned and dazed in the wrecked cabin for nearly a minute. The sound of American B-26's orbiting overhead finally pierced the mental fog. In seconds, the Russian was free of his seat harness and squeezed through the jagged edges where the door had once been. He jumped down to the ground and once he had regained his balance, trotted off toward a small group of pescadores assembling for a look at the smoldering wreckage. Behind him, Ralph Day decided to let his heart stop thudding before trying to exit the aircraft. He slumped forward over the wheel in exhausted relief.

Trofimenko warily eyed the American bombers crisscrossing the sky as he approached the fishermen. He pulled out a wad of dollars and bargained for a few minutes, trying to wrangle a truck ride to the nearest train or airport.

"A hundred dollars," he told them, "for the first hombre who can get me transport to Mexico City."

The pescadores looked at each other in puzzlement. What kind of oddball loco gringo was this? But they knew a good deal when they saw one and thus the haggling began. By the time they were done, Trofimenko was sipping a beer inside Senor dos Mesos' store, working out the arrangements.

With any luck, the Russian realized, he'd be on his way south to Hermosillo in a few hours, hidden in the back of a produce truck like a migrant ranchero. It was an eight-hour drive over bumpy, pot-holed Mexican highways but that didn't matter.

From Hermosillo, so Senor dos Mesos had assured him, the capitolo was a short six-hour flight away by his rancher friend's DC-3. They made one stop each way--El Sauteo near Durango--to drop off crates of tomatoes and iced bags of shrimp and pick up engine parts and oil for the boats, then continued on to Mexico City.

Dos Mesos beamed at the prospect of a paying passenger. "Just like the airline, no, senor? Even better that you will have company this time. My daughter Carmen is sending along her favorite burro. Paquito's getting some medical work done at El Sauteo. You'll like him...he's very friendly, very smart for a burro."

Trofimenko winced but said nothing and paid the man's asking price: two hundred dollars U.S. up front. Then he sat down at a makeshift table inside the tienda, really a plywood sheet laid over four barrels full of nails and fasteners.

Senora Dos Mesos was making a special second serving of breakfast, just for their unexpected guest. Trofimenko attacked the plate of tamales and hungrily accepted a fresh beer. He was famished.

After breakfast, he'd get some sleep in the back of the store, stay out of sight in case the Americans came calling again or Ralph Day wanted some company. Day had gone staggering off toward the shrimpers' wharf after he'd been pulled from the plane; he hadn't seen the Russian enter the store.

Fyodor Trofimenko figured it was for the best anyway. Day would only bring more trouble and the Russian wanted to get back to the Embassy in Mexico City as soon as he could. He didn't relish the prospect of admitting he'd failed to stop the bombs from leaving Los Alamos.

But he still had a long flight ahead of him. Plenty of time to think of something. Trofimenko had no intention of giving State Security any reason whatsoever to order him home to Mother Russia.

Even a dusty shrimping village along a Sonoran desert highway to nowhere was preferable to that.

Two thousand feet above Jose Dos Mesos' tienda, Tango Echo Two turned smartly back over the Sonoran desert and dialed in a speed heading north to Nellis Field. Charles Race really could not tell what had happened to the occupants of the Beech Twin Bonanza after the aircraft pranged in a heap into the desert outside San Felipe. He was reasonably sure the crew had survived. But he was severely limited in what he could do.

They couldn't very well land a U.S. Air Force bomber in Mexican territory without permission so Race had reluctantly ordered Tango Echo Two turned around and pointed back toward American airspace.

Race had a hunch the Russian agent, if indeed he had been aboard, would try to make it to Mexico City. It just made sense, Race thought, since the Soviets had a huge mission there and a very active espionage network to boot. Outside of Washington and New York, the People's Commissariat for State Security had a bigger operation there than anywhere else in North America.

Race knew he would need permission on this one. He'd have to work with the brand-new Central Intelligence Agency and the brass hats at State Department too, a pleasant prospect for sure, to try and locate 'Klaus Krieg', or whatever his name was, in the Mexican capitolo. But he knew he'd have plenty of assets there and the Agency already had several top 'diplomats' under near-constant surveillance.

Race was confident Krieg was eventually show up in Mexico City. The problem was this: the President had given them a deadline to crack the Gallant Flag case and time was fast running out.

Charles Race stared glumly out the side cockpit window at the black desert of Baja as Tango Echo Two made its way north to Nevada.
CHAPTER 16

Wednesday, January 3, 1951

Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, San Francisco

5:30 a.m.

Robert Blount puffed nervously on his cigarette as he watched the loading operation from the Nimitz Avenue wharf. The thirty-ton bridge crane swung Ship's Manifest Item O-6586 across the oily waters of the slip and over the deck of the Chesapeake, stabilized by guy wires as it settled onto a reinforced platform of steel deck plates. A deck party shoved the massive container back, damping out the swinging oscillations, then guided it down toward heavy padeyes that would secure the item to its foundation.

Blount flicked his unfinished Lucky Strike into the water. "Nasty buggers, if you ask me, Commander. Gives me the creeps."

Commander John Ward, skipper of the fleet auxiliary AF-18, U.S.S. Chesapeake, agreed. "No argument from me on that, pal. I'm just glad these babies made it safely."

Blount felt a chill as cool breezes swept in off the Bay. It had been a nerve-wracking night for everyone, following the progress of Army train ARTC-118 across Utah and Nevada and on into the Bay Area. The train had arrived at four that morning, heavily guarded, none the worse for wear after the aborted strafing attack by an unknown private aircraft south of Salt Lake.

"Bacon and atom bombs...my kind of breakfast." Blount watched the deck party unhook the shielded container and level it on its deck mount. "How come that one's staying topside?"

Ward explained the tight storage situation down on E deck. "We're keeping the five add-ons up here. Shielded, lead-lined container, weather-proofed enclosure, shock-mounted and electrically isolated. They'll be fine. It's been done before."

Blount was dubious, but maybe that was just professional skepticism, he supposed. "What happens if the ship sinks?"

Ward was cautious around the FBI agent. Bad enough the Bureau had somehow wrangled permission to poke around a Navy base as it was. Paul Craft had emphasized need to know a hundred times at their last meeting. Ward wasn't sure what Blount was cleared for, nor really why the man was here, just that he was assigned to investigate security leaks around the Greenhouse test and he'd somehow been manifested aboard Chesapeake for the week-long ride out to Eniwetok.

Sort of like having your mother-in-law along for the honeymoon, Ward thought. Just so long as the man understood who was in command of the ship.

"In the extremely unlikely event that Chesapeake goes down," the Commander explained, "those containers double as flotation rigs. The devices just float around like five-ton corks until help arrives."

"Big catch for some unsuspecting fisherman," Blount said. Ward ignored the crack.

Robert Blount knew all about the attempted aerial attack on the train the day before. But for the Fourth Air Force and some gutsy anti-air gunners aboard the train, the Greenhouse bombs might not have made it this far. Question was: who was behind the attempt?

For Blount, the answer was self-evident, if not immediately provable. It was clearly the boldest effort the Russians had ever made, certainly since Klaus Fuchs had been picked up in England, since the Rosenberg case had broken. The attack in Utah was incontrovertible evidence that old Joe Stalin was desperate to get his hands on American atom bomb technology. For that reason, extraordinary security measures were justified.

And, as Blount could plainly see with his own eyes, such measures were definitely in place all around the Navy port terminal.

Blount's opposite number, the Army cop Lyle Kitchens, was already poking around Tokyo now, trying to scare up evidence on the Army end of things. Blount had grudging respect for a man in Kitchens' position. It wasn't every cop who had the balls to sniff out high-ranking malfeasance in his own backyard. Blount had been around enough Inspector General hearings and internal affairs Q and A marathons in his career. They always smelled bad and the field was littered with career flameout types.

Blount wanted to get to know John Ward a little better too but the Chesapeake skipper wasn't exactly the talkative type.

"You been making this run a long time, Commander?"

Ward shrugged, checked off something on a clipboard. "Chesapeake's my first command."

"They ever make you nervous...atom bombs, I mean?"

"Not really. It's just ordnance. We carry thousands of pounds of bombs and shells all the time for the fleet. Just takes a little more care, that's all."

Jesus, what's eating this guy? Blount thought.

The men swapped stories for a few more minutes. Blount figured Ward for a typical ship's captain: taciturn, remote, image of resolute determination. Onward, ever onward, the FBI agent imagined...lashed to the helm....

Maybe that explained Ward's reluctance to talk. Or maybe the guy's just an asshole. Either way, Blount figured he would be able to plumb the man's soul soon enough. The trip out to the Marshall Islands would take nearly a week.

It took two boatswain's mates and half the mid-watch coming off shift to help Blount find his quarters. The bunk turned out to be a four-man affair in the heart of Officer's Country, just forward of a starboard shipping hatch. Blount stowed his gear and freshened up a bit, before deciding to head to the wardroom for a cup of Navy coffee and a few doughnuts.

The wardroom was standing room only, packed with ship's officers and a few civilians. Blount spotted a short, slightly stooped fellow landlubber in a rumpled blue suit, beside the coffee pot. Albert Ranier was bent over in heated conversation with another shorter man, who stroked his black goatee thoughtfully while Ranier outlined some point with finger-wagging finality.

Blount had seen pictures of Ranier in the case files. That Hanford physicist Chambers Kennedy had painted an indelible picture of the Czech physicist. Cup in one hand, doughnut in the other, Blount worked his way through the crowd and introduced himself.

Ranier abruptly concluded his lecture and sent the shorter man away. His elliptical, hard blue eyes regarded Blount with suspicion.

"Then you're part of the security force, is that it?"

Blount shrugged. "In a roundabout sort of way, yes. Actually, I'm just along for the ride."

"Keeping an eye on the eggheads, I suppose."

Blount smiled, as insincerely as he could. Show some teeth...he expects it. "Us cops are forever misunderstood, Dr. Ranier. I'm trained to keep the bogeyman away, so you can sleep peacefully at night."

Now it was Ranier's turn to show some teeth. He strained the dregs of his coffee through stained molars. "Sometimes, the bogeyman, as you call it, is already inside the house. That would make your job more difficult, would it not?"

Blount polished off the doughnut, then licked his fingers loudly. "It depends, I suppose, on the bogeyman. Some are more frightening than others. See, there's an old tactic us cops learn early on in training."

"And what is that, Mr. Blount?"

The FBI agent regarded the Czech physicist evenly over the steaming halo of his coffee cup.

"Indeed," said Blount, "I'll have to tell you more about it when—"

Ranier started to reply but was interrupted by an announcement over the wardroom's PA.

"--hear this...now hear this...there will be a security briefing for all science and test support crews at 0900 hours. Lay aft to the instrument lab on C deck...on the double. Security briefing at 0900 hours--"

Ranier shrugged apologetically. "It seems we are invited to another lecture, Mr. Blount. This should be right up your alley. Are you giving the briefing?"

"No, not at all. I'm in the dark, just like everyone else. The Navy's running the show here."

Less than a thousand yards away north of Slip Number 17, beyond a run of chain-link fence on the opposite side of Nimitz Avenue, neither Albert Ranier nor Special Agent Robert Blount noticed the small Japanese-American stock clerk lying prone in a thicket of holly bushes. Koichi Kanabe was a full-blooded American, Nisei background, born and raised in the working class neighborhoods of Oakland and the East Bay. He'd grown up in an internment camp in Nevada's High Sierra during the war, relocated there with his two brothers and two sisters just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Koichi Kanabe's father and mother were patriotic Americans, second-generation Californians and Mr. Kanabe owned a small cleaning business that had made money from the first day he started the enterprise in 1936. Still, the Kanabe family had been forced to liquidate the business, sell their home and pack up everything for the trek east. Someone in authority had decreed them enemy aliens in the weeks after the 'Day of Infamy' and a dire threat to national security.

The years of enforced isolation in Nevada had not been forgotten by Koichi Kanabe. Now, he worked on retainer for one Masuhiro Tetsuko.

Kanabe figured it was something like poetic justice that this son of a one-time 'enemy alien' was now employed as a stock clerk at the base PX. It gave him plenty of time to carefully note the comings and goings of important visitors. Ships, too.

On this foggy January morning, Koichi Kanabe had but one mission: to note when the U.S. Navy fleet auxiliary Chesapeake and her escorts departed Slip 17 for the Golden Gate and put to sea.

And when the six-thousand ton Navy vessel finally did slip her moorings shortly after 0930 hours that Wednesday morning, and churned water as she backed out of her berthing spot, Kanabe took a few pictures with his new Polaroid camera, carefully noted the time, and waited patiently in the wet bushes until she was just a smoky speck gliding north in mid-Bay toward the bridges of the Golden Gate.

As soon as he could melt away, back to his day job stocking shelves at the post exchange on Spear Avenue, Kanabe would process the pictures he had taken, then after leaving work for the day a little after 2:30 p.m., he would drop by the Western Union office on south Bayshore Boulevard and pay a buck and a half for a wire telegram to be forwarded to Tokyo, Japan.

In this way, Kanabe's friend and part-time employer Masuhiro Tetsuko would know that the ship bearing atomic bombs for Operation Greenhouse was finally on its way.

When he paid the Western Union dispatcher the requisite amount that afternoon and departed the telegraph office with the receipt duly pocketed, Koichi Kanabe had no way of knowing that he had now set in motion an irreversible chain of events...a sequence of events which could well end in atomic annihilation for millions of unsuspecting people.

At the exact same time Koichi Kanabe was leaving the Western Union office, Commander John Ward was in his stateroom aboard the Chesapeake. He had just received a call from the bridge, as ordered, informing him that the ship had just cleared Golden Gate Park and the headlands of the peninsula and was now transiting the territorial twelve-mile exclusion zone leading to deeper waters.

Ward promptly ordered the OOD to set best course and speed for Waypoint One, an imaginary rendezvous point in mid-Pacific three days' steaming time away, where she would pick up the rest of her convoy and proceed on to Eniwetok.

Riding high in the early morning swells, Chesapeake and her two escorts plowed westward, bearing eleven Mark VI atomic devices destined for testing at the Pacific Proving Grounds in the Marshall Islands.

Only Ward knew that some of the devices would not be remaining long at the task force anchorage off Eniwetok.

Ward locked his stateroom door and began reviewing details of what was supposed to happen with the extra bombs.

He knew from Paul Craft's briefing that once they had made harbor at the Eniwetok anchorage, all the devices would be offloaded to be checked out and cleared for test. After at least two shots had been fired in the Greenhouse series, five of the bombs remaining would be found to be 'defective,' and would be shipped back to the States immediately aboard the Chesapeake. It was during this return voyage, Ward knew, that the mid-Pacific diversion was to take place, the warheads to be transferred to a contract Japanese ship after the Chesapeake was mysteriously 'disabled' in mid-transit from a boiler room casualty.

Ward was nervous after looking over the details for the hundredth time. Too many things could go wrong. Too many details hadn't been explained adequately by Craft. And it didn't help Ward's nerves that an FBI agent had suddenly been added to the ship's roster at the last minute. There were far more Navy and Defense Department security types on board than he ever remembered for an atom bomb transport mission. The presence of so many security people was going to make it harder to create the boiler room incident on the voyage back; unless a reason could be found to keep the security people at Eniwetok.

To hell with this. Ward tore himself away from his tiny metal desk and decided to head up to the bridge for a little fresh air. There was no use dwelling on matters he didn't fully understand. When they got to the Marshall Islands, he'd see if he couldn't ring up Paul Craft and invite him up to observe the tests. Clear up a few questions he had.

It was bad enough he had worried himself into a splitting headache.

Thursday, 1-4-51

East China Sea

11:20 a.m.

Masuhiro Tetsuko didn't know whether to be impressed, relieved or worried. He had boarded the Sunfish for the short shakedown cruise only six hours before, insisting on seeing for himself the state of readiness of ship and crew. The captain wasn't happy about having a 'civilian' aboard but there wasn't much he could do about it. Tetsuko was paying the bills. Indeed, after the test, the Japanese industrialist had promised to provide all hands with half their promised pay.

It was the only way he could think of to prevent an outright mutiny.

Tetsuko was adamant about withholding the rest. "Not until the mission is completed," he told Li Gao Chi. Li (aka Hideki Osato) fumed and privately told his exec he'd strangle Tetsuko to within an inch of his life if the man held anything back. For Li, the money was important--his share alone would come to something like several hundred thousand yen--but to most of the crew, the promise of a substantial payoff was the only thing that kept them from lynching someone.

In a few days' time, if all went well, the Sunfish would make rendezvous with one of Tetsuko's own ships, the Orient Star. The rendezvous point was several days steaming time out of Kobe. Thereafter, the Sunfish and the Orient Star would transit the western Pacific together, eventually standing to several hundred miles east of the Marianas Islands--not far from Eniwetok--where they would lie in wait.

If Tetsuko was right, they wouldn't have to wait long.

The captain of the newly refurbished American fleet boat known as Sunfish was a veteran submariner and one-time skipper of the Imperial Navy's I-95 before she'd been nearly sliced in half by an American destroyer off the northern Ryukus in '45. Li had managed to crawl ashore from the sinking hulk and blend into the local population for several years, before finally making his way south to Hong Kong and Macao. Odd jobs and drugs had gotten him back on his feet--that and a thirst for revenge against Americans.

It was the genius of Masuhiro Tetsuko that he could feed all of Li's appetites at the same time.

The shakedown cruise out of Taipei had been planned as a three-day bow-to-stern operational evaluation of the boat and her crew's readiness to perform the mission. Tetsuko had insisted on the demonstration. For Li Gao Chi, it felt good to finally be back in command of a submarine, even if it was a derelict abandoned by the Americans, dredged up by the Chinese and restored to something resembling seaworthiness by a combination of Tetsuko's endless pockets and some clever scrounging and backyard engineering by Li and his men.

For the first six hours, as they cruised topside at twelve knots through three-feet seas east of Okinawa, Li had run his boat though endless diving, surfacing, casualty and other drills. Even a few simulated torpedo runs on unsuspecting ships had been thrown in while Tetsuko looked on critically from the back of the control room.

No doubt Li had a lot of experience, Tetsuko observed, but the crew clearly needed some more work to jell properly. On a mission of this importance to his friend and business partner Paul Craft-san, Tetsuko wasn't sure they would stand up. Most of them were little more than sea-going mercenaries anyway. But he knew that once they had jelled and everything worked as planned, they should be able to tag along with Orient Star to the rendezvous with the Chesapeake. The Navy ship would be sunk, after her diverted bombs had been removed. Tetsuko was counting on surprise. Craft-san had made it abundantly clear that Chesapeake had to be sent to the bottom of the Pacific, to get rid of any evidence that the bombs she was carrying might have survived.

Captain Li was just hungry for any chance to make a torpedo run on an American ship.

Generally satisfied with the last firing solution, this one on an unsuspecting Japanese tanker, Li climbed topside to the 'cigarette deck' for some fresh air. The sky was cloudy, intermittent squalls lashing the area, and Sunfish wallowed like a hippo in heavy seas. As a precaution, he ordered speed reduced to five knots. He cupped his hands, trying to light his cigarette and saw a sickly-faced Masuhiro Tetsuko climbing through the hatch to join him.

Tetsuko leaned unsteadily on the rail as he fought back a rising urge to unload his breakfast. "That last run, Captain...you liked it? The crew seemed unsure, unsteady--how many times did your navigator have to correct himself?"

Li shrugged, peered out through binoculars at the choppy gray foam of the East China Sea. "He made a mistake, that's all. Misread gyro angle and angle on the bow. The boy corrected himself in time. It was a good run...in the end."

"Your crew needs work. You must work them harder."

Li sniffed. "That is a captain's call, Tetsuko-san. I know this crew. I put them together. They'll be ready when it counts. You just be sure you're ready with the money."

Tetsuko was tired of that argument. He was tired of Li's attitude too. The man was worse than gaijin now--he'd been away from Nihon too long.

Li wasn't finished. "One more thing...I want you out of the control room when we're maneuvering. You're distracting my crew."

"You have no authority to make that demand. I'm paying for this mission."

Li said, "I have the captain's authority. That's all I need. If you don't stay out of my way, I'll have you confined to quarters."

Li and Tetsuko glared at each other for a few seconds, until a large wave drenched them both with salt spray. Tetsuko gratefully accepted a towel from Bilbao, the exec who had just emerged from the conning tower hatch.

Bilbao was fat, Portuguese, a grungy, oily, bearded man who had spent most of his life at sea. "Sonar report, Captain. One surface contact...seven thousand yards, bearing one-six-five degrees, running at fifteen knots. She's heavy, multiple screws. May be a tanker or a freighter."

Li acknowledged. He tried his binoculars. "Too foggy for visual sighting."

Tetsuko wasn't going to be put off. "Captain Li, I just want to be reassured. This mission is vital to the Americans. And they're paying top dollar. I don't want any screwups."

Li snorted. Screwups? Tetsuko was more gaijin than the gaijin; now he was starting to sound like the Americans. Next thing you know--he'd be dancing the jitterbug, like the GI's did in port. Then, he had an idea.

"Bilbao, what was the range to that contact?"

The exec checked with the sonarman once again. "Just under seven thousand yards, sir. She's going to close well astern of us...probably heading for Nagoya or Osaka. Some place like that."

All right, Tetsuko-san, we'll see how ready this crew is....

"Bilbao, set up another torpedo run on that contact. Surface approach. We'll make it just like the last one. And make tubes one and two ready."

The Portuguese man's eyes lifted. "Captain wishes to make tubes one and two ready?"

Li didn't flinch. "Ready in all respects."

Bilbao snarled a quick grin and winked at Tetsuko. "Aye, aye, sir." The exec dropped down the hatch to pass the orders.

"What are you going to do now?"

Li squinted through bright early morning haze, hoping to catch a glimpse of the contact. Squall lines marched in a line off to the southeast, swollen purple clouds ready to pound the ocean with rain. "A demonstration, my dear Tetsuko-san. You'll see how ready my crew is."

Tetsuko listened to the approach with fascination, and growing horror. For the next half hour, Sunfish steadily tracked and stalked a Chilean freighter, the Tristan, bearing processed seafood and machine parts for Osaka, Japan.

After searching for several minutes on the surface, Li ordered all hands to lay below. Hatches were dogged and the dive klaxon sounded.

After dropping down the ladder, Li rudely shoved Tetsuko out of the way as he made for the periscope. The diving officer called out their descent.

"Five degrees down bubble...passing through twenty feet...bow planes fifty per cent...."

Li hugged the periscope. "Make your depth fifty feet. Helm, come right to zero nine oh degrees. Engine room, make turns for fifteen knots. Steady as she goes."

Bilbao dispensed orders as instructed. Sunfish heeled to starboard and started running on an easterly heading, slightly closing the bearing angle to the Tristan. Forty five seconds later, the diving officer announced their depth.

"Fifty feet, Captain."

"Very well. Level off and trim her steady, Lucian. I want a good run and a good solution."

All over the boat, Li's call for battle stations had sent the crew scurrying to stations. In the control room behind the periscope well where Li had eyes pressed in on the rubber eyepiece, an approach party worked the plotting table. Tetsuko clung to one end of the table as the Sunfish rocked in surface swells still felt fifty feet below. A few feet around the side of a short bulkhead, the torpedo officer worked frantically at the TDC--Torpedo Data Computer--trying to coax a good firing angle from the mass of wires and gyros and black knobs spread out before him. Ninety feet forward of the control room, torpedomen were already dogging the wheel that opened outer doors in bow tubes one and two. Two Mark 14 torpedoes were winched forward and steered into the tubes.

"Up scope!" Li commanded. The glistening metal shaft hissed up and Li draped himself around the handles, twisting the scope to find the target freighter. "What's our range now?"

Bilbao checked with the sound man. "Ranging, sir....still ranging...looks like four thousand eight hundred. Slight closing angle."

"Angle on the bow?"

Rene, the torpedo officer, worked the solution on his computer and read off the numbers. "Angle on the bow now... seventy degrees, Captain."

"Very well." Li snapped the handles closed. "Down scope! We'll work in a little closer. Try to make the angle a bit less."

Masuhiro Tetsuko was sweating profusely in the close confines of the humid control room. "What's going on, Li? Is this another exercise?"

"Of course, Tetsuko-san." Li didn't bother to look at the industrialist. We're in my country now. "You wanted to see if my men were ready. I intend to demonstrate just how ready they are--"

Tetsuko sensed what Li was doing. "This is...no, this is not necessary, Captain Li. You have only to--"

Li cut him off. "You will have your confidence, Tetsuko-san. Right here and now. And my men will have their money. Keep quiet or I'll have you removed by force, if I have to." He slid over beside Bilbao, now hanging on the shoulders of the helmsman. "Come right, one three five degrees. Maintain speed."

Bilbao acknowledged. "Come right to one three five degrees, aye, sir. Maintaining speed. Our depth is still fifty feet."

"Very well."

Sunfish adjusted her course, angling in toward Tristan's stern, closing the gap at several hundred yards every minute. Li knew the standard procedure for making a submerged daylight periscope torpedo run hadn't changed in years. He'd done much the same as skipper of the I-95 and found the fire control layout of the American boat both understandable and easy to employ. Most of a torpedo attack was simple physics anyway, regardless of the boat's flag.

When a submarine had established contact with a target, the first problem was to determine the target's direction. Usually this was done by making observations of the change in true bearing of the target, often visually from the conning tower. When this was done, the submarine then came to a normal approach course, closing on the target's track at a right angle to the true bearing.

During the approach, the submarine would try to close to within about a thousand yards of the track, at a range equal to about seven and a half minutes of the target's run and within two minutes of any late zigzags. This ended the approach phase. Now, the submarine was free to make final maneuvers to work herself in for the best firing position, usually (and ideally) a track angle of little more than 90 degrees, little or no gyro angle and a final range to target of about a thousand yards.

"Angle on the bow?" Li asked.

The torpedo officer had a quick answer. "One hundred degrees, Captain."

"Tubes one and two ready in all respects," Bilbao reported. The weapons board showed green lights at the bow of the boat.

"Very well. Range to target?"

Bilbao polled the sonarman. "Twelve hundred yards, sir. And closing."

Another thirty seconds. Li caught Tetsuko out of the corner of his eye, restlessly stirring at the other side of the plot table. "We've trained long and hard for this moment, Tetsuko-san. Have you ever blooded a hound?"

"What? What are you saying?"

Li decided to take another look-see. "Up scope!" The metal tube hissed up and Li snapped the handles down. "Bilbao...mark this bearing...zero...four...eight degrees...when you want a dog to hunt, you give him the scent of his target. Smear a little fox blood on his nose. That drives him wild, gives him that raging desire to find his prey...down scope!" Li closed the handles even as the tube hissed back down into its well. "I just want my crew to know the scent of the enemy...."

Tetsuko was angry. Angry at losing control of the situation. Masuhiro Tetsuko wasn't accustomed to taking orders from anybody...except possibly amerika no like Craft. He started to say something, to emerge from behind the plot board but--

"Range to target?"

"One thousand yards, Captain."

"Fire one!"

Bilbao stabbed the button on the weapons board. Tube one discharged its weapon in a hiss of compressed air. Sunfish rolled slightly as trim tanks compensated for the weight loss.

"One away!"

"Fire two!"

Bilbao pressed the next button on the firing panel.

"Two away!"

"Both weapons running, sir," called out the torpedo officer. "Hot and normal. Depth ten feet."

Li checked his watch, counting down the seconds. "Let's hope she's heavy this morning. Riding low so both fish catch her. Give me the count...."

Bilbao called out the times to impact, both fish. "Ten seconds...--"

Tetsuko wiped sweat from his forehead.

"--five seconds...four...three...two...one..."

Nothing.

Li's expectant face fell. "Damn it, Bilbao. She missed--"

Bilbao was already poring over the torpedo officer's last solution, sliding back and forth from the desk to the plot table. "Captain...I don't know if--"

"Never mind...give me the second count--"

Bilbao counted down the seconds.

At the expected time, a dull explosion was heard, reverberating through the waters.

A cheer erupted in the control room.

"Direct hit, Captain!" The sonarman clenched a fist in the air. "Direct hit...sounds like amidships...yep, that's a boiler that just went..."

"Keep listening," Li told him. "Up scope. Slow to five knots and come right to two six five degrees."

"Coming right to two six five degrees, aye, sir. Slowing to five knots."

Li peered through the eyepiece. Through the chop of the waves, he could see a smear of black oily smoke issuing skyward dead ahead.

"Bulkhead noises!" the sonarman cried out.

"She's cut clean in two," Li whispered. "Tagged her directly in the middle, right between her stacks." He snapped the handles shut. "Down scope! Target will be underwater in five minutes, I'll bet a round of sake on it."

"Done," Bilbao grinned. He shook hands with the captain.

"She's breaking up...you're right, captain...water impact noises now...may not even be five minutes....

Li glared back at Tetsuko, sweating like a pig in the corner of the control room. The industrialist wiped his forehead down with a wet rag. "Well, Tetsuko-san, you have your little demonstration. What do you think?"

Somewhat stunned but awed by Li's audacity, Tetsuko was forced to admit that the crew and boat seemed ready.

"You didn't have to sink an innocent ship. Now there will be inquiries. Questions. Investigations. It was a stupid thing to do."

Li had had enough of the brains of Omisumi Corporation. "This is a ship of war, Tetsuko-san. And I am still at war with amerika no. I have unfinished business with the United States Navy. Now, thanks to this boat and to your money, I can finish what I should have finished five years ago." To Bilbao: "Take this intruder to the officer's mess and lock him in it. Post a two-man guard, armed. On my boat, I am shogun and he is the peasant."

Tetsuko was hustled out of the control room, his arms pinned by Bilbao and the torpedo officer.

When the commotion was over, Li turned to the helmsman. He ordered the boat brought about. "Make flank speed for Taipei. Lao Gun Shipyard." They had only a short time to provision the boat and load all live ordnance before they would have to put to sea again.

This time, Sunfish would be heading north out of Formosan waters, to a rendezvous point five hundred miles east of Tokyo. There she would link up with Orient Star.

And from there, the freighter and the refurbished American submarine would cruise southeast for two days, eventually coming to anchorage a hundred miles west of Jaluit Atoll at the southern tip of the Marshall Islands.

The bloodhound would not have long to wait for the fox.

1-4-51, Thursday

Aboard the U.S.S. Chesapeake

5:30 p.m.

Maybe it's the weather, thought Commander John Ward. Or maybe it's the food. That was it. The Russians had powdered the crew's mess with worry dust and fried everybody's nerves to ragged ends.

It was the only way he could otherwise explain it. The whole ship was going nuts and they weren't even halfway to the Islands yet.

John Ward walked along the quarterdeck of the ship, examining lashings and fittings and other deck details with a more critical eye than usual. He was uneasy, everybody was, and the real reason was the unusual presence of so many security types on board. At times, it seemed like one half the crew of the Chesapeake was spying on the other half.

Professional suspicion, that FBI agent had called it. Ward stared out to sea, wondering. Robert Blount was the one he couldn't quite figure. Added to the ship's roster at the last minute, no explanation from Fleet on why an agent of the FBI should be aboard, Blount was the wild card.

Ward concluded it would be wise to keep an eye on the man.

Three decks below Commander Ward, Robert Blount was prowling the maze of corridors that made up E deck, thinking much the same thing. Blount was restless, unable to sit still for long. Before embarking, J. Edgar Hoover had secured Navy and Atomic Energy Commission authority to spot a man on E deck, where the original Greenhouse devices were stowed. Blount had made the request. Since Albert Ranier was a primary surveillance target, it made sense to be able to go where he was. And since he was a key scientist in the upcoming tests, it was axiomatic he would be spending some of the voyage down on E deck, in the storage vault called Wonderland and its adjoining labs and compartments.

Blount had seen enough of B deck and his bunkmates that afternoon. Most of the technicians who inhabited the wardrooms and forward bunkspaces were playing canasta, or bridge or poker anyway. Blount begged off and went exploring.

The Marines at the sentry station stared down at the FBI agent with impassive faces as the agent marched up to the desk.

"I'm looking for Dr. Ranier," he announced. The entire detail was armed. Colt .45's were the weapon of choice. Blount felt the reassuring heft of his own shoulder-holstered .45. "You chaps seen the good doctor around these parts?"

The duty sergeant regarded Blount with a cool appraisal. "Dr. Ranier is probably in the lab. You authorized to be here, mister?"

Blount produced his FBI badge. That raised a few eyebrows. The sergeant--his green nameplate read Perkins--checked for Blount's name on a list. After several pages, he found what he was looking for.

"Looks like you're one of the anointed ones, Mr. Blount. You'll have to check your weapon here." Perkins held out his hand, smiled faintly at Blount's puzzlement. "Standard procedure. No live ordnance in Wonderland."

Blount gave up figuring out how the man knew he was armed and handed over his own .45. Perkins checked the chamber and deposited the weapon in a small pouch, which he stowed in his desk. He handed him back a rad control badge.

"Clip this to your lapel. It'll fog up if you're exposed."

"Exposed?"

Perkins was already logging the agent in. "To radiation. Just in case."

Blount did as he was told. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all. Another Marine cycled opened the latch and heaved the heavy door aside. Blount went in.

Several technicians were puttering around the steel plate and wire grating that passed for a floor. There were six metal cradles more or less equally spaced about the compartment--to Blount, they looked for all the world like huge, lead-lined baby cribs. The cradles were covered with clamshell doors. A few were open. Technicians had wires running from electrical panels to several.

Blount had no problem locating the Czech physicist. A few mumbled inquiries and heads turned toward the short, slightly stooped man wearing a dusty blue suit jacket and a black tie, jammed into his oily white shirt. Ranier was bent over the open doors of a cradled bomb, goggles slightly askew on his face.

"Dr. Ranier, I'm sorry to interrupt...."

Ranier at first didn't hear the FBI agent. A small electrical box lay on a table next to the cradle, thick ganglia of wires and cables draped from the box into the cradle. Ranier was tinkering with connectors at a patch panel at the rear of the Mark VI device. He was talking to himself, in a low voice, muttering something inaudible.

"Dr. Ranier--?"

Ranier looked up startled. He raised his head to see out of the goggles, then exasperated, snatched them off. A nod of recognition. "Ah, I thought I heard a voice...."

"Sorry to interrupt, sir. They said you would be in here."

"Yes, well it's just a routine check, you see. Fusing and firing circuitry. These batteries--" he pointed his needle-nose pliers at a trio of boxes inside the bomb casing "--they're just no good. Salt air, humidity, I don't know what it is. They drain too fast." He wiped some grease off his face with an arm, only to add a new grease mark on his cheek. "What is it you want? I'm quite busy here...battery power, temperature, ambient radiation--you see those clipboards?"

Two clipboards with graph paper and pen markings had been stashed in a space between the battery tester and a tool chest.

"Yes, sir."

"Hand me both of them." Ranier clucked. "So much paperwork. When Oppie was around, we just did things. Didn't worry about paperwork until later." He took the clipboards, made a few notations. "What was your name again?"

"Robert Blount. I'm with the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

Ranier fished in his suit pocket for reading glasses and found them. He regarded Blount with a suspicious squint. "Ah, yes...The FBI. Here?" He chewed on that for awhile, went back to his clipboard. "Why do we need the FBI here?"

"Security, I suppose. It's Greenhouse. People are worried, you know. What with the Russians and Klaus Fuchs and the Red scares."

Ranier sniffed. "Seems odd. The Army and the Navy can run their own security programs. This is a military operation anyway. Does the FBI have any juris--what is the word--?"

"Jurisdiction is the word." Blount shrugged, bent over beside Ranier as he peered into the rear opening of the bomb casing. He was aware of the heat inside the casing. Plutonium decay inside the core made the space quite warm. It made Blount uneasy. Just a few inches from his face, the nickel-steel alloy of the outer casing was uncomfortably warm. Blount remembered his rad control badge, quickly backing his head out of the area. "Actually, I was assigned to the project. Justice Department orders."

Ranier was outwardly courteous but still skeptical. Truth was, Blount made him nervous. "Everybody is interested in Greenhouse. You know anything about atomic bombs? Or atomic tests?"

"I hope to learn. Actually, I'm onboard for counter-intel work." No sense trying to hide it now.

"Counter-intelligence work. That's serious, isn't it?"

"Very. There's intelligence the Soviets, or maybe the Chinese are running an operation to try and steal an American warhead during Greenhouse. I'd appreciate talking with you, not necessarily here, hearing what you know. Anything unusual you've seen or heard."

Ranier's voice was muffled as it issued out of the bomb casing. "I did sign the Loyalty Oath. My papers are on file." Inwardly, Ranier was surprised Blount had made so specific a charge. He kept his head buried in the innards of the Mark VI; no sense giving the man any more than necessary. He forced himself to keep the pliers steady. Connector 8-E to terminal block C-4...focus, concentrate....

"I'm sure they are, Doctor. Actually, I was just making the rounds, introducing myself, getting to know some of the project people. I read up a little on Greenhouse before I came aboard. Had some briefings in Washington. You're from Czechoslovakia, I take it."

Ranier continued to busy himself with checking continuity on the fusing, bypass and time-delay circuits. They had been extensively checked as soon as the devices were shipped aboard at Hunters Point.

"You're thorough, Mr. Blount. And accurate. Radowice Street, to be precise. It's in the Turkish Quarter of Prague. I could see Havelska out my window when the light was right. The castle on the hill across the Danube. I had many fantasies about that old castle."

"Is it true you knew Einstein?"

Ranier eased up out of the cradle. He put the pliers down, wiped his goggles with his jacket sleeve. "It is. We met...let me see--it was 1921. February, I believe. I was apprenticed to a professor at Charles University. I helped him out with... things, and he tutored me in my studies. I even lived in a room in his house on Sadovoy Allee." Ranier frowned, dredged up the memory from some deep place. It was something he could be truthful about with Blount. "Actually, I was just a boyservant. But it was a way to get into University. I wanted to be a great physicist. I had accompanied my professor to Berne, Switzerland...there was a businessman, an importer or banker. Someone like that--I don't remember his name. He was a benefactor for the University. Kurri and I--my professor--had gone. To beg for money, actually. To solicit, as you would say. I slipped away from the hotel. There was another hotel. The Durer Gasthaus, it was. Einstein was giving a lecture there, I had heard about it and I was excited. I was already studying physics, you see. Einstein was a great man. He was speaking on relativity. The topology of the universe." Ranier closed his eyes, re-living the moment. "I was just a boy, perhaps twelve, thirteen. After the lecture, I went to the front of the banquet hall and squeezed in. I shook Herr Professor Einstein's hand. Right there in the Durer Gasthaus in Berne." Ranier looked quizzically at Blount. "You knew I met Einstein once?"

"I did my homework. Project briefing with Atomic Energy Commission. We were given background on all the key scientists, yourself included. It was a small detail in the folder, caught my eye."

Now it was Ranier's turn to be suspicious. "You have a sharp eye for detail, Mr. Blount. What else do you know about me?"

The FBI agent shrugged, helped the physicist stow his tools and clean up the worktable. "Not enough of the right things. I know about the trip to the Cavendish Lab in England. Rutherford, Szilard, those days. The trip to New York. The lab at Chicago. Wasn't it Compton who got you into the Manhattan Project?"

"Fermi, actually. I was just a low-level technician, handling graphite bricks, covered with dust and soot. Fermi talked to me, recommended me."

"And you went back to Europe after the war?"

Again, Ranier was truthful. Why not? Blount seemed to know everything. But the drift of his questions made the physicist increasingly uneasy. "To visit family. My mother was quite ill."

"You barely escaped the Communists. That was--"

"1948." Ranier seethed with the memory. "Leeches, all of them. They've strangled my country, killed innocent people."

"--including your mother?"

Ranier nodded, got over a thick lump in his throat. He took off his gloves, reached into his pocket and extracted his wallet. He pulled several bills--not dollars--from the wallet. "These are my link to Czechoslovakia now. Old koruna notes. I keep them to remind myself...what we have lost. What the world has lost." He sighed, felt the fading currency with his fingers. Blount noticed Ranier was missing part of his right index finger. The file had said lab accident. "Every year, once a year, I go back to New York. Do you know why?"

"Coney Island hot dogs?"

Ranier snorted. "Hardly. No, I visit all the newsstands along the Lower 30's, east side, near the river. I buy newspapers from Prague, Czech language newspapers. Expatriates write them, print them. It's news from the homeland. And I give them some money." He pocketed the koruna notes. "Not these."

Blount watched as the physicist carefully re-seated the clamshell door over the back of the bomb casing.

"That screwdriver, please--there...." Ranier indicated an odd tool with a tiny octagonal head, some variation on a Phillips. Blount found it, handed it to the physicist. Ranier set to work torquing down all of the forty bolts that secured the inspection bay of the casing.

Blount took a short stroll around the Mark VI device. It was a massive, eighty-five hundred pound nickel-steel egg, fat at the bottom--Ranier pointed out the attach points for the fins and shroud, but this device wasn't fully weaponized. The device was tapered to a blunt nose at the front. Sixty inches in diameter at the widest point. A hundred and twenty eight inches in length. Eighty-kiloton expected yield, boosted fission implosion device. Blount kept his distance. He imagined he could hear something ticking inside. It turned out to be a wall clock opposite the cradle.

"You called the Communists leeches, Doctor. Just now."

Ranier shook his head. "Worse than leeches. Beasts of the Devil."

Blount folded his arms. "I'm not prying into your personal politics here but I am curious. America faces a real threat now. That's not news to you, or people in your profession, I know, but we're being challenged by the Russians. We've got to respond. Our whole way of life is threatened. That's why I'm here. And, frankly, I need your help. Every scientist, every soldier and sailor and technician on this project is sworn to follow security procedures. I'm just curious, Doctor. Curious if someone in your position, someone on the inside, as it were, thinks we're doing enough to combat this threat. Are we doing the right things at all?"

It was a surprising question and it caught Ranier off guard. "My dear Mr. Blount, all of us who worked with Oppie on the Gadget have lived with strict security and secrecy for a long time. It's like a second coat, like an undergarment you wear in winter. You ask a difficult question...are we doing enough? We asked the very same question of Nature herself in '45. Are we doing enough, are we doing the right things to understand you? To make atomic nuclei split apart, or fuse together the right way. We have a saying in science: 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.' You can never really know if you're doing enough."

"Don't you think Americans have a duty in this matter? A duty to turn in suspected Communist sympathizers? That's the least they should do."

Ranier scoffed. "No Americans, even the FBI, if you will excuse me, really know anything about the Communists. I have direct experience." Ranier stopped tightening bolts for a moment, and just stared down through the wire grating of the floor below, staring ten thousand miles away. "I know what they can do. Just reporting Communist sympathizers isn't enough. You have to beat them at their own game."

"Even if it means breaking the law?"

Ranier was again scornful. "Survival is the only law Communists understand. That and force. We're in a fight to the death. Some people realize that. Many don't."

The discussion drifted to the bombs themselves. Ranier finally finished securing the inspection cover. He gathered up his tools. Blount asked a few more questions about the devices. Ranier was uncomfortable with this man, with the questions, but he didn't want to add to anyone's suspicions. Not here. Not now. Patiently, he explained some of the physics behind what they were trying to achieve with the Greenhouse tests.

Robert Blount listened carefully, not to the science, but to the tone of Ranier's voice. "It's odd, isn't it, Doctor, how the Atomic Energy Commission added those devices topside to the test. At the last minute, I mean."

Ranier was momentarily flustered at the depth of Blount's knowledge, but he recovered. He had to be careful around this man. A scorpion, that's what Teller would have called him. A desert scorpion, ready to sting suddenly, without warning. Teller liked to brag about how he crushed the things with his shoes. Ranier doubted Blount could be so easily dispatched.

"It's true," he admitted. He explained the meeting where he and Tolkach had pressed for the added tests. Then he explained why, briefly describing the value of the Ranier-Tolkach method to the nation's atomic arsenal.

When the lecture was over, Blount knew nothing more about atomic bombs. But he'd gained an insight into the physics of Albert Ranier.

"Are you sure this method will work, Doctor?"

"No, not completely. That's why we test."

"And if your method doesn't work...if the first test of Ranier-Tolkach shows problems, what then?"

Ranier was increasingly uncomfortable with this whole line of questioning. Irritated, he broke off the conversation, saying, "The method will work. I'm sure of it. Now, sir, you will have to excuse me." The Czech physicist left the storage bay and closeted himself in a small instrument lab nearby, burying himself in calibrations and recalibrations of some measuring device, no longer interested in talking.

Bingo. Blount left the storage vault too, logging out and retrieving his weapon, satisfied he'd gotten what he came down to E deck for. He had satisfied himself that Albert Ranier somehow knew the method that bore his name had no hope of working. Blount was convinced of something he knew he couldn't prove. Ranier-Tolkach was as bogus as a two-dollar bill.

Somehow, Ranier was planning on turning over some of the bombs to the Soviets or the Chinese. Or maybe that cockamamie story he'd heard at the safe house in Maryland really was true and MacArthur or someone had plotted to snatch a few bombs and open up World War III right at the Manchurian border. Either way, Blount was sure, security would have to be increased. Especially on the devices stowed topside in the 'bank vaults.' Those, he now knew, were the Ranier-Tolkach devices. They were the ones Security would have to watch.

The next step, Blount realized as he made his way back to his quarters on B deck, was to find some way of getting Ranier away from his own quarters and his E Deck office long enough for a thorough search of his personal papers and effects.

Blount wondered about the legality of that...an FBI agent conducting searches on a U.S. Navy ship at sea. Still, the Chesapeake was sovereign territory of the United States. But he didn't want to push the matter, not with so many Marines and other security types skulking about the ship.

He decided to try and arrange another, longer security briefing. That would occupy the right people for awhile. He figured he'd need at least an hour, maybe more in the physicist's stateroom.

What Robert Blount didn't know was that Commander John Ward himself had already detailed a member of the ship's own security detachment to do a little snooping too. When Blount squeezed by Lieutenant (J.G.) Willard Cox in the corridor outside the officers' mess on his way to B Deck, he didn't realize Cox had explicit orders to keep an eye on Blount and report everything back to Ward.

Cox had just finished a little quick and quiet look-around inside Robert Blount's bunkspace.

1-4-51, Thursday

U.S. Eighth Army Phase Line D, Ten Miles South of Seoul

6:15 p.m.

For the last hour, General Matthew Ridgeway had received nothing but bad news and the former 101st Airborne paratroop commander was steaming mad. The briefing at the command post tent a few miles south of Yongdungp'o was silent and tense as the commanding general Eighth Army glared at his assembled staff, eyes and lips hard, a deep furrow plowed across his forehead.

Everywhere along the 38th Parallel, UN forces were in retreat...U.S. Eighth Army, the ROKs, the Brits and the Greeks, all pulling out of Seoul for the second time in the last six months.

Ridgeway, now in his third week as commander, was gloomy but grimly determined.

Phase Line D was only the latest in a series of fallbacks that was rapidly turning into a rout before the onslaught of nine Chicom divisions all across the front. The line ran clear across the Korean peninsula from just south of the Han River at Inchon, south of Seoul, all the way to the Sea of Japan coastline at Kangnung. On every front, the Red hordes were pushing UN forces back..."hell," Ridgeway snarled at the sitreps he was reading, "the bastards don't even have to push...our boys just cut and run. I might as well try to stop the Han River."

On the left, General William Kean's 25th U.S. Infantry was in headlong retreat, throwing down their weapons in panicked flight, along with the ROK 1st Division. Only the Brits' 29th Brigade had managed to organize anything resembling an orderly military withdrawal.

In the center of the front, 'Hap' Gay's 1st Cav was struggling with General John Church's 24th Infantry to solidify a rapidly crumbling position at Phase Line D but it was a hopeless task when the ROKs and the Greeks broke and ran at the first sight of a Chinaman.

In the east, Ridgeway just shook his head...all ROKs. The UN front had melted like butter in July. The damn South Koreans had about as much spine as a Boy Scout troop.

The situation reports and tactical briefing were over in half an hour. Ridgeway stood and paced the perimeter of the tent, cinching up his grenade-laden field jacket against the frigid winds swirling in the valley. The Eighth Army commander had huddled with his field generals most of the morning, studying the terrain, counting up forces deployed, trying to make something work.

Ridgeway stopped at the map table and stared straight ahead, through the tent, staring at things only he could see. Hap Gay had seen that look before, the rigid spine and set of his mouth. He knew Ridgeway had made a decision. He had a feeling he wasn't going to like what he heard next.

"Gentlemen, two days ago, I came across the Han River with some units of the 25th and the ROK 1st." Ridgeway shook his head. "Men had flung their weapons into the river and were fighting each other to get through the refugee columns. Korean and Americans...flinging women and old man off the damn bridge so they could get across before the bridge was blown. It was disgusting. I have never had such an experience before. I pray to God I never have to witness such a spectacle again."

Ridgeway jammed his hands in his jacket. "It's plain as the nose on a Chinaman's face...we've got to make a stand." Ridgeway reached out and cut a slash across the map with his fingers. "--at Wonju."

There was an uncomfortable murmur around the tent.

Hap Gay of 1st Cav cleared his throat. "General, that doesn't give my boys much room to maneuver. I got stragglers all the way from Inchon to Osan. We need time and space...to regroup."

"What the hell have you been doing the last week, Hap? You've had half of western Korea to re-group. Trouble is, your men are scattered to hell and back and you've used up a hundred miles of defensible terrain to blow half a dozen defensive positions. Look with your eyes, man, not your feet. Wonju's on a slight rise here--runs from Suwon like the palm of your hand with several ridges for fingers. Terrain couldn't be any more favorable."

"What have you got in mind, General?" Gay thought it expedient to focus on the future, not the last few days.

Ridgeway scoured the dirt floor of the CP and collected some small stones. He dropped them on the map, lined them up the way he wanted. "I want to force the Reds to stretch out their supply lines too far, Hap. Like this--" he shaped the rocks into two narrow rows paralleling each other. "Funnel them into and through some natural checkpoints, like these ridges that fan out from Wonju. Let 'em get greedy and careless, then--" he slammed a fist into the palm of his other hand--"counterattack! Air and ground...a coordinated assault on the bastards."

The lecture lasted ten minutes, ten scorching, blistering minutes. Gay, Church and Kean shifted uneasily. No one had talked to them like this in months, maybe years.

Ridgeway ended the briefing hoarse from yelling; his hand ached from slamming it so many times on the map table.

"Damn it...the Big Bugout stops here! Now!" Ridgeway started pacing again, orbiting the table like a vulture sizing up his prey. "This Army's finally going to show a little backbone and stop whining. We set up a 'meatgrinder' along these axes and let the Reds come to us. Then, we chew 'em up, use our firepower where it'll do the most good."

"General, I got whole companies shot up so bad it'll take weeks to reconstitute 'em." Kean just shook his head. "I don't know if I got enough manpower to sucker the Reds like you're talking about."

"That's exactly my point," Ridgeway pleaded with the man. "You don't have to be at one hundred per cent. You just have to show enough fanny to the Reds to get 'em drooling. Their own arrogance will do the rest. We just have to draw them on, force them to either concentrate where we can use our firepower or stretch them out so thin that a squad of schoolgirls could punch right through."

"I don't know, General--"

Ridgeway could smell fear, indecision. The Chicoms had spooked the whole damn Eighth Army. It was an odor he meant to stamp out, wherever he found it, stamp it out for good.

"That's the key, gentlemen. Make the Reds fight our kind of war, not theirs. Charlie wants to pick off a piece of Eighth Army and surround it, gobble it up like an amoeba. We have to deny him that chance, keep ourselves on the move so he can't do that. When we get him where we want him, then we let him have it. Trade our bullets and bombs for their bodies. That's a fair exchange."

Still...unease rippled around the tent. Ridgeway glared at his men like a crazed bulldog. The senior commanders swallowed hard, knowing their men had little stomach for resuming the fight.

Hap Gay said as much to Ridgeway, gave it to him blunt and straight.

The commanding general Eighth Army shrugged off Gay's worry.

"Fight or die...it's that simple, men. That's what we're paid to do. We stand at Wonju."
CHAPTER 17

Friday, January 5, 1951

Tokyo

6:25 a.m.

"You got any idea where we are?" Major Lyle Kitchens eyed the narrow alley off the Omate Sando with an uneasy settling in the pit of his stomach.

"Not really," Bret Billings muttered. He steered the black Embassy Ford over some broken lumber--construction was hectic and furious in Shibuya ward, rebuilding block after block of apartments and flimsy wood-frame i.e. houses after LeMay's B-29s had incinerated the area into ash heaps in '45--and eased down the alley. Cats shrieked. Laundry fluttered from lines draped over wooden railings. The Ford slopped through pools of rainwater and bumped into a trash bin, which clattered down the street. More cats shrieked. "Osawa said it was three streets west of the Aoyama Dori intersection. See--there's Ito Hospital--" he indicated a beige brick building wreathed in early-morning steam, towering over the apartment block. "--and Yuku...the bakery, down at the end. Just like Osawa said. This must be the place."

Billings cut the engine and let them coast on toward the front of the bakery. Employees were already inside, kneading huge wads of dough for the ovens. He stopped and pulled the Ford over near the door.

"This is nuts. Osawa's just leading us around in circles."

Billings fished out a cigarette and lit up. He offered one to Kitchens, who declined. "I guess he's got his reasons. I'm sure we were tailed the moment we left the Embassy."

Kitchens remembered the plain brown sedan that had hung on their rear for many blocks through Hibiya and the Ginza. Only a quick maneuver at the Higashi Fountain near the Palace had given them enough space to elude further surveillance.

"Army, I suppose," Kitchens said.

"No way to tell," Billings said back. He checked his watch by the glow from the bakery. If this was the place, Osawa was late. "Could have been Russian. Maybe even Red Chinese. This town is crawling with Reds. I'm guessing that's why Osawa wanted to meet here and not the noodle shop."

Ten minutes later, the anxious staff assistant finally emerged from the shadows of the bakery and approached the car. ID's were quickly made and Osawa climbed into the back. Billings introduced Kitchens.

"You are police?" Osawa asked. He was already nervously chain-smoking less than a minute after climbing in.

"Sort of." Kitchens studied Osawa's face, now enveloped in smoke. Hard, ascetic, slight tic at the left eye, Osawa was a cocked weapon, ready to fire. A few fingers of slick black hair hung down over the unruly left eye, which fluttered uncontrollably. "U.S. Army CID, detailed here on an investigation."

Osawa sucked at his cigarette. "There's something new going on with Tetsuko-san, Mr. 'Hightower.'"

Billings watched Osawa fidget in the rear-view mirror. "Like what?"

"He left Tokyo a few days ago. When I went with him to Lao Gun--the shipyard in Formosa--I became acquainted with the purser there at the yard. A Mr. Soong. Last night, I heard something--I didn't believe it until Mr. Soong confirmed it. The submarine there--the American submarine I told you about--?"

"I remember."

"It left yesterday."

"What do you mean--left?"

"Put to sea. And Tetsuko-san was seen by many people going aboard her. Just after sunset, I'm told." Osawa shook his head. "I wasn't informed at all. Me...his assistant for travel arrangements."

Billings had already filled Kitchens in about the Sunfish. "That's not good. It means something big's underway."

Kitchens was already making mental calculations. "What's today's date?"

"It's the fifth. Friday. Why?"

Kitchens laid out his thinking. "The bombs shipped out today. From San Francisco. The devices for Greenhouse. I checked this morning, before you picked me up. The task force in Washington already got word from the Navy portmaster. The convoy cleared Golden Gate at 0615 hours, their time. Headed for the Marshall Islands."

Billings whistled. "And Tetsuko boards a submarine that departs at the same time. A rendezvous somewhere? In the middle of the ocean, maybe?"

"Maybe. There's an agent from the Bureau aboard the lead ship. Trouble is: you can't fit any of these devices in a submarine like the Sunfish. We did the measurements--they won't ship through any hatch on the boat."

"Maybe Sunfish has a special hatch. Or special riggings."

"A possibility," Kitchens admitted. "One we can't afford to discount. We just don't know. But now that Sunfish has left, the Navy needs to be informed."

Osawa listened to the speculation for a few moments, growing more and more agitated.

"There's more, Mr. 'Hightower.'"

"What have you got, Osawa-san?"

"This--" he handed up a small envelope. Billings took it and tore open the flap. Mimeographed sheets were crammed inside. "--copies from Tetsuko-san's safe. At the Omisumi office in Chiyoda."

"Some of it's in Japanese--"

Osawa explained, leaning over the car seat and quickly pointing out important

sheets. "I can translate--"

Much of the paperwork consisted of logs and receipts for construction work, done and paid for out of a little-used contingency account that Tetsuko maintained. The logs indicated the work had been done in Kobe.

"A warehouse," Osawa said.

Billings' eye went straight to the list of approving signatures. It read like a duty roster at SCAP's Government section.

"Son of a bitch...there's Craft, Wright, Kades, Czernowsky... that looks like Bunker there--" he showed the copies to Kitchens. "This must have been one hell of a priority project, with these signatures."

Kitchens studied the ledger of accounts. "Scarce materials, too." He fingered one line item. "Twenty rolls of quarter-inch lead sheet? What kind of warehouse is this, anyway?"

Billings saw his point. "All this is stuff the Army would normally reserve for urgently needed facilities like schools and hospitals. MacArthur's been pretty adamant about that. A warehouse in Kobe's port district isn't my idea of a high priority project."

"Unless--" Kitchens was suddenly intrigued by the revelations.

"Unless what?"

"Unless it's war-related. That has top priority over everything now." The CID officer realized he had a rapidly expanding case staring him in the face. "I'm going to have to get some kind of clarification from General Whitney on SCAP policy for allocating materials and labor to reconstruction."

"Doesn't sound too difficult," Billings said.

"Never underestimate the power of Army bureaucracy," Kitchens told him. He turned around to face Osawa, slouching in the back seat. "You know where this warehouse is?"

"Yes, Major. It's two blocks away from Yamashita docks in Kobe. Re-built from the war--and expanded. I've been there several times with Tetsuko-san."

"It's flimsy," the CID officer said, "but it's all we've got at the moment. I need hard evidence before I go around accusing SCAP staff of wrongdoing."

"We got a submarine," Billings offered. "Isn't that pretty hard evidence?"

"Yeah and it's gone now. That's important too--"

Billings tried to fit Osawa's news into some kind of bigger picture. "We got two things, Major, the way I see it. A refurbished American sub, now at sea, with some kind of mission related to diverting American atom bombs for possible use in Korea or China. The question is when?"

"And where and how?" Kitchens added. "Now we also got a warehouse in Kobe, re-built under unusual circumstances by Tetsuko, signed off by everybody under the sun at SCAP. Is there any connection between the two?"

Kitchens stared out the dark window. Outside, the alley was beginning to show signs of life: someone had already taken in the laundry from the second-floor railing. Lights in the flats nearby were coming on.

"There has to be," he decided. "Maybe this is where the bombs are supposed to be hidden, once they're diverted."

"So what's our next step?"

Kitchens thought. "Get a car and drive down to Kobe, for starters. I want to have a look at that warehouse. If the bombs are supposed to be brought there, we should be able to scare up some evidence, something I can use."

"We should have hauled Tetsuko in for questioning when we had the chance."

Kitchens agreed. "He may be coming back to that shipyard." To Osawa: the CID officer added: "Find a reason to go back to Formosa. Tetsuko's got to come to ground somewhere--that's as likely a place as any."

Osawa nodded quickly. "Hai. I can go to Taipei on Omisumi business. I can ask around the shipyard, talk with Mr. Soong. Maybe someone knows if the submarine will return. And when."

"Whatever you learn," Kitchens said, "I want to know too."

"I'll head down there myself," Billings promised. "Separately. That'll give us two sets of eyes."

"I need something--anything--to connect Tetsuko and this submarine--the Kobe warehouse too--to somebody inside SCAP. More signed orders, requisitions...that sort of thing. If I'm going to build a case against one of MacArthur's angels, I need an airtight case. That means evidence, and lots of it."

Osawa promised to do what he could. After some discussion, the three agreed to meet again by midweek, the tenth of January at the latest.

Osawa climbed out of the car and disappeared on foot the same way he had come.

Billings gave him a few minutes, then started up the Ford and eased back out of the alley, pulling out into light early morning traffic on the Omate Sando. As they sped back toward Shimbashi and the Dai Ichi offices, neither man saw the black unmarked Ford pull away from the curb in front of the wood-log Tenriko Shrine, and fall into place behind them, pacing them at exactly six car lengths behind.

Friday, 1-5-51

Mexico City

11:45 a.m.

The Bureau called it a 'moving pocket' and Charles Race figured that was about as apt a description as there was. The purpose of the pocket was simple: surround a high-value surveillance target like a cloak, moving across the streets with a mobile cocoon of eyes and ears, sliding and shifting as the target moved, across all manner of streets and parks, plazas and parking lots. The 'pocket' was standard procedure for high-value targets but it cost a lot of men and time and it often fell apart after a few hours. Like its football namesake, the pocket was damned hard to keep together in the chaos of a fluid, ever-shifting city landscape.

But Race knew this was one moving pocket the Bureau had to maintain, whatever the cost.

By law and by custom, surveillance and investigative work outside United States territory was prohibited to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The newest kid on the intelligence block-- an awkward and gangly confabulation called the Central Intelligence Agency-- had been given that responsibility back in '47 and to Charles Race's way of thinking, the decision was the usual sort of political arm-wrestling that gave birth to bureaucratic monstrosities like the CIA--a truer example of a bastardized organizational mule could not have been found.

Which didn't mean Race would turn down any help he could get. Keeping tabs on one Fyodor Trofimenko in the din and cacophony of the Mexican capitolo was proving a lot harder than he had bargained for.

The pocket consisted of five men this morning: Race and his CIA compadres Cohen, Delaney and Steeples. The fifth man was a late addition: Rufus Peeples of the Atomic Energy Security Service, now part of another Washington mule known as the AEC.

They had been tracking Trofimenko--known to the Americans only as Fox One--for the better part of the last twenty four hours, after initially spotting him departing the Queretaro Express train at Estacion Guadelupe near the Thieves' Market in Tepito. How appropriate, thought Race, that the Bureau and the Agency should be 'pocketing' a known Soviet agent through the rambling stalls and cantinas of a market district named for burglars.

During the day, Fox One had been briefly lost, in a broiling street fight outside Alameda Park. Two hours later, the elusive Russian had again been spotted entering a small hotel off Granada Boulevard, near Chapultepec Park. The pocket had quickly re-formed outside the hotel and a stakeout set up over night. Race and the newly minted Agency bloodhounds handed off four-hour watches throughout the night.

In the solitude of the early morning hours, they had started a betting pool on when the target would finally leave the Hotel Seville and attempt to make some kind of contact with officials of the Soviet Embassy. Guesses had ranged everywhere from sunup to siesta time that afternoon. Race proved the most accurate prognosticator and won the pool.

Fox One walked down the tiled steps of the Hotel Seville and onto the street at precisely 12:00 noon.

The Russian turned right and walked several blocks along the Paseo de la Reforma, crossing the street twice and three times pausing to scan newspapers tacked up on boards. Obviously maneuvering to check for any kind of tail, Race figured. He realized he was dealing with a seasoned and experienced field agent who would not be an easy mark for any kind of continued surveillance. Fox One had already eluded the pocket once before. Race figured he probably could do so again any time he wanted to.

The day was cool and crisp in the Mexican capitolo and the sidewalks were crowded. That made the pocket easier to run and inside half an hour, Fox One was bracketed on all sides with American eyes and ears. One agent pressed ahead a block or so, a second followed at an equal distance behind. At forty-five degrees across the wide boulevard, two more paced the Russian carefully, easily blending in with the sidewalk throngs. For this watch, Race had drawn the 'rover's' job, which meant he was free to float and cover as tactical conditions dictated.

For the time being, Race took up a moving position inside the pocket, several dozen yards behind the Russian.

Unknown to the Americans, Fyodor Maximovich Trofimenko had a mid-afternoon appointment with his Embassy handler Sergei Brylin inside Chapultepec Park, during which he was to drop off information from his Los Alamos trip and receive new instructions. The meet was set up as a standard street encounter, a quick pass by and concealed exchange, over in seconds.

Charles Race had some strict instructions of his own to follow, straight from Hoover himself, and he'd spent most of the night and half the morning working out the details with the Agency boys.

If it worked--a big if--they planned to grab the Russian right off the streets and spirit him out of Mexico, back to the U.S. for questioning. It was the Bureau's version of a grand slam and Race figured the odds of pulling it off were about as good as his at Yankee Stadium.

Still, Fox One was sure to be a rich and fertile catch, after what he had undoubtedly seen and done in the States. They had to try; the President's deadline was fast approaching.

For the better part of an hour, Fox One moved in fits and starts along the boulevard, backtracking occasionally, taking side streets and doubling back more than once. The pocket hustled to keep up and several times, Race had to surge forward to fill a gap when the Russian suddenly changed directions. Midday crowds thickened the sidewalks through Juarez and the line of the great statues--Cuauhtemoc, El Caballito and Columbus--necessitating quick hand-offs and some end-arounds to keep up with the target.

They had a brief scare when Fox One accidentally ran into a senora outside Chapultepec, causing the flustered woman to spill a small bag of groceries. For a few tense moments, Race thought the woman was part of a planned street pass, but the Russian apologized heartily and helped her re-pack her bag.

Race, watching closely from the boozy front door of a pulqueria, was fairly sure nothing material had been exchanged in the collision. Fox One soon moved on.

It was then that Race and the Agency lead, Cohen, made their decision. It was time to move in and grab the target before they lost him for good.

The first step was to squeeze the pocket tighter around Fox One. At Cohen's signal, Race, Delaney and the others began steadily closing the ring, moving in as the Russian made his way west along the Paseo de la Reforma.

For ten minutes, the surveillance team made progress. Fox One paused at the foot of Independence Monument--a tall winged spire--probably to survey the crowds around him. He strolled to a row of vendor carts and bought a wax wrapper full of chicharrones--pork crackling topped with chili paste--taking his time among the swarm of midday strollers gathered around the foot of the statue.

Alerted, Race signaled a quick halt to the squeeze and let the pocket hold at fifty yards. The FBI agent ducked into a throng of onlookers, watching an organ grinder at work while keeping a close eye on the Russian's movements. He wondered what the target was thinking. Had he seen the tail? An experienced field agent could often sense surveillance, like a football runner felt his way through a line, probing for seams in the coverage, slipping away despite everyone's best efforts. Race was determined that this was one catch that wasn't going to get away.

Soon, Fox One began strolling again, moving on into the Zona Rosa, toward Chapultepec Park. Race and Cohen agreed by hand signal: get moving and close up. If the Russian made it into the Park, so much the better. The timing would be better and it would go more smoothly trying to apprehend the target at the Park entrance, normally a chaotic scene of screaming children, pinatas, balloons and singing vendors.

Race and Cohen closed steadily on the subject, working their way in from front and behind.

Just outside the Park entrance, Fox One disappeared momentarily in a gathering of children, a knot of screams and squeals around a gaily dressed brass band. Race broke into a trot, dodging cars in a dash across Avenida Chapultepec, and slowed to a brisk walk on the other side. The children moved like a huge organism, trailing the band as it ooommpah'ed its way along the park gate plaza. Where the hell is he? Race glanced over at Cohen, moving in from across the Avenida. The Agency man was equally puzzled, worried. A distant shrug made Race swear under his breath.

Then, quickly, Fox One surfaced once again--this time fifty yards further ahead, moving at a good clip past the line of clowns and conjurors that always clotted up the park entrance. Moving into the park itself now, and moving fast.

Race could tell by his movements. Somehow, the Russian had sensed the tail and shifted into high gear. Before he could react, Fox One was gone again, lost in the thousands of patrones spilling onto the park lawns and walkways.

Cohen had seen it too. The pocket dissolved and the surveillance team surged forward, diving into the crowd.

Race felt like he was fighting off an entire ocean, heaving masses of park-goers aside as he pushed and elbowed his way through. From behind him, an ice cream cart ting-a-linged and a cross-current of kids rolled through the crowd, carrying the FBI agent along. He fought his way back, then slogged toward a quick huddle with Cohen and Peeples, right in the middle of the throng. Somewhere behind them, the sounds of a rickety roller-coaster clattered through the cypress trees.

"Got to be that way--" Cohen breathed heavily, perspiring despite the cool breeze. "I say we cover the exits best way we can and wait him out. We'll never find him inside the park."

Race agreed and the team deployed to take up positions along the major axes of approach into the park. Chapultepec was a vast nature preserve in the heart of the capitolo. A dozen or more streets passed through and covering all of them was out of the question. Race and Cohen took the Paseo entrance and the Avenida Chapultepec plaza between them.

It was like trying to catch a single drop of water in a raging river.

Charles Race had never been a big believer in luck or fortune. A few bucks on the Derby every year was about it, maybe a fifty if he was feeling generous at Pimlico and he'd never even set foot in Atlantic City. You made your own luck with hard work, discipline and training--that was a motto he might have embraced had anyone asked.

Yet, unquestionably, the FBI-CIA surveillance team was lucky when five minutes later, Fox One suddenly re-appeared along the northeast promenade of Chapultepec, right under the stare of the serpent's head figurines adorning the National Museum of Anthropology. Rufus Peeples spotted the target in seconds and quietly closed the distance. By the time he had taken up position twenty yards behind, easily pacing the Russian as he exited the park onto Avenida Polanco, Race and the rest of the team had been alerted and reformed the tail.

This time there was no pretense of subtlety. The Russian was being followed and everyone understood what was at stake.

Six blocks north, Fox One made a sudden shift left down a garbage-strewn alley and emerged into a rat and tin shack perdida of slums and tenement houses. Through the soot of endless fires and belching stoves, the snowy peak of Popocatepetl was dimly visible in the distance.

Fox One never hesitated. He trotted deeper into the shantytown without looking back.

Peeples was first on the scene. He was out of breath running, and trotted to a halt at a bent and rusty street sign. The sign read Via Rosario. Race and the others joined him.

Peeples sucked air, indicating the pot-holed street. "Down there...I think he went left...down that street."

Race scanned the intersection. Nothing. "He can't be far. How far ahead was he?"

Peeples shrugged, fixed his tie and took off his fedora, smoothing back his hair. "I don't know--maybe a hundred yards. He was walking fast and I saw him stop at this sign." Peeples whirled around, scrutinizing every face that came by. "Then he was gone."

"It's all we've got to go on," Race said.

"Come on--" Cohen had already started into the perdida. "--we're wasting time."

Race didn't argue.

The street curved and went down, descending like Dante's Inferno, through layer after layer of grimy concrete and adobe blocks, crude jaccales--wood, cardboard and jerrycan shanties draped with old swathes of cloth and electric wire--and shacks, sheds, huts and hovels stretching into the haze as far as they could see. Even rusted-out car hulks had been papered over and made into crude dwellings, all of it festooned with strings of lights and laundry lines swaying like tree limbs in the breeze. Dogs barked and rats chittered in packs. Sullen eyes followed the men as they picked their way through broken pavement, trash heaps and empty beer bottles.

From somewhere ahead, through columns of smoke from a burning rubbish mound came shouts. Then more shouts--an altercation had sprung up. Gunshots crackled through the air and voices, low and menacing, carried on the wind.

"That's Russian!" Cohen hissed. He moved faster, kicking at a rat that darted by. "Down there--" he pointed to a circle of pink and yellow adobe blocks--now caked with soot--"Russian and Spanish mixed up."

"You're nuts."

Cohen broke into a sprint. "I'm telling you I heard Russian--"

Another shot rang out. Shouts. _''asir! Asir---!"

Then a different voice: "--nyet...nyet...ya ruso!"

The agents jogged and stumbled and slipped their way down toward the rubbly circle of huts and pulled up short, face to face with a slum gang of paracaidistas, pinning another man against a wall.

It was Fox One. His eyes were wild with fear.

"Hold it!" Race shouted. He pulled out his .38 and leveled it at the closest hoodlum.

Almost as one, the gang whipped out their own weapons. Race blinked hard in disbelief as he found himself facing a small army of knives, pistols, machetes and shotguns. Peeples and Cohen reacted instinctively, pulling their weapons, as did the other agents. In less than ten seconds, a stalemate had developed: armed agents of the United States Government squared off against equally well-armed squatters on the Via Rosario.

"Come on, come on--" Race growled. "Vamos...es criminales...turn him over--"

Two paracaidistas stepped forward to block Race. They were quickly joined by shotgun-wielding compadres.

"No, senor...esta criminal...he's killed a friend...mi amigo es muerto. He stays here."

"He dies." The shotgun next to him said plainly in English.

"Call the policia," Race said. He took a step. "And give me that man. He's Russian. He's a spy. Wanted by your government."

The 'shotgun' raised his own weapon. Race saw a dark red scar on his lips, still oozing blood. Scarface, he was quickly dubbed. "We are policia here on Via Rosario. This man killed. He's asesino...a murderer. We have a trial...then we kill him."

Fox One, still pinned to the wall by four gang members, squirmed, started to talk but was cuffed on the side of the head with a pistol butt. "--nyet...." Dribbled out of his mouth, along with a stream of blood. The paracaidistas forced him to kneel.

Race and Cohen glared at the toughs, then each other. They were outmanned and outgunned and street justice was thick in the air. Behind a battered car, women and children were wailing over a body. Lifeless legs poked out beside a stack of tires.

Race had an idea. "Look--" he lowered his .38 a notch. "Amigo...we can do business. This clown's a spy. He's worthless to you. But not to the nortenos, not to my government." Race pulled out his wallet, held up a few ones. "I'll pay you. Give me the spy and I'll pay for him."

'Scarface' snorted. "You think we are piratas?" But the machete behind him nudged him to shut up. 'Machete' was short, a fast blink to his eyes, arms black with scars and tatoos.

"Shut up!" Machete stepped out front, squinting at this odd band of nortenos, willing to pay for the prisoner.

"Why you pay?"

Race had already flipped out his wallet. "Because he's valuable to us. He's nothing to you."

Machete considered that. "Two hundred pesos for this slime."

Scarface kicked Fox One in the ribs for good measure. The Russian winced but stayed upright on his knees.

"I'll give you one hundred," Race said. He peeled off some bills.

"He says two hundred, amigo," Scarface grabbed Fox One by the collar and yanked him to his feet. Two compadres closed in, pistols pressed against the Russian's skull.

Race eyed Cohen and Peeples. They shrugged. The FBI agent peeled off more bills. "Turn him over to my friend there." He indicated Cohen.

"Money first, amigo."

Race would have loved nothing better than to slug the creep right then and there. But Fox One was valuable and the paracaidistas knew it. Race flung two hundred pesos in the dirt.

Scarface snorted. Machete pushed Fox One forward. The Russian stumbled right into Peeples' arms. Cohen grabbed one arm, Peeples the other. The Russian offered no resistance.

"Gracias," Race spat out. He herded the Russian away from the shack, backing up the Via Rosario with his eyes still on the Mexican gang. The nortenos kept their weapons out, cocked for action, the whole way.

Scarface, Machete and the rest just glared, then fell to fighting and kicking over the loose bills.

By then, Fox One had been dragged back all the way to the Avenida Polanco.

"I'll get the car," Peeples offered. The Embassy Ford had been left parked outside a favorite cantina several blocks off the Zocalo. Peeples returned in ten minutes and the Russian was piled into the backseat, draped with an overcoat. Cohen drove the car, taking ten minutes to reach an Agency safe house in a middle-class neighborhood south of Guadelupe.

The airport was only a half hour further.

Fox One was sedated with a tranquilizer and locked in a sealed bedroom for few minutes, while the drug took effect.

"Standard Agency practice," Cohen admitted, nursing a beer. "Makes them more pliable, easier to handle in transport. Looks better than handcuffs too. Plane ready?"

Race was checking and re-packing the contents of his small bag. He dumped cartridges out of his .38, leaving one in, and stowed the rounds in a pouch.

"Air Force is kind of funny about carrying loaded weapons aboard their aircraft," he explained.

Peeples came out to the cool shade of the brick patio. Jacaranda and cypress boughs spilled over a wrought iron railing in luxuriant tufts of green and pink and white. "Plane's already gassed up and ready," he reported. Chet Martin, Hoover's AD for Criminal Investigations, had arranged first-class transport for their very important prisoner -- an Air Force C-46 had flown down overnight from Holloman just to ferry them to D.C.

"Better get our lucky guest ready to go," Race told them. "Mr. Hoover doesn't like to be kept waiting."

The ride to the airport took twenty minutes. Fox One lolled in semiconscious stupor between Race and Peeples as Cohen negotiated the winding streets and hills of Guadelupe, finally hitting the Xochimilco Highway. The airport road came up a few minutes later. Cohen steered them into the terminal, through a policia checkpoint--Race's Bureau badge prompted a stiff salute from an otherwise bored guardia--and onto the ramp, where the CIA agent pulled up under a wing of the Air Transport Command C-46.

Fox One was half-asleep, still draped in an overcoat to pin his arms down, as he was bundled up the ladder and into the plane.

Race and Peeples had drawn escort duty. Cohen would stay behind.

The agents said their good-byes at the foot of the ladder.

"Happy trails, amigos," Cohen shook hands, signed over the paperwork transferring custody of the prisoner. "I hope the Red scumbag gets life in an iron closet. Maybe you could arrange to drop him out of the plane on the way up."

"No dice," Race said. "This guy's golden. He's got tales to tell and he's going to be squealing so loud his lungs will hurt. Bureau's got a nice little reception all planned for him in Maryland."

"Life's too good for a Red," Peeples added. He'd be in on the Q and A sessions, too, looking out for the Atomic Energy Commission's interests. "The rap sheet on this guy's already longer than my arm."

"Yeah...conspiracy to commit espionage, assault on federal officers, dropping bombs on a military train...some poor public defender's going to puke when he gets this case."

Cohen left and Race and Peeples climbed up into the plane. The big Lycomings were already turning over, belching black smoke.

The trip up to National Airport took almost ten hours--a refueling stop was made at Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina. It was going on eleven at night when a weary Fox One was half-carried down the ladder to the caravan of black Bureau sedans waiting in a light snowfall on the ramp. Race grabbed a quick coffee from the ramp mechanics' station below the terminal before climbing in the car with the Russian. There was a chow cart outside the mechanics' tool cage, full of cold sandwiches and candy bars and Race was tempted.

But the Bureau drivers were anxious to get going and Race gave up the idea. It was a three hour drive to St. Michael's.

Talbot County was dark and cold as the caravan pulled up in front of the white woodframe farmhouse. The wind had picked up, coming off the Bay, and stinging needles of sleet were in the air. Behind the house, sailboat masts clanked back and forth.

Hell of a night, Charles Race thought as he slung Fox One's arms around his neck, bracing the Russian on rubbery legs. All in all, he would have preferred the warm breezes and hot salsa females of Mexico City to this.

They went in.

The Russian was stretched out on a bed in an upstairs bedroom. Chet Martin stood in the doorway, hands on hips, while a Bureau physician administered antidotes to the sedative.

"He'll be functional in an hour or so. Dramamine and about a million cups of coffee...always does the trick. Then he'll be wired to talk. Probably for days on end. The problem with this stuff--" the AD held up an ampoule of the antidote being administered--" is that it works too well. Subject takes this and it's like he won't shut up, ever. We have to stuff a rag in his mouth while we change the recorders."

Race had finally managed to scare up a bologna sandwich from the kitchen, just to keep his stomach quiet. He gulped it down, slurped his fifth cup of coffee. "Going to be a hell of a long night, eh Chet? You got the room ready?"

Martin nodded. An adjoining bedroom had been set up as an interrogation center, complete with table, chairs, microphones and recorders. "Director wants round the clock sessions. Subject gets two hours rest every twelve. It's a killer. I'm not sure whether he'll crack first or us."

"Who else is coming?"

Martin ticked off names on his fingers. "Peeples will be back. That's Atomic Energy. Vic Kalmer from the Bureau...he's C-I--"

"I know him."

"--and two guys from Army CID. Plus Chadwick, from General Investigative. And all the technicians. A real party here for the next few days. Hope you brought aspirin."

Race watched the physician gently administer a cocktail of stimulants to the Russian. Fox One--his pocket papers identified him as one 'Pyotr Mikhailov', assistant to the Naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City--was sitting up in bed, tie undone, a dull stupor on his face.

He was a young fellow, thirtyish, maybe. Thin wavy black hair and large languid brown eyes. Probably a real womanizer, Race thought, watching the doc bring him around. Or a queer.

Fox One/Mikhailov was generally coherent a few minutes after midnight. The physician okayed moving the subject to the table and chairs of the inquisition room--reluctantly.

"He's still feeling some effects from the sedatives. I can't guarantee he'll make a lot of sense right now."

Martin brushed that off. "Half my staff doesn't make sense at this hour, doc. I'll take the responsibility."

The AD sat down at the table, took a sip of coffee. "Pyotr Mikhailov...let's talk. You understand where you are?"

Mikhailov nodded glumly. He was still in street clothes, now covered with a blue bathrobe. His hair was slick with sweat, his face pale. "Ya ruso, ya Pyotr Sergeyevich Mikhailov--"

Martin held up his hand. "We speak English here, pal. This is America."

Mikhailov ran delicate, long-fingered hands through his hair. His watch was expensive, nails well trimmed. A real dandy, Martin thought. In the bedroom, he'd been well-examined for any ampoules of potassium cyanide, the preferred way of dispatch for Soviet agents. "You have no right to hold me. I have diplomatic immunity."

Martin lit a cigarette, blew smoke in the Russian's direction. It had the desired effect. He could see Mikhailov silently begging for a smoke. "Maybe in Mexico. But this isn't Mexico."

"I am assistant naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy. I insist you release me at once." Mikhailov's voice was weak, his eyes fixated on Martin's cigarette. The AD took out his pack and laid it on the table, just to torture the man for a few minutes.

"Mr. Mikhailov, if that is your name, you know you're facing very serious charges."

The Russian glared at him. "You cannot just kidnap a Soviet diplomat. My country--"

"--is in one hell of a fix right now," Martin said. "Let's see--" He consulted a scrap of paper he pulled from his jacket pocket. "--we've got conspiracy to commit espionage, false representation to a lawful investigative officer--that was in Los Alamos--lying under oath, assault on federal officers, unlawful possession of weapons and explosives, use of unlawful explosives in the commission of a felony--" he looked up. "Shall I go on?"

Mikhailov was grim. He folded his arms. His forehead was shiny with perspiration. "It is against international norms to hold a diplomat like a common criminal."

Martin's eyebrows shot up. "Common criminal? I got news for you, pal. You're no common criminal. What does your own country do to spies?"

Mikhailov said nothing. He glared back at Martin, then at Race and Peeples. "You have no right--I insist on speaking with my Embassy."

Martin shrugged. "Fair enough. I'm not an unreasonable man. I'll let you contact your Embassy...after you answer a few questions."

"That will be quite impossible. I have diplomatic immunity. You cannot charge me with anything. You can't hold me."

"Really? Then why are you locked here in this tiny bedroom, Mr. Mikhailov? Seems to me you don't have a lot of authority around here." Martin watched the Russian's fingers twitch. He gently pushed the cigarette pack across the table. "Go on. Have a real cigarette. You'll like Marlboros a hell of a lot better than that jackweed you guys smoke."

Mikhailov hesitated. The cigarettes were bait, he knew that. If he accepted--he chewed his lips. Damn it, he needed a smoke now. He pulled out one, and allowed Martin to light it from a match he had struck. The Russian puffed angrily for a few minutes, glaring all around the room. He didn't know where he was. At least it wasn't Moscow. He'd read papers about Hoover and the FBI. Hoover was no Lavrenti Beria, that much he was certain of.

"Shall we deal in realities now?" Martin asked. Some kind of subtle signal caused Charles Race and Rufus Peeples to come and sit at the table. Three against one. Trofimenko/Mikhailov tried a sneer, then gave it up. It even felt phony.

"Soviet diplomats are always realists. Reality is the inevitable triumph of the working class against imperialism and blood-sucking capitalists."

Martin suppressed a smile. "Well put, Pyotr. Have you got that out of your system now?"

Peeples cut in. "Reality is attempted sabotage of a United States military train. Plus unlawful access to restricted areas, areas well outside the fifty-mile perimeter you're confined to in this country. Let me see--" Peeples did some calculations, "--fifty miles from the DC line is about Fredericksburg, Virginia, going south. Yet you were inside Los Alamos for how many days--three, or four, I believe--approximately twelve hundred miles beyond the diplomatic limit."

"Not to mention the minor fact that you aren't even credentialed for being in this country in the first place. Hmmm--" Martin pretended to add another crime to his imaginary rap sheet--" unregistered diplomatic personnel. Or should I say enemy alien. I'm sure the State Department would like to know that. We got two options. Hold you for awhile, exchange you for something or someone bigger. Or just deport you right back to Mother Russia."

Mikhailov's lips tightened. No way he was going back to the Rodina. He had taken his time even contacting Brylin in Mexico City, knowing what the NKVD rezident would do when he learned the bombs hadn't been stopped. Maybe he was better off being kidnapped by the Americans. No, that was ridiculous.

"You can't legally hold me."

Martin was getting impatient. "Legally, I can do anything I damn well please. This is America, pal. Americans have rights. I'm sworn to uphold them as an officer of the law. Unfortunately, you're not American. You're a Red. So I'm kind of like the dog pound. I round up Reds that don't have a license and get rid of 'em. One way or the other."

Mikhailov sucked on the cigarette. "Under international law, I don't have to cooperate with you."

"True," said Martin. "Under international law, I don't have to be so nice to you, either. We normally just throw enemy aliens into our jails. But you're such a handsome chap. For you, I'm sure we could arrange something special, say sharing a cell with a sex offender. Something like that."

Peeples whispered something to Race, sitting next to him. The Atomic Energy Commission agent decided to take a new tack. "You were in Los Alamos to steal a bomb, weren't you?"

Mikhailov laughed, in spite of himself. "That would be difficult, sir. Your bombs are quite large. I don't think I could make off with one in my pocket. An absurd accusation."

"So how come you know our bombs are so big?"

Mikhailov's eyes narrowed. He had to be more careful. "Atomic devices are large, by their nature. We have them too, you know."

"Yes, so you do. Thanks to Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs and Harry Gold. Soviet science wasn't up to the job. So you borrowed--or rather, I should say, stole--the prints and designs for ours. Now what's the matter--Joe Stalin greedy for more? Blueprints weren't enough? Now you want a whole bomb?"

Mikhailov sniffed. "I know what you are trying to do. It's a standard trick in police work. Our militia and our police do the same...perhaps, with less polish. I was never in Los Alamos."

Peeples shrugged. "Well, proving that a lie is the least of our problems." He got up, paced the small bedroom, checked outside the window blinds. Still snowing, a bit harder. There was talk of half a foot by dawn. "Then there is the matter of this small aircraft you hired. In Albuquerque. The one that overflew an Army train in Utah last Tuesday morning. I'm sure our troops didn't imagine the explosions that nearly derailed the train. And we have the pilot already in custody. Mr. Day assures me that he never authorized bringing Army-issue hand grenades and other explosives aboard."

Mikhailov just shook his head. He looked around. His neck and shoulder muscles were cramped. He wanted to get up too, move about. Martin's look discouraged any further thoughts along that line. "I was never in any plane. I was never in Los Alamos. Clearly, you have confused me with one of your Most Wanted criminals. I am a diplomat of the Soviet Union."

"Pretty bold," Peeples insisted, "trying to hijack an Army train. But I don't see how you'd ever get one of the bombs aboard that Beech aircraft. Not big enough."

Mikhailov snorted. "The Soviet Union is not engaged in smuggling atomic bombs. Our only desire is peaceful relations with the world, even with the United States. Someday, maybe that will be possible."

Race couldn't let that pass. "Meanwhile, you arm a million Chinese troops and send them looting and rampaging across Korea. That's your idea of peace. The peace of the dead. Happy days are here again, under Communism."

Mikhailov was only too happy to steer the talk into ideology and diplomacy. Neutral ground. No one ever got hurt there. "We support the legitimate right of all peoples to live as they wish. If the Koreans desire to join the socialist camp, certainly we will help them. It's the United States that frustrates hope. You are the one raising the stakes, expanding the war, introducing terrible weapons to crush people's dreams."

Martin listened to the exchange. Something about the Russian's words--

"What terrible weapons?"

Mikhailov realized he had already gone too far. "You burn whole villages with a gasoline bomb. You destroy anything that moves with your airplanes. Terrible weapons, all of them."

"No, no, just now, Pyotr...what terrible weapons are you talking about?"

The Russian held out his hands. "I just said, this jellied gasoline--"

"You're talking about atomic weapons, aren't you?" Peeples had picked up on the slip as well. It was worth a shot.

Mikhailov frowned, stretched, tentatively reached for another of Martin's Marlboros. The AD didn't object. "It's well known Americans like to drop bombs and kill civilians by the thousands. Look what you did to Japan. The Soviet Union would never be first to introduce terrible weapons, even atomic weapons, into war. We have no Hiroshimas on our conscience. But, of course, we would defend our fraternal colleagues, to the death if we had to. Even if the U.S. did make the mistake of initiating atomic war in Korea."

Where's he getting this stuff? Race thought. Hadn't Truman disavowed any use of atom bombs in Korea? Of course, who knew what MacArthur was up to? "The President said less than a month ago that America had no need for atom bombs in Korea. Maybe the Soviet Union is planning a little surprise, like the Red Chinese did on Thanksgiving Day."

"It's you who are making the legitimate struggle of the Korean people into a proving ground for your terrible weapons. We Russians love peace. We've seen enough war. We want to stop war. MacArthur must be stopped."

"Why just MacArthur?"

"MacArthur threatens annihilation. We read the news, hear the radio. We have our own intelligence sources, as I'm sure you know. We know what MacArthur is up to, what treachery Truman is planning. And, I tell you from my heart, it will be stopped. One way or another."

"Wait a minute." Martin was confused. "What the hell's going on here? One minute, we're ticking off your rap sheet, the next minute we're yakking about Doug MacArthur. This isn't a political science class."

"How the hell do you know what MacArthur's up to anyway?" Peeples asked. "You must have sources in the Far East."

"Of course we have sources. We have sources everywhere, as do you."

"But MacArthur? The man's a blowhard. A brass hat with a big mouth. What are you saying, Pyotr?"

Mikhailov was wary of a trap. "Only this: that no one, not MacArthur, nor Truman nor Acheson, will be allowed to make a new Hiroshima out of the dreams of the Korean people."

Peeples' had found a thread to unravel. He decided to run with it. "You're talking atom bombs, aren't you? That's why you're here. Not to grab a bomb. To sabotage one."

Race was skeptical. "I don't buy it."

Peeples was sure he was right. "It's Greenhouse, Charlie. Look at it. It's staring us right in the face."

"Watch the talk," Martin warned. "Looks like we need a recess." He switched off the recorder, started to rise from the table.

"--wait," Peeples waved him down. "It's Gallant Flag, fellows." The AEC man turned back to the Russian. "I hear you saying you're in this country to stop MacArthur from bringing atom bombs into Korea--"

Martin stood up abruptly. "Can it, Rufus! That's enough. It's classi--"

"So are we!," Peeples announced. He stood up too, face to face with the AD. "It's the same case."

"What the hell are you saying?"

Peeples chopped the air with his hand. "Listen to the man. Listen to what he just said. He's in this country to stop MacArthur. He's got intel indicating Dugout Doug's sneaking atom bombs into Korea." He glared right at Chet Martin, who frowned, shaking his head. "He's on the same case we are."

"Friggin' preposterous--"

Mikhailov had watched the exchange with growing unease, keeping to himself. The Americans were arguing, not making a lot of sense.

Race didn't see it the same way. "Rufus, you're wrong. Fox One's here to grab a bomb. Not sabotage one. Stalin's greedy for more, that's all."

Mikhailov shook his head. "That's not true. We have the same technology as you. Our Soviet scientists are equally capable. But we have no desire to destroy the world. Our weapons are for punishing aggression, as we punished the Hitlerists. It's well known, even publicly known, that MacArthur doesn't think this way. He intends to extend the war into China, perhaps into Russia. That we will never permit."

Martin stood with hands on hips, feeling like a referee in a sparring bout. Trusting Mikhailov was out of the question. The Red agent was the enemy. But Peeples was wrong, putting words in the Russian's mouth. The AD leaned over the table, five inches from Mikhailov's face. "What's your mission here, mister?"

Mikhailov surprised him, a direct answer, taking a chance the truth would work. His eyes locked and never left Martin's. "To stop Greenhouse bombs."

"That's it," Peeples declared. "Greenhouse is MacArthur's cover. We know that. Isn't that what Kimberly said? Implied, at least. The evidence is there, I'm telling you. It's staring us right in the face."

Martin sat down as abruptly as he had stood. A headache was coming on. His mouth was coppery--too much coffee. And his stomach churned. "This case is starting to get to me, fellows. I don't know what to believe." To Mikhailov: "You mean to say your assigned mission is to stop the bombs bound for Greenhouse from getting to their destination?"

The Russian was almost as confused, surprised too. He wasn't sure how to reply. A trap? Americans were treacherous. So was Beria. Brylin too. He chose his words carefully. "The situation in Korea is in a dangerous phase. MacArthur is desperate. We have sources that say he will drop atom bombs, in China, perhaps even Russia. We have the right to defend ourselves."

Martin couldn't believe what he was hearing. Peeples was right, the schmuck. A Soviet agent, one Pyotr Sergeyevich Mikhailov--or whatever his name was--was working Gallant Flag just like they were. Not friggin' likely, a part of his mind warned. But supposing Peeples was right sure made a lot of things fit. Question was: could you ever trust a Soviet agent?

Could the Senators ever beat the Yankees?

"Get me a phone," the Assistant Director growled. "This, we got to call in. I want to talk with Hoover."

Inside of two hours, J. Edgar Hoover himself was standing in the very same converted bedroom, listening to a replay of the recording made during the first hour of Fox One's interrogation.

The Director took off his jacket and loosened his tie. When the recording was over, he sat down at the table and appraised Mikhailov carefully, silently studying the Russian from head to toe.

"You're a real dandy, from what they tell me," Hoover observed.

Mikhailov said nothing. The FBI Director seemed like a fat, jowly bear on first impression, a bear with a visible twitch to his left cheek. Best not to do or say anything that would startle him.

Hoover folded his fat hands on the table, a small hill of flesh rolling and churning like some hairy pile of lava. "You're unusually well-dressed for a Russian. Most Russians I know can't pick a suit or match a tie to save their souls. Look at you--nice tweed...I like the herringbone, by the way. Got a silk shirt, French cuffs and all. That your tie over there?"

Chet Martin retrieved the gold and burgundy tie and passed it to Hoover, who caressed the fabric, then sniffed it like an animal.

"Silk, too--" he muttered. "You didn't get this little gem at the local Woolworth's, I'm sure. Shiny new Bennett and Johnston's on your feet. You're an advertisement for good taste. I'll bed you've even got a pocket watch on a chain--only I don't seem to see it at the moment--"

Mikhailov's left eyebrow went up. "It was lost in Mexico City. On the street."

Hoover sniffed. The Director unclasped his hands. "Show me your hands."

Uneasily, the Russian placed his hands on the table. He willed them to be still, in contrast to Hoover's nervous antics.

"As I thought. Either you're a pianist and you spend an awful lot of time in the manicure shop. Long, delicate metatarsals..." he reached for Mikhailov's fingers but the Russian suddenly withdrew his hands back to his lap.

Hoover chuckled. "I'm pretty sure you didn't get these duds at GUM Department Store in Moscow."

Mikhailov glared back at him. "Diplomats often attend official functions. They must present themselves accordingly."

"Indeed." Hoover returned his own hands to their original pile of roiling flesh. "You seem to have quite a taste for the finer things. How long have you been--shall we say accredited--to Mexico? How long have you been a field agent for Soviet State Security?"

"I've served my country for many years."

"From what I hear," Hoover went on, "you've been in the West quite awhile, enjoying our fine food and drink, our shopping and museums and fancy cars and clothes, living the good life. The kind of life one could never have in Moscow, under the thumb of the NKVD. Is that so?"

Mikhailov was silent. He shifted uneasily.

Hoover continued. "Could it be, Mr. Mikhailov, that you've been in the West so long, you've somehow acquired a taste for our way of life?"

The Russian forced a smile. "The Revolution breeds a kind of discipline you know nothing of, sir."

"Well said," Hoover laughed. "Very well said. Without such discipline as yours, I'm sure a lesser man would have succumbed to temptation long ago. Perhaps--" Hoover's hands suddenly stopped moving. Mikhailov realized he had been mesmerized by them. He shook himself out of the daze. "--we can ease those temptations. It would be simple enough. If we just ship you back to Russia on the next flight out of National, you wouldn't be so tempted, would you? You could live that wonderful Bolshevik discipline and not have to worry about where to find that next pair of Bennett and Johnston's. Or a silk shirt with French cuffs. No more of that nasty old American trash, like ice cream or hot dogs or young women tempting you on the streets with their tight sweaters and skirts. Wouldn't that be a lot better for you?"

Mikhailov glared back at Hoover. A bald, transparent attempt to frighten him would never work.

"--the plane is waiting for you right now at the airport," Hoover told him. "You're charged with twenty-six counts of crimes against the United States. To be honest, we really don't want scum like you here anyway, poisoning our land. Eating our hot dogs. Shopping in our stores."

"I have the privilege, Mr. Hoover, of knowing that my system of life is superior to yours. We are the future. More and more people are choosing to live like human beings, not like cattle to be herded around from shopping center to shopping center, buying meaningless trinkets and toys."

"Good." Hoover stood up. "Then we are in agreement. Chet, the car's ready?"

Martin was momentarily flustered. "Uh, yes, sir...the car...yes, sir...I'll see to it. Right away." The AD hustled out of the room.

Mikhailov swallowed hard. Hoover really was going to do it. No negotiations. No trial. No long imprisonment...just ship him back to Mother Russia like a defective tractor.

Mikhailov/Trofimenko wet his lips. He knew perfectly well what Beria did with defectives. He flashed an image of Fumei An in her lilac kimono, surrounded by the exquisite little blossoms of the Happy Rose Petal. Drinks at Lohmeyers. Burgers and fries with a mountain of ketchup at the American Club on the Chui Dori.

No.

"Mr. Hoover, you need what I have."

Hoover had been going over case details and notes with Race and Peeples. He looked up.

"Something to say, Mr. Mikhailov?"

The Russian hunched forward over the table, resting on his elbows. "Fyodor Maximovich Trofimenko." He extended a hand.

Hoover slowly sat down, cautiously shaking the Russian's hand in slow motion. "Pleased. You were saying--?"

Trofimenko was nervous. "No recorder. I must speak freely. Only for this group."

Hoover obliged, waving the recorder away. Race removed it.

"It's not a crime, is it? To cooperate with the enemy? What I mean is--the situation is very grave. If atom bombs were to be used in Korea, in China--"

"My orders come directly from the President," Hoover said. "No atom bombs can be used without his direct authorization. If anyone else has ideas to the contrary, my job is to stop him."

Trofimenko was grim. "My government has evidence of just such a plan. By your own General MacArthur. I myself have provided much of this evidence. It appears you need my help."

Hoover's hands started churning again. "Are you offering?"

"I must be extremely careful in how I answer your question, Mr. Hoover. I don't want my loyalties to be...what is the word?...misconstrued. I am a Communist and a Soviet patriot. I love my country. But when the world faces such a grave danger, even patriots must sometimes yield to a larger cause...the cause of peace."

"Are you saying, you can provide me your sources? Your evidence on this plan by MacArthur?"

Trofimenko said. "Let me be clear. I cannot do anything that jeopardizes the interests of my country. That would be treason. But if I can help my country by helping you stop this mad plot to bomb China, perhaps even Russia, which would surely lead to a new world war, then clearly, I must I help you."

"And by helping me," Hoover observed, "you also help yourself, right? You get to keep those fine clothes. You get to keep driving luxurious cars. Enjoy fine wines. All the things you've developed quite a taste for? Isn't that right?"

Trofimenko grudgingly acknowledged the truth. "I learn more of my adversary by living as he does. Surely you can appreciate the tactical necessity."

"Of course."

"Then we have an agreement?"

Hoover shook hands with the Russian. "I'll let the Attorney General know we have a new inside source. As of right now, Mr. Trofimenko, consider yourself an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I'm all out of badges."

The debriefing lasted three more grueling hours. It was near dawn, after Hoover had left to brief the President, before the interrogation team fully realized what kind of case details the Russian could provide.

Rufus Peeples slumped over the back of a chair in the downstairs kitchen, hollow-eyed and grim. Trofimenko was rummaging through the refrigerator, piling up a plate full with cold cuts. Race was in the living room, curled up like a baby on a sofa.

Peeples watched the Russian devour a fistful of bologna and cheese. "They're mad. All of them."

Trofimenko slurped up a glass of milk to polish off his early morning snack. "Da. It's insane, to bring atom bombs into Korea." He shook his head, looked around the kitchen. "What's going to happen to me now?"

Peeples shrugged. "Depends. Hoover's gone to brief the President. For now, you stay here."

"It's not so bad here," the Russian admitted. He peeked through the venetian blinds. It was gray and snowy outside, a stiff breeze off the Chesapeake swirling snowflakes through the pines. Trofimenko saw no guards but he had no illusions about his status. He was a prisoner--in a comfortable, well-stocked American farmhouse, but a prisoner nonetheless. He went back to the refrigerator, finding a foil-wrapped tray. The cover read Swanson--Turkey and Rice. He peeled back the foil and took an experimental sniff, wrinkling his nose.

Peeples laughed at the sight. "Do they have TV dinners in Russia, pal? You're holding one of America's greatest inventions."

Trofimenko was dubious. He shook the tray, peered under the foil again. "Surely this is for your animals. How does it work?"

Peeples explained the concept of frozen dinners and heating in an oven. The Russian listened with growing skepticism, his face contorting into a mask of distaste. He put the tray back in the refrigerator.

"Americans have invented many great things."

Peeples agreed. "Maybe that isn't one of them. How long did you say you'd been posted to Japan?"

"Since 1947, full time. I originally came in with the Soviet delegation in 1945, with Marshal Reshetnikov. After a few years with the Embassy, my superiors found I had a peculiar talent, for--"

"--intelligence," Peeples completed the thought. "Same with me. You miss Russia?"

Trofimenko hunted through the refrigerator, found some more milk. He sat down at the table with the bottle and slurped more, dribbling on his sleeve. "How can one answer a question like that? Russia is my home. I am from Luzhniki. A suburb, as you would call it, of Moskva. But my real home is Rostov. You've heard of the Don River?"

Peeples shook his head. "Seen it on maps. That's all."

"Ah, the glorious Don. Wide and slow. I love the color of the Don, at sunset. It has the sheen of a copper tail, twisting through the farmland."

"I'm from Texas myself. Sounds like you're ready to go back home. After all this is over."

Trofimenko was staring through the window, his lips resting on the edge of the milk bottle, staring at the snow falling. "I'm not so sure, actually. I love your Glenn Miller songs. In Japan, I feel almost as if I'm in America. Kilroy is everywhere." The Russian smiled. "In my apartment--the Embassy allows me to keep a place in Shinjuku--I have some pictures of Rita Hayworth. In a sweater. Very nice. And I've developed a taste for Coney Island hot dogs, too." Trofimenko drained the milk bottle. "A difficult decision, Mr. Peeples. Am I ready to go back to Russia? I've been away for a long time. I'm not sure how I would answer that."

Peeples seemed to understand. "Sometimes home looks better from a distance. My family grew up on a dirt farm west of Dallas. Weatherford, Texas. I'd kill to keep from going back to that place."

Trofimenko rubbed his red eyes. "An extraordinary day," he muttered. "Do you think Russians and Americans can ever cooperate again?"

"I think we better learn how to, pal. It is kind of funny, isn't it? We're fighting each other in Korea and pointing cannons at each other in Berlin. Yet here we are, sitting at the same table, trying to figure out if we can trust each other enough to keep from blowing the world up."

"What do you think President Truman will do?"

Peeples shrugged. "What can he do? No one wants atom bombs dropping all over Korea or China. Someone in the chain of command is disobeying direct orders from the Commander in Chief. It's a hell of a thing when we have to have Russian help to keep our own people in line. But I figure Truman's a realist. He'll do what he has to to keep a lid on things in the Far East. I guess the next question is what will Stalin think of us cooperating."

Trofimenko didn't want to think about that. "Josef Vissarionovich keeps his own counsel."

"Give 'em Hell Harry and Uncle Joe Stalin--" Peeples raised a glass of orange juice as a toast. "--two of a kind. Throw 'em both in a box and shake it up real good. You get the same thing either way. That's what I think about politicians."

Trofimenko got up and went back to the refrigerator. He wanted to see just what other wonders this American marvel contained.

Harry Truman kicked off his shoes and propped his stockinged feet on top of the huge oak desk that dominated the Oval Office. He took off his spectacles and wiped them down while J. Edgar Hoover stared back impassively. Folders of pictures and interrogation briefs covered the desk. The Secretary of Defense sat next to Hoover, General George Marshall, stone-faced. Opposite the FBI Director, John Foster Dulles stroked his goatee, studying the President's face, totaling up all the reactions Hoover's briefing had elicited.

Incredulity, for starters. Then came skepticism and disbelief. Maybe a touch of cynicism for good measure. And a generous dollop of something like disgust. Truman's eyes were red and weak, small ferret's eyes, without his glasses.

"I hope this is worth getting me up at the crack of dawn," the President muttered. Truman had been staying at Blair House, across Pennsylvania Avenue, for nearly a year now, while the White House underwent extensive renovation and repairs. He didn't appreciate Hoover getting him out of bed at 6:00 a.m. and having to bundle up against the snow to make his way over to the Oval Office.

The FBI Director ignored the jibe. He went through the details of the Gallant Flag case, describing the progress the investigators had made since the last briefing ten days before. There hadn't been a lot of progress, Hoover was forced to admit.

Then he detailed the aborted attempt to grab an Operation Greenhouse warhead from the Army train.

"There was no damage to any of the bombs," Hoover said. "The devices made it safely to Hunters Point intact. They're aboard the Chesapeake now, heading to the test site. And we have a special agent aboard...Robert Blount, from our Counter-Intel branch,"

Truman started to reply but was interrupted by the intercom buzzer.

It was Rose Conway, the President's secretary.

"Coffee and rolls, Mr. President."

Truman took his feet off the desk. "Bring 'em in, Rose."

Conway wheeled a stainless steel cart into the Oval Office and parked it beside the oak desk. Two steaming pots surrounded a tray of rolls and doughnuts. Saucers, spoons and plates of fruit completed the assortment.

Truman slurped his coffee black, the moment Conway finished pouring it. "Hits the spot, Rose. Especially on a morning like this. Thanks."

When everyone had been served, Conway departed. Truman glowered at Hoover over the rim of his cup. "Are the Russians aware of this Gallant Flag plot?"

Hoover consulted his notes, ruffling through papers to find the right page. "Initially, we didn't think so, sir. But now, with the train attack, and the capture of Fox One in Mexico yesterday, we've got evidence the Russians not only know of Gallant Flag, they're actively trying to stop it. The evidence suggests they're trying to sabotage Greenhouse too. And if they can grab a loose atomic bomb of ours in the process, so much the better."

Truman was furious. "When this group met a week ago, I informed all of you that I wanted results on this case right away. I wanted to shut it down right then, before it got completely out of hand. But you persuaded me not to do that. The only reason I didn't order the case resolved was your argument that we could smash Stalin's whole North American network in the process. Has this happened? Have we got old Joe Stalin by the balls yet?"

Hoover had to admit the investigation was very much a work in progress. "The Russians are a step ahead of us, Mr. President. They seem to know more than we thought."

Dulles, the Director of Central Intelligence, scoffed, "Hell, they know more than we do, period. They've got better sources."

Truman's ire was still focused on Hoover. "This has gone on long enough. Do we know--do we even have proof yet--of who's behind this absurd plot?"

Hoover and Marshall described the joint investigative task force, the agreements they had worked out, the moves that Kitchens and Blount had already made.

"Then you're telling me, that with all this apparatus you've set up, we're not one damn bit closer to solving this case? Is that what you're telling me?"

"This Russian agent--Fox One--Trofimenko--could be a blessing in disguise, Mr. President." Marshall figured it would be politic to cap the President's temper before things went too far. "We might be able to work out a limited form of cooperation with the Russians on this."

Dulles thought the idea had merit. "We both seem to be chasing the same rabbit, sir."

"They may have information we don't," the SecDef went on. "Both sides have an interest in seeing the war in Korea--I'm sorry, sir...the police action--limited to the Korean peninsula and not start another world war."

Hoover was adamantly opposed. "Mr. President, excuse me but the idea of collaborating with our mortal enemy--an enemy sworn to destroy the American way of life no matter what it takes--is a poor excuse for strategy. It's like giving the fox the keys to the henhouse. The Bureau is fully capable of conducting this investigation without any assistance."

Truman leveled an even gaze at Hoover. "I suppose that's why we're no closer to solving this case than we were a week ago."

Hoover reddened. "Mr. President, the Bureau has never failed the American public and it never will. I can promise you that--" but he was waved into smoldering silence by Truman.

"It's an intriguing idea you've got there, George. Let me remind all of you that ten days ago, I was persuaded to let this damn plot go forward in the hopes of developing enough evidence to get to the bottom of the whole thing. Now you want me to cooperate with the Soviets...hold hands with the very enemy who's probably behind the whole affair." Truman took off his spectacles once more.

"Gentlemen, I don't have to tell you that what you're suggesting is probably treason, or worse. Plus it goes against the grain of everything I've fought for since I went into public service in Missouri. It's damned ridiculous."

But after an interval of debate and profanity, the President began to calm down. Marshall saw to it that Truman cut the endless stream of coffee with some juice and rolls. No sense stoking a fire that was already burning plenty hot, he thought. The tactic seemed to work.

There was cautious agreement that Marshall's idea might have some merit after all.

The President was still irritated that more progress hadn't been made on the case.

"I'm still convinced," he told them, "that the right thing to do is shut down Greenhouse for good. Cancel the whole thing. That trumps old Joe Stalin, doesn't it? If Greenhouse is stopped, the Russians have a harder time going after our bombs."

"And we lose our best method for staying ahead of the Russians in atomic technology," Marshall pointed out. "Stalin has the bomb, too, Mr. President, even if it did come from Los Alamos. We need the results from atomic tests like Greenhouse to keep our arsenal one step ahead of the Russians."

"Limited cooperation adds something else, too, Mr. President," Dulles added. "It might allow us to learn just what the Soviets know about our atom bombs. It's a good intelligence opportunity to see how far along they are."

Truman wasn't fully convinced. "Who's going to propose this to the Soviets anyway? And why should they agree to cooperate? They seem to be able to get what they want without cooperating."

"I'll undertake the job," Dulles said. "The UN's hosting a disarmament conference at Lake Placid next week. Word we have is that Molotov himself will be in town to attend. He's got Stalin's direct ear. Our sources say he's pretty tight with the Generalissimo."

Truman picked at a doughnut. "I don't like it, men. Playing with this case is like playing with fire. It gives me heartburn and indigestion. You know: Bess says I toss and turn at night like a pancake on a hot griddle. Muttering and swearing...she's says I don't stop moving the entire night. I know what it is too. It's Korea. Korea and China and Russia--the three of 'em coming at me, in my dreams, spinning like a Missouri twister. It takes all my strength and wits to keep from being sucked in. I just hope to hell I can keep ahead of that twister. They're so damn unpredictable."

The Oval Office was quiet for a few moments, save for Hoover's wheezing and the soft tock of a clock on the wall. Truman tried to make eye contact with each man. Only the FBI Director seemed willing.

"It's against my better judgement," the President went on, "but I'll agree to this cockamamie scheme on two conditions: one--that the Russians also agree. Two--that strict limits be placed on what information is shared. I don't want Joe Stalin shaking my hand with one hand and picking my pocket with the other, and that's exactly what'll the bastard will do if we let him." Truman sat up abruptly, then got up and stood before the windows, peering out through a cold gray fog at the wintry South Lawn and its shadowy sentinels of oak, poplar, and elm. He huffed a halo of steam with his breath on the glass and drew stick figures.

"It's unprecedented," he said. "In the middle of a cold war, in the middle of a shooting war, we cooperate with our greatest enemy to keep the war from widening into global catastrophe." He shook his head. "Hell of a thing--" He turned back to the desk, standing with arms folded behind him. "Meet with Molotov, John. Work out the particulars of how this case can be managed."

"Mr. President?" Hoover was already working out details in his mind.

"What is it now?"

"As a minimum first step toward moving the case forward, I want to attach this Trofimenko fellow to the case task force. Send him to Japan. I'd like to hook him up with Major Kitchens."

"George...you're the military man here. Will it fly?"

Marshall shrugged. "It's a logical move. From what I've heard here, the Russian knows Japan well enough. We'll have to call him an advisor, or something like that. No way Lightning Joe Collins or Doug MacArthur would ever stand for admitting a Soviet spy onto the case team. He'll be lucky to keep from being arrested and shot, as it is. Call him an advisor or a critical informant or a key source--whatever. We'll have to work out some ground rules for access to information and case files. I can work that out with the Bureau this morning--" He glanced over at Hoover.

"Then it's settled," Truman said. He sat down again, eyed the last doughnut, but gave up the idea and settled for finishing off his fifth cup of coffee.

"Today is the day we hike our skirts for Stalin and hope to God we don't get raped."

Saturday, 1-6-51

Westchester County, New York

5:30 p.m.

An hour north of Nyack, New York, Palisades Drive and the west bank of the Hudson River folded gently into rolling farm country graced with large virginal stands of linden and elm, miles of manicured hedges and landscaped boxwood gardens, punctuated by a scattering of English manor houses and the occasional counterfeit Norman chateau or Bavarian castle. To even a casual observer, the countryside was redolent with wealth and good breeding, vast portfolios fertilized with Wall Street fortunes and Groton diplomas, the very citadel of American capitalism.

Or so it seemed to Vyacheslav Mikahilovich Molotov, Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union.

Molotov glared at the road sign reading Duxford Hill, as the Packard turned up a long, twisting gravel drive to the thatch-and-beam Tudor-style estate of Wall Street millionaire Lew Roth. The Commissar of Foreign Affairs had ridden up from the Soviet UN mission's Long Island compound all afternoon and he was both tired and somewhat annoyed that his long-time acquaintance John Foster Dulles had insisted on a "meeting of utmost urgency" so far away from the comforts of the fenced and gated Long Island mansion.

Duxford Hill offered the scenic splendor of the Hudson River valley and the privacy and seclusion Dulles wanted for the meeting. Even that might not have been enough to coax Molotov out of his Long Island lair had not the DCI left a cryptic explanation with the Russian about the meeting's purpose: to work out arrangements for cooperating on an investigative case that threatened to blow the Korean conflict sky-high.

Molotov eased himself out of the Packard's rear compartment, glanced sourly up the hill at Roth's huge mansion and adjusted his pince-nez frames. Even for John Foster Dulles, he told himself, the message didn't make any sense.

The Foreign Minister hitched up his fur coat, adjusted the black sable shapka on his head, and leaned into a wintry late afternoon breeze as he headed up the gravel drive toward a knot of approaching Americans.

In the center of the group was the Director of Central Intelligence, John Foster Dulles. He wore a wool greatcoat and a black homburg. The estate owner Lew Roth stood beside him. Several men also in long coats hung back from the group. Molotov decided they were staff, or guards.

Dulles removed his gloves and extended a hand.

"A pleasure to see you again, Mr. Foreign Minister. Thank you for coming up here on such short notice."

Molotov shook hands with Dulles and Roth. "It seems I have been lured into the snakepit of capitalism, Mr. Dulles. Still, to meet with the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency--"

The Americans laughed. Molotov didn't.

Dulles took the Russian by the arm. "Shall we retire to the lodge? Lew's got a big fire going with a great view of the Hudson through the windows. Plus he has a very well-stocked wine cellar; I can personally attest to that."

Molotov squinted suspiciously at Dulles out of the corner of his eye. "The view is better here, don't you think? Let's walk the river along this path here." It would be a lot harder for the Americans to record what was said if they remained outside.

Dulles, warily eyeing the light snowfall, shrugged. "As you wish, Minister."

They strolled along a graveled path paralleling the river, through banks of snow that had been swept aside. The wind was sharp and cold, slinging needles of sleet into their faces. Roth and the others hung back, giving the two men plenty of room.

"You didn't invite me up here to admire the scenery," Molotov observed.

"No, I did not." Dulles jammed his hands into his coat pockets. "Minister, what I am about to tell you is a very grave matter, a matter of the highest national urgency. I asked you to come up here to explain the matter in person...and to ask for your help."

Molotov walked grimly on while the DCI laid out the basics of what was known about Gallant Flag. From a distance, a disinterested observer would have imagined the men discussing the fine points of pheasant hunting or wine tasting. The Russian stared ahead with no visible reaction.

"--what I'm proposing, Minister, is clearly without precedent in recent years. I'm well aware of what relations have become between our two countries. Yet once, we were allies in a great campaign...not so long ago. The situation were facing now is equally grave and time is short. Simply put...we must cooperate if the plot is to be stopped. If events are not to spin completely out of control. I'm asking you to put this idea to Marshal Stalin, right away, today if possible."

"The President has approved of this?"

"Completely."

Molotov stopped at a bend in the path; the walk led away from some high bluffs back toward a stand of linden and plane trees, branches now quilted with snow. The Russian was wary and noncommittal. He knew he would have to get this to Stalin.

"Why should our countries cooperate?" Molotov asked. "Why should we help you when you are at war with two of my country's allies?"

Dulles decided to be blunt. "It's much more effective than trying to sabotage our atomic tests in the Pacific. Or stealing a bomb."

A hint of a smirk crossed Molotov's face.

"Let me assure you," the DCI went on, "what we're proposing is a very limited form of cooperation, limited only to the case at hand. The President has authorized me to propose sharing case-related information, developing and pursuing leads in a joint effort to determine who the key people are in this case, how the bombs are going to be smuggled into the theater and how they might be used."

"You're telling me the much-vaunted FBI has failed to catch the criminals?"

Dulles nodded. "It's true. I don't like to admit it, but it is true."

"And what does my country stand to gain from this so-called cooperation?"

Dulles stamped his feet to stay warm. "You gain assurance, Minister."

"Assurance?"

"Assurance that atomic devices won't be used to widen the war in Korea. Make no mistake--" Dulles was shivering in the bitter wind; Molotov was unsympathetic. "--this is a conspiracy of the highest order. We are relentlessly trying to stamp this thing out but Washington is a long way from the Far East and MacArthur is sometimes a difficult man to deal with."

"The President should simply remove General MacArthur. Is that so hard?"

"It may well come to that," Dulles admitted. He added, "We both have an interest in seeing that the conflict in Korea is contained to Korea. You gain the President's personal assurance that such will be the case. The President has instructed me to state categorically that there are no plans to introduce atomic weapons into this conflict."

"A good thing," Molotov said, "for such a move would bring catastrophe on all of us. And you? What do you gain?"

Dulles thought about that for a moment. "Faster resolution of this plot. Enough evidence to overcome the political popularity of a legend and reel him in. Minister, I must be honest with you: MacArthur is a delicate subject, politically. If the President has sufficient, incontrovertible evidence of conspiracy or treason, then MacArthur's done for. Not that we won't continue to fight you hard in Korea. We will. But with MacArthur out of the picture, the President has a better grasp, better control of the situation."

"It is unusual," Molotov said, "to be asked for assistance in getting rid of the President's personal enemies. In my country, these matters are handled somewhat differently." The Foreign Minister made a simulated gun with his hand.

Dulles started to say something back, but the Russian held up a hand. He seemed uneasy, lost in the huge fur collar of his coat. "Of course, Mr. Dulles, you understand I must talk with Josef Vissarionovich. With the Central Committee too."

"Give me your opinion of this," Dulles asked. "Your personal opinion."

Molotov thought. "Cooperation for a common cause is a worthy goal. But the final decision must be made in Moscow."

The men turned and retraced their steps along the walkway. Dulles urged speed on the Russian diplomat.

"We don't have a lot of time. The warheads for the Greenhouse test are en route now. Somehow, some way, a few are going to be diverted to Korea, unless something is done. The President has given us permission to let the conspiracy unfold a bit more, so we can grab everyone involved. It's risky, to be sure. The President doesn't like it. That's why we need your help."

Molotov and Dulles reached the circular drive where the black Packard limousine was parked. The engine was still running, enveloping the car in acrid fumes. An official from the Soviet UN mission opened the rear door.

At length, the Russian agreed to communicate the gist of Dulles' proposal to Moscow right away.

"I can make no promises beyond that."

The men shook hands and Molotov slipped into the car. The Soviet motorcade, with its escort of State Department and New York State Police vehicles, pulled away, heading down the driveway.

Dulles watched through fogging glasses as the snow swirled harder around the windswept front lawn of the mansion. A chilly fog was working its way up from the river valley, cloaking Duxford Hill in white.

Lew Roth let Dulles alone for awhile. The DCI seemed a lost soul in the middle of the snowfall. Presently, he grabbed his long time college fraternity friend by the elbow and gently steered him up the hill toward the house.
CHAPTER 18

Wednesday, January 10, 1951

Moscow

2:45 a.m.

Stalin smelled a trap.

The Great Protector of all the Russias slouched on a divan and glared pensively up at the flickering movie screen. His gray tunic was unbuttoned and he had long ago removed his boots, propping his feet up on a low credenza littered with uneaten portions of shashlik and bliny, half-finished bottles of brandy, vodka and Georgia narzan mineral water.

The small theater in the basement of the Kremlin's Arsenal Building was part of the Generalissimo's apartment complex. It had once served Peter the Great as a wine cellar, later a meat locker and ice cabinet for Tsar Alexander, and a cutlery room for Nicholas. Josef Vissarionovich Stalin had ordered the chamber renovated as a birthday present to himself at the victorious end of the Great Hitlerist War. Now the theater hosted screenings of American movies almost as often as it showed film clips of heroic socialist farm communes.

Stalin waved a hand in the air, through the smoky beam of the projector. In the booth behind his head, two technicians of the Kremlin Kommandatura's Radio-Technical Troops understood the gesture and reacted instantly to cut the volume down. The movie was one of Stalin's favorites: Destination Tokyo. Cary Grant's homilies trailed off to an indistinct murmur.

The great Vozhd of the Soviet Union needed some quiet to think. In the distance, the muffled chimes of the Spasskaya Tower bells sounded once again: a deeper double peal followed by three quarter tones, signifying a quarter to three in the morning. The chimes were broadcast on the hour on State Radio throughout the land.

Stalin stared over the stains of the evening's meal on his tunic, at Molotov's cable on the credenza. He had been mulling over the message about the Americans' offer to cooperate on some kind of joint investigation most of the night, a strange message involving bringing charges against their own top military leadership. It didn't make any sense. He snatched up the flimsy and re-read the Foreign Minister's words for the tenth time.

It was called Gallant Flag.

Investigating their own military leadership for possible conspiracy to commit treason. Incredible. Stalin couldn't make any sense of the cable. Why not just execute the generals involved, as enemies of the state? Why let this conspiracy go forward, as Truman was obviously doing, and allow such dangerous men to run the war in Korea?

Unless there really was no plot.

Stalin was convinced Truman could not be trusted. For a mere general of the United States Army to consistently outmaneuver and outfox the President of the United States was too incredible to be believed. No, it made no sense to think of this offer as anything other than a trap.

We'll soon see whose henhouse the fox winds up in.

Josef Stalin was wary but in spite of the caution such an offer required, he was oddly inclined to accept Truman's offer anyway. But before he made any decision, he wanted to talk with Beria.

Lavrenti Pavlovich was always good for a few insights. Plus he would have the latest dispatches from Treeline and Windward and the rest of the North American network.

He called up the bespectacled Commissar for State Security and invited him over.

Half an hour later, Beria joined him, sipping brandy in the screening room in a leatherette wing chair beside Stalin's divan.

Beria had already familiarized himself with the contents of the cable. The Commissariat's radio room at #2 Dzerzhinsky Square had processed and decrypted the original transmission a day earlier. Beria had a long-standing policy that any traffic for the Central Committee, even for Stalin's eyes only, would pass through him. It was a form of life insurance that no amount of money could buy.

"It's a trap, I'm sure of it," Stalin was saying. "Truman's tricky and this is a trap."

"Perhaps," Beria said. He polished off the brandy and started picking through a tray of Stalin's leftovers. A smoldering fire opposite the men guttered and smoked; the theater was stifling hot and Beria loosened his own tunic collar. Visiting Stalin, the NKVD chief sometimes found it politic to come in his dark green all-Union General of Border Troops uniform. "But I see some possibilities here."

"Possibilities...don't be a rabbi with me. What are you talking about?"

"Just this, comrade. It's certain that any kind of offer from the Americans must be carefully considered and weighed. Certainly there is a risk. But there's also a gold mine of intelligence in that cable too. All we have to do is dig in the right place."

Stalin belched loudly and closed his eyes. "Truman's angry we plucked his chickens at Los Alamos. Now he wants to get back at us. Does he think we're that blind?"

"Not at all." Beria sucked on the last piece of shashlik before popping it in his mouth. "This cable is an opening. It gives us a chance to learn much that is useful about American atomic bombs. Perhaps, more than our own operatives could give us."

"That's also true of the Americans, Lavrenti Pavlovich. Truman and Hoover would love to know what we know, how far behind we are. If they learned that, our whole position in Europe could be threatened."

Beria had to admit the possibility was real. The two men swapped risks and rewards for a few minutes, each poking holes in the other's argument. It was a comfortable, well-rehearsed routine.

The NKVD chief tried to convince Stalin that such a cooperative joint venture could be managed.

"I was able to manage Kurchatov, was I not? Kurchatov and his atomic scientists. We gave Russia the atom bomb last year. I'm sure I can manage this too. Communications can be compartmentalized to minimize what the Americans can learn." Beria picked up the cable and pressed it close to his eyes. The Commissar was practically blind, even with his spectacles. "I know Fyodor Maximovich Trofimenko well. Good proletarian stock...his father was a colonel of artillery with the Red Army in the civil war. I know what motivates him. With the right motivation, he can he a useful tool for us. Plus Truman wants help in getting enough evidence to get rid of MacArthur. He thinks MacArthur has become too powerful."

Like Zhukov, Stalin thought. He was sympathetic with this view, this realization about Truman.

"Getting rid of MacArthur would serve our purposes as well. It might finally allow the Communists, the Red Hand and similar groups, to operate more easily in Japan. It could even cause enough turmoil to help our North Korean and Chinese comrades on the battlefield."

"Then that can be our goal: help our fraternal allies crush the warmongers in Korea and at the same time, grab every scrap of technical information we can about American atom bombs. A perfect chance to slingshot ourselves ahead and build an atomic arsenal second to none."

Stalin seemed to like the idea. "I'll approve on one condition: communication between our people and the Americans must be strictly limited and carefully managed. And you, Lavrenti Pavlovich...you must stay on top of the situation and keep me informed. Everyday."

This Beria agreed to do. Stalin waved at the projector booth and the technicians raised the movie volume once again. Beria watched the Principal Marshal of the Soviet Union lay his head back and follow the exploits of the American submarine in Tokyo Bay through tiny slit eyes.

For his own purposes, Beria figured the Molotov cable, along with his own role in shepherding the Soviet atomic bomb effort, would eventually give him enough power and influence at the highest levels of the Party and the government to make him invulnerable in the inevitable struggle for power that would follow Stalin's death. Already, the NKVD chief was trying to think ahead, trying to position himself for that day, a day be believed was not too far off.

Watching Stalin follow the American movie in a sleepy trance, Beria carefully noted every tremor and facial tic that crossed the Great Protector's pockmarked face. Josef Vissarionovich Stalin was aging and visibly declining every week.

The night of the long knives could not be far away.

Thursday, 1-11-51

Guam

10:15 a.m.

To Robert Blount, Guam looked a lot like a fuzzy green sock from the air.

The FBI agent had flown for seven hours, taking a Navy PBY from the project anchorage at Kwajalein after Chesapeake had put into dock at Eniwetok the night before. Hoover had left a message and Blount had spent the whole flight puzzling over it.

It didn't make any sense.

Now he had a brief layover at Andersen Field on the north side of the hilly island. The Air Force had a three-times daily C-47 shuttle run up to Atsugi Field Tokyo and the next flight out left in less than an hour. Just enough time to grab a few smokes and some coffee that tasted like diesel oil.

Blount stared out at Runway 18 Left from the crude Quonset hut that served as a departure lounge, watching a B-29 from the 13th Air Force taxi into position for takeoff. Probably on a bomb run to Korea, he surmised. He pulled out Hoover's note again and re-read it for the hundredth time, especially the part about hooking up with a Soviet agent in Japan.

He wanted to make sure he had read it correctly.

He had.

Once Chesapeake had dropped anchor at the project site, a few miles off Rongelap Atoll, Blount had gone to the ship's radio room and, with Captain Ward's permission, wired a message back to the case task force in Washington, advising Hoover and the Division AD that the Greenhouse devices had made it okay, without incident, to the Pacific Proving Ground. The first devices were scheduled to be winched off the ship that very morning, to a test rig at Bikini, where their electrical and arming/fusing systems would be checked out. Just before taking a motor launch down to the seaplane base at Kwajalein, Blount had observed Albert Ranier and the Los Alamos T-Division team making their initial preparations for the first test shot a few weeks away. Unloading equipment for the shot would take several days, according to the Chesapeake's chief, and preparing the shot site and tower another week beyond that.

Blount had seen precious little hard evidence of anything out of the ordinary.

Several times during the trip out from Hunters Point, the agent had snooped around Ranier's lab and quarters aboard ship. With all the security teams aboard Chesapeake, he felt like taking a number and standing in line, for all the surveillance operations underway. It was cinch Ranier knew perfectly well what was going on but the Czech physicist had said little and let his work babying the atom bombs shield him from the nosier inquiries.

Blount grudgingly respected Ranier's ability to remain unperturbed in the midst of such frenetic surveillance and obvious suspicion. He hadn't seen a shred of evidence to implicate Ranier in the conspiracy but that didn't matter. The agent had a feeling, well-honed after years of case work, about people and their crimes. Guilt did odd things to crooks, perps and conspirators. Even the spy business had its unwritten rules. Treason and espionage were like strong liquor, to Blount's way of thinking. Some people could handle them. Some couldn't. But everyone had a limit and nobody was unaffected.

In the case of Albert Ranier, Blount figured the preternatural calm the physicist displayed was the most damning thing about him. You had to work hard to stay that calm when the ship was crawling with cops. The average person would have gone nuts in a day; police presence always did that to people.

Blount was quite certain Albert Ranier was guilty as hell. He just couldn't prove it.

Now he had instructions from Hoover to fly to Tokyo and hook up with Major Kitchens, the Army CID officer. The message said the Russians were sending an agent too, to work the case with the Americans.

That was hard to believe. With some of the other AD's, Blount would have suspected a joke. But Hoover didn't make jokes. Blount chain-smoked Camels the whole hour as he waited for the ground crew to make the C-47 shuttle ready.

After all, weren't the Soviets the enemy?

The aircraft was soon ready for boarding and Robert Blount wrestled his bags across the rainy tarmac to the stairs. He figured he was easily the only FBI agent for five thousand miles in any direction. The badge hadn't meant a whole lot to the loadmaster sergeant overseeing the aircraft loading on the ramp.

"Looks great, pal. Just get onboard, will you? I got a deadline to make and some hotshot general's due here any minute."

He soon found his badge and Special Agent's pin didn't count for much in a land of stripes and eagles and lots of stars.

Blount climbed up the stairs and settled himself into a pile of straps and canvas webbing that no one would have mistaken for a seat. Ten hours in a cold, rattling, bumpy metal box...that's what the dispatcher had called the Tokyo run.

"Oh, you'll love it. Be sure to ask the stewardess for the filet mignon."

Blount looked sourly at the waxpapered sandwich he'd gotten at the canteen on the way out.

He settled in and tried to get as comfortable as he could. In some ways, he could almost imagine he was back Stateside, sitting on his aching butt in a stakeout car. Only the grub was better Stateside.

Trouble was: out here in the middle of the Pacific and Far Eastern Command, Special Agent Robert Blount, Section CI-1, Counter-intelligence Branch of the Washington Field Office, was an extremely small fish in a very large ocean. It was plain the Bureau had no teeth in this part of the world.

Hoover didn't seem to understand that. If Blount was going to make any headway on the case in Japan, it was a sure bet he'd have to grow longer and sharper teeth.

At least, Kitchens was a known quantity. They had sized each other up at the Bureau's safe house in Maryland. Presumably, Kitchens was one of the good guys.

Blount wasn't so sure the same could be said of the Russians.

1-10-51, Wednesday

Tokyo

11:00 a.m.

Situated several blocks south of the Imperial palace, along the Hibiya Dori, the Hotel Natani was an unlikely place to hold the bi-weekly get-together known as the Allied Council for Japan. The hotel itself was a mixed concatenation of architectures--part Greco-Roman classical with columns and friezes full of heroic figures, part Japanese pagoda and woodbeam construction.

The Natani had one especially large banquet hall, called the Zuiko Room, that was often chosen for ACJ meetings of importance. The Soviet delegation had made the request, asking for special arrangements for what was sure to be a memorable occasion.

It wasn't everyday the Russians detailed one of their spies to work a case with American intelligence.

Bret Billings and Major Lyle Kitchens had arrived at the Hotel Natani shortly after 1000 hours. They promptly took themselves on a self-guided tour of the place while the hotel staff scurried about getting the Zuiko Room ready. George Atcheson, the U.S. delegate, arrived a few minutes later. He gathered the American delegation together for a pre-conference briefing in one of the side rooms, the one with the Egyptian pharaohs.

"Keep your mouths shut," Atcheson told them. "There's an agenda and we have to stick to it. Protocol is very important. Sometimes these things only last a few minutes. Sometimes a few hours. Depends on how much Derevyanko wants to talk. Just sip your sodas and try to look agreeably pleasant. It's show time for the windbags. You can bet your Howdy Doody dolls the Reds won't pass up a chance to score propaganda points."

Like good soldiers, Kitchens and Billings marched into Zuiko Hall right behind Atcheson and his staff. They murmured greetings to old friends in the British and Dutch delegations.

The Soviet delegation occupied one leg of the horseshoe-shaped table, glowering behind pitchers of mineral water and little red hammer and sickle flags tacked to dowel rods. Kuzma Derevyanko had come in full Red Army regalia--a dark evergreen uniform with three stars on his shoulderboards. Accompanying him was Jakob Malik, career diplomat and one-time ambassador to the UN. Malik was decked out in a dark suit with a pale blue tie.

"Which one's the spy?" whispered Kitchens. The Americans seated themselves on the horseshoe leg opposite the Russians.

Billings sniffed. "Spy? Hell, they're all spies, Major."

"You know what I mean."

Billings indicated a tall, younger man three seats left of Malik. "The nervous one over there. With the cigarette holder."

Kitchens sized up Fyodor Trofimenko from a distance. "Looks like he hasn't had a square meal in years. Baggy suit, baggy face--"

"All Russians have baggy suits. It's the Party line."

For an instant, Kitchens and Trofimenko exchanged glances. The Russian looked like a juvenile delinquent to Kitchens. He slouched in his chair, dangling a cigarette in some kind of ivory holder, fidgeting like a bored child. The rest of the Russians looked like Kitchens' idea of Sunday School teachers, a committee of rule enforcers scowling across the room, scrutinizing every twitch the Americans made.

For his part, Trofimenko gave Kitchens only a moment's stare. Probably doesn't realize I'm his contact, Kitchens thought. He tried a smile and a quick nod of acknowledgement but the Russian's eyes had wandered on.

"Just my luck," Kitchens muttered to Billings. "Howdy Doody with bad teeth."

The proceedings droned on for nearly two hours. When Atcheson had the floor, he extolled the virtues of Japan's new American-style constitution. He spoke for half an hour. There was a short break. When Derevyanko had the floor, he blasted the western Allies for blocking the 'legitimate aspirations of the Japanese people' and 'ignoring petitions of the Soviet Union to assist its fraternal allies in labor relations.' He spoke for an hour and half. There was no break.

The midday reception couldn't come soon enough for Lyle Kitchens. He hated long-winded speeches more than incoming mortar shells, and he'd seen his share of those in Italy in '44. Kitchens pulled Billings aside.

"I'm going to do it. I'm going to introduce myself. Howdy Doody has no idea we're the ones he's working with. At this rate, I'll be bald by the time General Windbag gets through."

Billings was skeptical. "It doesn't work that way, Major. You don't just walk up to a Russian intelligence officer and shoot the bull. There's channels--"

"Baloney." Kitchens watched several Russians squirming a bit, maneuvering themselves step by step toward an exit. Trofimenko was one of them. Maybe if I can catch them in the head, he told himself. He scribbled a note on a scrap of paper and stuffed it in his jacket. Then he got up and angled off to intercept the group.

Ten feet from Trofimenko, Kitchens half-saluted and extended a hand. "Major Lyle Kitchens, U.S. Army. I don't believe we've met yet."

The Russians were startled by Kitchens' directness. Trofimenko's eyes narrowed. Warily, eyes alert for his comrades, the agent reached forward to grasp Kitchens' hand.

"Good afternoon, sir." Trofimenko felt a wad of paper in the palm of his hand. Kitchens had passed him a note.

They locked eyes for a moment. The American's seemed to say: keep it calm and under control. Trofimenko manipulated the grip and then, in one smooth motion, released Kitchens' hand and stuck his right hand in his jacket. He hadn't imagined it. Unknown to everyone else, a small piece of paper had just passed between them.

"I'm glad to finally meet you," Kitchens went on. "I understand we will be working together on a case."

Trofimenko started to reply but Malik intervened. The diplomat was severe and hard-edged. "In good time, Major. All in good time. We mustn't deviate from the schedule. If you'll excuse us, we have some matters to discuss--"

Malik and another man--Kitchens figured him for an NKVD enforcer--herded the group out of the Zuiko Room, ostensibly to get some 'fresh air' before the conference resumed.

"Certainly--" Kitchens backed off, let the Russians pass and returned to the American side of the table. Atcheson was furious; Kitchens thought the man might chew off the green baize covering the table. Kitchens ignored him; he sat down and busied himself with a small notebook.

Billings was mildly amused by the whole affair. "Not much for social graces, are you, Major?"

Kitchens checked his watch. "What time have you got?"

Billings checked. "Just after one. Why?"

Kitchens glared straight across the open space to the Russian side. A few Red delegates, military attaché-types from their uniforms, were engaged in heated discussion, ignoring everyone else.

"Because you and I have a date with that spy I just shook hands with."

"What the hell are you talking about--"

"I passed him a note when we shook hands."

"A note? Jesus, Kitchens...this isn't first grade, you know. You want to blow the whole deal before it even gets started?"

Kitchens lit up a Lucky Strike and took a deep drag. "Relax, will you? Nobody saw."

"You're sure of that? Look, why don't you just leave tradecraft to the professionals?" Billings sipped water, tried to ignore Atcheson's glare from two seats away. "You just about created an international incident, you know. What did the note say, anyway?"

"All I did was say hello, for Chrissakes. And for your information...it said meet me in the men's room at 2:00 p.m."

"Jesus." Billings just shook his head. My four-year old son is better behaved than this Army cop.

The proceedings resumed, with Derevyanko droning on interminably about oppressed peoples and class solidarity. Even the Russian delegation had a hard time stifling their yawns. Kitchens fidgeted, checking his watch constantly. Billings doodled while Atcheson just glared, at everything and everyone. Every few minutes, Kitchens chanced a glance toward Trofimenko. No reaction. The Army major developed a grudging respect for the spy. He wasn't tipping anything. Just the right blend of pleasantly bland interest toward Derevyanko, not quite attention but more of a light doze with his eyes half open. He managed the trick better than most.

Only once did their eyes meet, and then only for a second. A slight flair of recognition? A flick of an eyebrow? Maybe a facial twitch? Kitchens wasn't sure he saw any of that. The Russian was cool and distant, at least outwardly.

Precisely at 2:00 p.m., Trofimenko politely excused himself and eased his way along the table to the exit. He left Zuiko Hall without incident.

Kitchens and Billings glanced at each other from the corners of their eyes.

Ten minutes passed...a decent enough interval, Kitchens figured. He rose and excused himself, ignoring Billings' question-mark face, and headed out of the hall.

The men's room was around the corner, sheltered in an alcove of chairs and sofas. Kitchens pushed through the door.

The Russian was there.

This time, their handshake was firmer.

"A dangerous game you play, Major. I was just about to return to my seat. The 'Pig' will probably be showing up here in about two minutes."

Kitchens shook his hand. "The 'Pig'?"

Trofimenko splashed water on his face and toweled dry. "I believe you would call him an enforcer."

"Ah, yes." Kitchens looked around the room, checked under the stalls. They were alone.

"Major Lyle Kitchens, U.S. Army...at your service. I believe we are assigned to the same case."

"Indeed. Fyodor Maximovich Trofimenko." The Russian formally introduced himself. "Deputy cultural attaché with the delegation of the Soviet Union."

Both men got a good laugh from that. In person, Kitchens found Trofimenko more engaging and good-natured than he had figured.

"Sorry for the dramatics...I didn't know how else we could meet. Really meet."

Trofimenko shrugged, turned to the mirror to examine some tiny crow's feet under his eyes. "Have you ever been to a geisha house, Major?"

"Can't say that I have. Are you offering?"

The Russian laughed. "Not exactly. At least, not yet. Japanese women, especially the geisha, have absolutely exquisite skin. It's like ivory or porcelain, flawless, almost ethereal. No blemishes, no moles, no wrinkles. It looks almost artificial. The geisha look like fragile dolls, as if you could just barely touch them and they would shatter. And do you know what, Major?"

"What's that?"

"The geisha cultivate that image of fragility. That's exactly what it is...an image. The Japanese ideal of feminine beauty. Beneath that image, the geisha are nearly as tough as the samurai. They're like the samurai, in a way. Fanatically dedicated to their arts. Butterflies of the night, someone once called them."

Kitchens wondered what kind of dandy this Russian was. "I read all the debrief notes from Maryland," the Army major admitted. "The case officers thought you were some kind of queer."

Trofimenko stared back at his own reflection in the mirror. "Hardly, Major. That is, if I understand your American slang properly." He sighed, flicked off imaginary dust from the shoulder of his tweed jacket. "A misunderstood romantic, perhaps." He pulled out Kitchens' note and unfolded it. "You obviously have some reason for such a theatrical introduction."

Kitchens shrugged. "I hate listening to boring speeches. I'm tired of reviewing case files. I want to get moving, do a little legwork."

"Any place in mind, Major?"

"How about Kobe, for starters? I've got a car. We could be there in six hours."

Just then, the door sprang open. It was Billings. The CIA agent looked worried.

"People are whispering," he said. To Trofimenko: "Malik's suspicious. I think our Soviet friends are starting to miss their lost soul."

"We were making travel plans." Kitchens did some mental calculations. "We leave now...we're in Kobe by eight or nine." To Billings: "Can you contact Osawa? Move up the meet?"

"I can try."

Trofimenko was thoughtful. "I know what you're after. And I know where it is. Omisumi's got a warehouse. What's the street--Harima-cho, I think-- The bombs are going there, at least initially. I'm sure of it. But the big people, the nichestvy(CHECK THIS PHRASE), are here. In Tokyo. The Dai Ichi Building."

"Physical evidence," Kitchens said. "I need physical evidence. The Dai Ichi's full of papers. Most of them I can't get at yet. I don't have clearance. I've got to have something more substantial."

"Osawa's been good for his word, so far," Billings said. "Let's get moving. Before 'Smiley' shows up and collars our Russian friend here."

The left the hotel by a service entrance and climbed into Kitchens' Army sedan.

Twenty minutes later, they had maneuvered through heavy afternoon traffic clogging the streets of Shimbashi and turned south on the Sakurada Dori, paralleling a new rail line. Central Tokyo passed behind and Kitchens soon found himself heading south along Highway 1, through blocks of newly erected warehouses and factories.

In time, the smoky industrial landscape of Yamato thinned out and once past the great railway terminus at Hadano, built directly over a picturesque canal, they passed into Kanagawa Prefecture.

Minutes later, the cityscapes of Tokyo gave way to a rolling countryside of terraced rice paddies, wooden pagodas, thatched tea houses and misty green hills.

"The sea is only a few miles off to our left," the Russian explained. "This section of highway can get very foggy at times. Up ahead--see that exit there?" He indicated a turn-off that wound down through a steep ravine toward the ocean. "--that's Iseyama. A beautiful cove on the Pacific. Famous for pearl-divers."

Kitchens drove on. The highway was smooth, well surfaced. The Army Corps of Engineers had repaired Highway 1 in early '46, one its first projects, to allow Occupation forces quicker access to the cities of southern Honshu. "You seem to know your way around pretty well."

Trofimenko let the timeless beauty of the countryside wash over him. He stared pensively out the window. "I love Japan. I've been here since the fall of 1947. There's great power--the Japanese call it tamashii, like soul, I guess--in those hills. I feel it every time I go into the country."

"You've been a spy here since then? Jesus--" Kitchens shook his head, rolled down the window to let cool air circulate. "--our Counter-intel people must be asleep over here. There's got to be hundreds of Red agents around here."

Trofimenko smiled inwardly. "Probably thousands, Major. Thick as the fog in those hills."

"And just about as unstoppable, huh?" Billings interjected. "After all, you're the wave of the future. According to the propaganda I hear anyway."

Trofimenko heard the response forming automatically in his mind. The words came out like a recording. "The legitimate aspirations of the Japanese people can't be squashed forever. The class struggle won't end just because MacArthur or Truman orders it. You Americans can't stop progress."

"Maybe not," Kitchens said. "but we can sure as hell kick the bejeezus out of dictators. Just ask Hitler and Tojo."

"Perhaps," Trofimenko offered, "we should leave our politics aside, gentlemen."

"I don't mind telling you, pal...the last Red spy I had any dealings with is now behind bars. German fellow named Thielmann. Caught him red-handed, trying to bribe a NATO officer in Bonn."

Trofimenko smirked. "An inexperienced clod, as you Americans would say. Not every officer is so clumsy. Some of us even believe in what we are doing."

"I guess we're like sworn enemies," Kitchens said. "You and me. Pitcher and batter. Hell of a thing. I still don't understand it."

"You and I are both professionals," the Russian corrected him. "We each have duties. We are both warriors for our countries. Glory to the cause, and all that. Rally 'round the flag. Yet we're not so different, Major."

"How the hell do you figure that? You spy. I catch spies. I'm the cat. You're the mouse. How often do you see cats and mice sitting down at the same table, having a beer and a smoke?"

The Russian smiled. "In some of your Disney cartoons, quite a lot. Maybe the cartoonists know something we don't. If the house is on fire, cats and mice could agree to cooperate, couldn't they? Suspend their differences to fight the fire?"

"Yeah, but cartoons ain't real life, pal. I'm a professional cop, even though I got an Army uniform. That makes me professionally suspicious. When I see a Red spy, I get nervous. Can't help it. I get trigger-happy. I just naturally want to do something about it. This--" Kitchens waggled a hand free of the steering wheel for emphasis, "--this...isn't right. I know we've got orders. And I'm a soldier. I obey orders. But it still isn't right. What happens to the mouse when the fire is put out?"

Trofimenko gave that some thought. "He convinces the cat to sign a nonaggression pact."

That got a good laugh. Through the windshield, the afternoon sun was a pale daub heavy over the western hills, struggling through winter haze. The snow cone of Akaishi Daka peeked through late afternoon clouds. Highway 1 had veered west into Shizuoka Prefecture, crossing a splendid string of pocket-sized lakes on the outskirts of Shimizu. Kitchens slowed down to negotiate some truck traffic

"You have a wife?" Billings asked the Russian. "Kids?"

Trofimenko turned solemn. "No wife. Only Ludmilla."

"And?"

"Ludmilla and I were going to be married. That was five years ago, May 1945. The Germans had just surrendered."

"What happened?" Kitchens asked. "She stand you up?"

"She died. Tuberculosis."

Kitchens felt sorry for the guy. "I'm sorry to hear that, pal." There was a strained silence in the car. "What was she like?"

Trofimenko seemed reluctant to talk of it. "She was a translator. 40th Army, Petrov's army, the central front. What can I tell you? She was bright, red-haired. Ukrainian. You could see the sun every time she smiled."

"Yeah...I know what you mean." Kitchens decided he'd better ditch the spy and cop stuff. Spies and Reds weren't people anyway. Just grainy black and white photos, flickering film images. Men were different. Men had wives and kids and bills and houses. "You knew her a long time?"

"Not so long." Trofimenko's reflection in the window glass was grim. "A few years. We were once stationed together at Kristochowa. Staff headquarters...it was in Byelorussia, near the marshes. Ludmilla and I went every day to an old cemetery that was nearby. It was our place." He closed his eyes. "Our special place--"

Kitchens caught Billings looking back at him in the rear-view mirror. The CIA officer shrugged, nodded. "I'm sorry. Didn't mean to bring up something painful."

But the Russian had already recovered his composure. "And you, Major? You have a wife? Children?"

"Two children. One wife. They're all in Europe at the moment. Brussels, actually. I was all set to leave the Army and ship 'em home to Philly at the end of the year." Kitchens smiled ruefully. "Until the Chief of Staff called. 'You're on extended active duty, son. National security crisis. Detailed to Far East Command Tokyo 5th MPs. A special mission.' What a Christmas present."

Trofimenko considered that. "Americans investigating Americans. Some of my comrades are convinced this so-called investigation is nothing but a deception, a diversion while you move against us in Europe."

"I don't know anything about that, pal. I just know something funny's going on and my job is to find out what it is. Say, Bret, where's that Osawa fellow supposed to be meeting us in Kobe?"

Billings was watching the sun drop lower through snow clouds behind the mountains. Night was coming on fast. "Sorakuen Park, it's called. "It's a mile or so from the Omisumi warehouse. Right across from the prefectural office. How far do we have?"

Kitchens checked his watch. "I've got seven now."

Trofimenko pointed out a road sign that had just flashed by. "That's Nagoya, coming up. We're just off the Atsumi-wan...that's the bay you see through those gaps in the hills. This highway turns northwest for awhile and follows the inlet. Then we cross Shiga prefecture and pass through the outskirts of Osaka. Pretty big place...Osaka. After that, Kobe. Probably three hours, at least."

"Swell," said Kitchens. "The scenic route to nowhere. We'll see the whole damn country by the time we get there."

Trofimenko's estimate proved optimistic. It was nearly 11:00 local time when the Russian spied the first road sign. They were now in Hyogo prefecture, wrapped around the Inland Sea like a hand around a fish. Kobe was dead ahead--forty kilometers.

The city was a beehive of new construction, even at night. Kobe was a commercial port on the Inland Sea, and a thriving industrial center. Kitchens got off the highway and navigated the city's narrow streets away from the port district up into the Rokko Hills, overlooking the wharves. Crowded neighborhoods of woodbeam and paper paneled houses were jammed wall to wall on every square inch of street and slope. Below the residential quarter, neatly bracketed in the pagoda-gates of the Ikuta Shrine, the wharves and piers and bridge cranes of the harbor gleamed dull yellow in a light fog.

Sorakuen Park was a misty square of green in a dense thicket of wood-gabled bungalows. Bathed in spotlit brilliance across Nakayamate-Dori, the prefectural office was sober and solemn, a hasty concrete cube with a vague turret on top the only concession to style. Three white cars--National Police by their floral shield emblems, were parked out front.

"Pull up by the park entrance," Billings suggested. "Osawa was supposed to meet us there. Between ten and midnight, he said."

Kitchens parked the Army car as instructed. Prefectural police strolled by several times over the next hour, curious. Kitchens' badge and uniform and a severe look from the others convinced the local cops to keep their distance. Good thing, Kitchens muttered. Occupation law still had priority over Japanese law. In the grand scheme of things, one U.S. Army uniform was worth a platoon of white-hatted keikan.

As midnight approached, the harbor fog swelled up into the foothills and Kitchens became increasingly restless.

"Looks like your pal's not going to show up."

Billings was grim. "Let's take a quick pass through the park. Then I want to speak with those cops again."

The three of them climbed out of the car and did a quick reconnaissance of the park. Nothing. Billings signaled everybody to gather at the front steps of the prefectural office across the street. With Trofimenko interpreting, he inquired of the keikan if they had seen anyone in or around the park the last several hours.

Nothing.

They went back to the Army sedan. Billings lit up a cigarette. "I don't like it. Something smells bad about this. Osawa's always been good for his word."

Kitchens eyed the keikan, gesturing furiously at each other in a small knot. "Something's sure stirred them up. You sure this is the place?"

"Positive. I've just got a bad feeling...something's happened to Osawa."

Kitchens got in the car. "Come on. We came here to investigate. By God, we're going to investigate."

With Trofimenko's memory and directions, they made it to the north end of Harima-Cho, stopping on an overpass that bridged a pedestrian arcade below. The tiled open-air mall was deserted but still well lit, neon tubing flashing on and off in English and kanji.

"Down there," the Russian insisted. He indicated a brick and cement complex at the end of the street, several blocks south. Harima-Cho was a dead end. Beyond the warehouse roofline of ventilation ducts and fans, the glass and steel Harbor Office rose like a square fist in the fog. A black and white checkered building nestled next to it--the Customs House. Beyond were cranes and ship steam funnels...the harbor itself.

"Let's drive by," Kitchens said. He downshifted the Ford, took his foot partly off the clutch and let the engine idle them forward. "That sign ahead--"

"The Omisumi crest," Billings explained. "Some kind of stylized rosebush with wings."

"Tetsuko imagines himself a modern-day daimyo," Trofimenko added. "He'd use the chrysanthemum as an emblem if it weren't already the Emperor's symbol."

The warehouse was partly lit from the inside. A car and a truck were parked in front. Four men lounged against a low brick wall. Steps led from a gated opening in the wall up to a canopy and a set of glass doors. There was light inside.

"Must be the late shift," Kitchens surmised. He let in the clutch and the Ford jerked forward, picking up speed. Harima-Cho angled downhill toward the harbor.

"Yakuza," Billings said. "Japanese mafia. Omisumi uses only the best for protecting its property."

Kitchens took a peek as the Ford glided by. "The goon squad, for sure. Looks like three--make that four. This is the place?"

Billings nodded. "So it would seem."

Kitchens let the Ford coast on to the next intersection, then engaged the clutch with a painful grind and turned a corner.

"Where are you going?"

"I've got an idea." The Army major went two blocks west, along a street of empty stores and darkened offices overlooking the harbor motorway. He pulled into an alley and stopped.

"Bret, how tall are you?"

Billings shrugged. "Maybe six feet. Why?"

"I need to get inside that warehouse."

"You're an Army investigator. The uniform and MP emblem ought to be enough authority."

"Yeah and while I'm flexing my muscles out front, somebody's inside destroying evidence. Nope. First rule of investigative procedure: secure the evidence. Army manual FM 90-5. My Bible. Bret, you and I are going to trade places."

"Like hell--"

"Why you play Army investigator in my uniform, you can distract those gorillas out front and my Russian comrade and I can slip inside. See what's cooking without tipping anybody off. I've even got one of those new Kodak cameras in the trunk."

"I'm not sure I can bring this off--"

Kitchens was already out of the car, pulling off his jacket. "Quit whining and take your clothes off."

Trofimenko was mildly amused by the whole affair. When they were done, Billings was a distinctly uncomfortable major in the U.S. Army. Kitchens struggled with the CIA agent's wool trousers and shoes. "Christ Almighty--" he tugged again, finally decided the fit would have to do. "That's good enough."

They climbed back in and circled the block back to Harima-Cho.

"There's got to be a loading dock or truck bay somewhere," Kitchens muttered. He drove back over the pedestrian arcade bridge and pulled off at the next intersection, switching off the lights. The men got out once again.

Kitchens opened the trunk and pulled out the Kodak camera, which he slung around his neck. "Already loaded," he told them. "This one too." He uncovered a box draped with rags. Inside was a service pistol, an M1911A1 .45 caliber weapon. Kitchens ejected the clip, checked it for a full seven rounds, then rammed the clip home and cycled the action to chamber the first round. He turned to Trofimenko.

"Fred, you and me go on foot from here." Kitchens peered up into the shadowy block of houses. "I figure there's an alley or a path or something through there. Bret, you drive up in front and keep those goons occupied for awhile. Just wave your Agency ID in front of them. I do it all the time."

"Great." Billings was skeptical. "And while I'm out front--"

"Fred and me will be poking around back, trying to get a look-see at what's inside. If this really is the place they're holding the bombs, there should be some kind of evidence, preparations, something to connect this place to SCAP. A name, a written order, a requisition, anything physical. We find that and we've got ourselves a real trail to follow."

Trofimenko looked puzzled. Kitchens clapped him on the shoulder. "Hey, I know your name's not Fred. But I can't pronounce your real name."

"Fyodor Maximovich," Trofimenko clearly enunciated.

"Yeah...whatever. I like Fred better. You know...like Fred Astair. Good American name...Fred."

"So we'll pretend I'm not an officer for Soviet People's Commissariat of State Security...is that it?"

"Something like that, pal."

Billings climbed back into the Ford. "Good luck."

"Meet us back on the other side of the bridge, by that streetlamp. One hour."

The Army major and the NKVD agent disappeared up the narrow lane and were gone.

Bret Billings took a deep breath and started the car. He drove downhill to the warehouse entrance.

The block of tiny paper and wood houses were jammed together like crackers in a box. Kitchens probed and backtracked several times, trekking through gardens, gravel pits, and someone's laundry line before finally emerging onto another pot-holed lane. Across the lane, a service drive gave access to the rear of the warehouse. There were three docks and truck bays, all empty.

"Bingo." Kitchens led the Russian down a slight decline into the dockyard.

The last dock was open, its doors rolled up to reveal light and rows of wooden pallets stacked inside. Kitchens scratched furiously at Billings' woolen trousers. How the hell does he stand these things? "Come on," he whispered to Trofimenko. "And stay low--"

They made the dock without incident, crouching in a dark corner below the concrete platform. Kitchens listened, over his thudding heartbeat, for voices. He heard several, Japanese by the sound of them, distant.

They had to find a way inside the warehouse.

The Army major hand signaled to the Russian what he wanted to do. Trofimenko understood. Together, they scaled a rusting iron ladder bolted to the concrete and slipped inside the dock.

It was a cavernous yet dimly lit space, broken up by columns and overhead steel beams. Stacks of pallets surrounded the open dock--perfect cover, Kitchens realized. He checked his camera, testing the eyepiece by sighting in on prospective targets. Through the eyepiece, he spotted a glass enclosure in one corner. An office of some type. Two men--drivers, perhaps, or stevedores from their greasy uniforms--were nursing steaming bowls of something on a table. Newspapers were scattered across the table between them.

Checking out the comics, Kitchens figured. But that's where we need to be. Ten to one that office had a filing cabinet. Files and investigators went together like bears and honey.

Kitchens crept in further and slipped between two stacks of pallets. Trofimenko followed moments later. It was the Russian who first noticed a peculiar row of pallets along the wall.

"Lead," he breathed. He motioned Kitchens over. "Lead sheet...stacks of it. Thin lead sheet."

He was right. Kitchens took his first set of pictures. "It may not mean anything."

"Or it could mean everything. Lead sheet is an excellent radiation shield."

A machine started up and Kitchens jerked, startled. It was a heavy saw. Halfway across the warehouse, partly obscured by columns, a new enclosure was being constructed. Kitchens saw several carpenters erecting paneling on a stud frame. A new room was being fabricated, a good-sized room from the layout of the framing.

"What are those tracks?" he wondered. A parallel course of steel rails ran along the floor from the center loading platform to the new enclosure. "A railway of some kind?"

"See the overhead cranes and pulleys?" the Russian pointed out. "Right where the tracks begin."

Kitchens had seen them. "Something heavy's going to be moved. And carried to that enclosure on dollies that ride on those tracks."

Even as they watched, the carpenters finished their paneling and framing work. As a group, they gathered up their tools and left the enclosure, heading for the glass room at the other end of the warehouse. Kitchens and Trofimenko watched as one by one, the carpenters clocked out and disappeared through a gated exit next to the glass office. The uniformed men, apparently supervisors, returned to their newspapers.

"Come on," Kitchens whispered. "Now's our chance." He crept forward along a wall, slipping from one stack of pallets to the next, holding the camera box tight against his hip to keep it from slapping. The Russian followed.

Yard by yard, they worked their way deeper into the warehouse, up to the enclosure.

It was to be a large, rectangular room, perhaps forty feet by twenty. Lead sheet had already been tacked up temporarily onto one wall. Kitchens pointed out a series of concrete mounts, actually raised structures several feet above the floor concrete. Some of the mounts had lead sheet tacked to their sides as well. Metal shelves and racks lined another wall.

Trofimenko pulled off a black box with instrument dials on top. He poked around the seams of the box and sprang a small access hatch in the side. The Russian peered inside, then suddenly realized what he was holding.

"Major, you should look at this, please?"

Kitchens came over. "What is it?"

"I believe you call this a Geiger counter. For measuring radiation levels."

Kitchens whistled. He followed the Russian back to the shelves. "Looks like we hit the jackpot."

Additional electrical gear filled one shelf completely. Switch boxes and fuse panels were evident among the stacks of equipment. In one corner, a huge drum of electrical cable had been neatly stored. It was Kitchens who pointed out the tracks. The metal rails passed directly alongside each of the raised mounts.

"Something intense with radiation," Trofimenko said, poking through the electrical gear. "Electrically controlled or monitored. And heavy."

"Atom bomb," Kitchens said. He counted the mounts. "Five of them. Moved in here right on those dollies."

"And hoisted onto those mounts by crane and pulley."

"There's enough cable in here to stretch all the way back to Tokyo." The Army major unhooked his camera and flipped the switch. "This stuff is exactly what I need." He began clicking photographs, the camera's motor whirring quietly after each shot. "Look for paperwork, will you? Bills, receipts, shipping documents, requisitions, orders. Anything. If I can tie this place back to SCAP with a paper trail, we've got ourselves a case."

Trofimenko prowled the room. "Right in the heart of old Kobe. Imagine it, Major. Five atom bombs to be unloaded right here. Just as if they were bags of cement, or beef carcasses."

The Army major and the Russian agent poked and probed around the partially built room, pleased at what they had found. Kitchens took more pictures. The Russian gathered serial numbers from the electrical gear to trace the movements of the equipment. They had been collecting evidence for several minutes when Kitchens had an uneasy feeling they weren't alone.

He saw a shadow flit across wall panels in one corner. Quickly, he set down the camera and pulled out his .45. Trofimenko saw the move, his eyebrows shooting upward. Kitchens gestured toward the shadow, still sliding steadily along the wall. The Russian seemed to understand.

No question about it, they were being watched.

Kitchens moved to an opening in the wall, left uncovered by the carpenters. Trofimenko went outside the enclosure, to outflank their silent spy.

Suddenly the shadow moved again, this time abruptly. Footsteps sounded on the concrete and boards clattered. The shadow had knocked over a small pile of framing.

"--Hey!" Kitchens swung around the edge in time to see a figure dashing off into the dim warehouse, zigzagging from column to post. "Get him!"

They went after their quarry in a clutter of sawdust and scattered boards. Shots rang out and Kitchens ducked behind a pillar as the rounds spanged off the cement.

Whoever it was didn't plan on making much of a covert exit.

"There he goes!" Trofimenko pointed. The shadow shot forward again, and fired back at them. The muzzle flash lit up the gloom and both men dove to the floor. More rounds ricocheted off columns.

"Jesus!" Kitchens fired back, fully aware the exchange would bring Omisumi's security guards running. He squeezed off several rounds. When the shadow sprang forward again, Kitchens scrambled to his feet and plunged after him.

The last truck bay in the warehouse was dark and shadowed, a maze of metal shelving. The loading dock was empty but the door was half rolled up. Kitchens figured their unwanted visitor would make for the bay and try to lose them, maybe even duck out of the warehouse altogether.

He hand signaled to Trofimenko: That way. Cut him off! The Russian crept cautiously forward, into the rows of shelving, trying to secure the exit.

At that moment, Omisumi security showed up in the form of three uniformed guards, who materialized outside the glass office, weapons drawn. One guard gestured angrily at Kitchens.

"Tomaru! Tomaru koto!" The guards hustled after them.

Kitchens swore and followed Trofimenko into the warren of shelves and racks.

It was a tense game of cat and mouse. Kitchens probed along a narrow catwalk along the wall, hoping to catch sight of their visitor from above. But it was too dark. The Omisumi guards spotted his silhouette sliding along a brick outer wall and got off a few rounds. The slugs ricocheted, sending brick chips flying.

"Jesus H. Christ!" Kitchens muttered. Where the hell is Fred? Out of the corner of his eye, he sensed movement. He whirled...a rat scuttled chittering off into a dark corner.

Then something heavy crashed to the concrete floor. A shelf had fallen over, or been knocked down, spilling boxes and parts. Gunfire erupted--several times--different directions. Rounds ripped through the air. Kitchens kept his head low, crept forward, turned a corner. He could hear grunts and footsteps and keys jangling...the Omisumi guards were almost on them--

"Tomaru--"

More footsteps, softer...a lighter man--

"Major--"

It was Trofimenko. Kitchens reversed direction, beating back to another intersection of shelf rows. Through a pile of crates and boxes, he saw a head dart in and out of view. He carefully leveled his weapon, propping the barrel on his wrist for a head shot--but it was Trofimenko, two rows over.

Beyond him, the loading bay door clattered. Their visitor had somehow worked his way through the maze and was slipping out. Kitchens saw a shape briefly outlined in light streaming in from outside. A man of medium height, black hair. Lithe and wiry, quick as a cat, vaguely Oriental features. Then he was gone.

"Fred!"

"Tomaru koto!" The guards were in the shelving area, hunting them down, row by row.

"Outside, comrade--"

Kitchens wasted no time. He skidded making a tight turn and streaked right for the open bay door. The Russian was only a few feet ahead of him. As they dove out onto the loading platform and jumped the last ten feet to the concrete driveway, the guards opened fire again.

Small-caliber rounds--sounds like .38, Kitchens thought--peppered the platform, echoing across the loading bay.

Kitchens and Trofimenko zigzagged scrambling up into a row of bushes surrounding the dock and set off toward the street. The Omisumi guards followed.

The chase lasted ten minutes, through alleys and lanes, across gardens and parking lots and around bins and drums lining the perimeter of the warehouse. Through the deserted streets of downtown Kobe, the Army major and the Russian agent steadily closed on their quarry, dodging occasional shots from the security force. Traffic was light...a few pedestrians strolling up from the Meriken pier along the wharf, carrying bags of fresh fish and ice. The strollers scattered when the chase plowed through their midst.

Kitchens saw their pursuit gaining ground. The guards had split up and spread out, trying to converge on them from several directions. Trofimenko signaled a halt; the two of them peeled off down a slick, grassy embankment toward the port road. A pair of hundred-ton bridge cranes towered over them, their spotlights pooling illumination along the road.

No way was he going to let the Omisumi goons get their hands on the pictures he had taken.

From either end of the wharf, easily half a mile long, uniformed men were approaching. The only way out seemed to be back up the embankment, not a likely prospect, Kitchens realized, eyeing the angle of the slope they had slid down.

Or they could head down one of the piers, effectively trapping themselves.

Kitchens felt the blood roaring in his ears. It felt like Anzio all over again, the Kraut artillery barrage, eighty-eight shells ripping the air, sucking the very oxygen out of him. Kitchens shook himself back to the moment. I ain't no friggin heroic combat soldier, folks. Just a cop, that's all. Just a cop.

He had only two rounds left in the .45's chamber, plus another clip in his back pocket. And their quarry had vanished, somehow slipping out of the noose the goons had slowly drawn around them on the wharf.

Who the hell had he been? Kitchens eyeballed their surroundings, calculating cover and zones of fire among the barrels and crates and pallets stacked on the wharf. If there was going to be a gun battle, he wanted a fighting chance to do as much damage as he could. He figured his Army ID folder wouldn't count for a whole lot when the lead started flying.

He motioned Trofimenko to take cover between two stout wooden barrels, while he refreshed the clip in the .45.

Kitchens was sighting in on a pair of goons inching their way through a labyrinth of crates when shots rang out. They came from above, from beyond the embankment.

The guards ducked and scattered. The rounds had been aimed at them.

What the hell--?

"It's him!" Trofimenko hissed. Kitchens followed the Russian's pointing finger. In a line of acacia bushes along the top of the embankment, a face, dimly lit, appeared. Then, more muzzle flashes--

"Let's go!" Kitchens recognized the covering fire as an opportunity they dare not miss. Intentional or not, their spy had re-appeared and was systematically sanitizing the wharf of Omisumi scum. "Come on--!"

They bolted out of their cover and ran crouching like broken field runners, twisting and turning through the crates. A few well-timed rounds kept their pursuit occupied, though not without return fire.

Clear at last of the crates, Kitchens spied a line of wooden stairs embedded in the side of the embankment. He took them three at a time, the Russian right behind him.

When they made the top, a fusillade of shots ripped the air, geysering dirt and wood splinters everywhere. Ahead, through the bushes, the spy was hit.

A sharp, muffled cry of pain was followed by the thud of a body pitching back into the shrubbery. Kitchens dashed forward, head low as rounds zipped by his ears. He found their quarry-turned-comrade lying on his side, right arm slick with bright red arterial blood.

His face was pale and shiny with sweat. The spy was definitely Asiatic, perhaps Japanese. He was slight, even gaunt, with huge liquid eyes, squinting in pain. A prominent scar throbbed over his right eyebrow; it looked fresh. Trofimenko bent down to examine the wound, then tore off half the sleeve of the man's cotton tunic, fashioning a field dressing for the injury.

"Dare desu anata?" the Russian hissed, quickly bandaging the man's arm tightly. "Who are you?"

Kitchens crouched at the edge of the thicket. "Here they come!" he whispered loudly.

The spy struggled to sit up. "An enemy," he answered in accented English, tightening Trofimenko's dressing. He grimaced. "An enemy of...aggression...American treachery--"

"Cut the chatter and let's get moving, will ya!" Kitchens crawled back from the edge of the bushes.

Trofimenko helped the fallen spy to his feet. The Asian man shook off the throbbing fire of the wound, collected himself.

"My weapon--?"

"Forget it," Kitchens told him. He held up a small service revolver. "Confiscated by the U.S. Army."

Trofimenko recognized the make immediately. "One of ours...Tokarev. Type 51." He took the weapon from Kitchens, examined it critically, then glared at the spy, pocketing the sidearm himself. "These are Chinese markings. The grooves on the

slide--"

"Come on!" Kitchens grabbed the Russian by the jacket. "We've got company!"

The spy pointed further up the hill, toward some railway tracks, toward an elevated motorway that circled the harbor. "A storm drain--that way...maybe a hundred meters--"

"Good enough for me--" Kitchens led the way, scrambling through wiry brush, slipping to his elbows in a mud bank. The Russian followed, still clinging to the spy by his tunic sleeve, a tentative prisoner. They glared at each other--full of questions--then fell in behind the American.

Omisumi security was fifty yards behind, prowling the base of the embankment. Shouts and guttural curses filled the air; the guards knew their prey had disappeared up the slope but not where. They sensed an ambush.

That wariness was all Kitchens needed. With the spy's half-mumbled, bitten-off directions, the trio made progress and stumbled onto an iron grate halfway up the slope, in the lee of a column supporting the motorway. Kitchens heaved the grate off its base, and one by one, the men lowered themselves into a dank, oily storm drain, dropping into ankle-deep water the last few feet.

They slogged off into the dim concrete tube, feeling their way along.

"Where the hell does this thing go?" Kitchens asked. "We need to circle back to that bridge, pick up Billings."

They splashed on, heading toward a faint cone of reflected street light, a whiff of salt harbor air breezing through the conduit, somewhere up ahead.

The spy spoke heavily accented English. "This drain goes away from the harbor. North...I think."

"As long as we ditch those overgrown Boy Scouts with guns," Kitchens said.

"You're not Japanese," Trofimenko said, still clinging to his catch, half-dragging him along through the sewer. "Are you?"

The spy groaned in pain, murmuring, "A prisoner of war gives his name and rank. That's all."

"So don't be bashful," Kitchens called back. He kicked at something furry, a flock of furries scuttled through the drainwater just ahead of his feet.

"Major Jiang Chen Li. People's Liberation Army."

Kitchens nearly tripped. "People's Liberation--"

Trofimenko loosened his grip a bit. "Comrade--I'm--"

"A friggin' Chinaman...for Chrissakes!"

The cone of light brightened. Presently, they found themselves directly beneath another grate.

"Hoist me up," Kitchens ordered. Trofimenko gave him a boost. With a lot of sweating and swearing and straining, the Army major was finally able to shove the heavy iron grill away far enough to pull himself up and through.

In minutes, the three of them stood in a soggy culvert alongside a deserted street. Opposite them, red and white neon lighting flashed, spelling out shinryojo. A small medical clinic. And it was open.

Trofimenko had discovered a faint whiff of respect for his 'prisoner.' He helped Jiang across the street and up the circular drive. They pushed through glass doors and stumbled up to a counter. A small, elderly Nihon woman in a white uniform was curled up in her chair, sound asleep.

Kitchens startled her awake, slapping his Army ID folder on the counter.

The nurse's eyes widened at the sight of the three foul-smelling, bloodied, bedraggled men looming over the counter. She shot to her feet, in a fluster of fussiness and paper straightening.

"Sumimasen...sumimasen...my apologies, sir!" She straightened out her dress and blouse, fixed a tiny pillbox hat on her black bun of hair. "Can I help you?"

Kitchens and the Russian saw to it that Jiang was taken care of. The major's Army ID opened a lot of doors and answered a lot of questions Kitchens didn't particularly want to deal with.

In a small examining room down the hall, the Chinese officer's field dressing was stripped off and his wound cleaned and re-bandaged. The nurse clucked and frowned as she applied the new dressing, questions in her eyes. In the end, she kept silent, her head bowed by a stern look from Kitchens. She administered some painkillers, then left the room to round up some paperwork.

The three men glared at each other uneasily.

"Soon as she's done," Kitchens announced, "we're hightailing it out of here. Pick up Billings. Get back to Tokyo. We've got evidence that needs sorting out."

Trofimenko was curious. "How does an officer of the Chinese People's Liberation Army come to be in Kobe, Japan, reconnoitering an industrial warehouse?"

Jiang just glared back at them, pale from blood loss. His eyes were lidded and heavy. He said nothing.

"Talkative clod," Kitchens observed.

"He's giving us the great stone face. An Oriental specialty...what the Japanese call shakirinaoshi. The prisoner of war look."

Jiang finally blinked. "I'm just a soldier. Fighting American treachery."

"You said that before," Kitchens snapped. "Seems like China's the treacherous one...attacking us like a horde of flies up north in Korea. We had no beef with China."

Jiang's face hardened. "No? MacArthur threatens atomic warfare. He promises to send Kuomintang vermin across the Formosa Strait. What are we supposed to do?"

Kitchens stared at Trofimenko. "Who said anything about atomic warfare?"

Jiang said, "It's well known what MacArthur wants to do. We have the right to defend ourselves. Even Sun Tzu said, 'the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy's plans.' Even if America drops atom bombs, China will prevail. The peoples' resistance can't be defeated by mere bombs."

Kitchens felt for the camera box, with its critical film of the warehouse. It was still strapped to his waist. "MacArthur's not dropping any atom bombs on China. Not if I have anything to do about it."

Trofimenko cut in. "The Americans have discovered a plot, comrade. A conspiracy by MacArthur and his staff. There will be atom bombs in Korea, maybe China, unless he's stopped."

"I don't understand." Jiang winced as he shifted his bandaged arm around. "Truman can stop this madness...why doesn't he order it? He plays a dangerous game."

"Wait a minute." Kitchens glared at both of them. "What the hell's going on here? This is a sensitive case, Fred. I don't know how it's done in Russia, but in my Army, we don't go mouthing off details of sensitive cases or military operations to Red Chinese officers. This man's the enemy."

The Russian was offended. "Not to me. This man and I are comrades. Partners in the Revolution."

"Look, what were you doing snooping around that warehouse in the middle of the night?"

Jiang wasn't sure what was going on either. "I could ask you the same question."

"Don't be a wiseguy," Kitchens muttered. "I hate Commies who are wiseguys. For your information, my Army's been occupying this country for the last five years."

"Illegally," Jiang pointed out. "And my Army is systematically destroying yours in Korea."

"For the moment, pal. For the moment. So why are you here anyway...scouting for Chairman Mao's next target?"

"Reconnaissance."

"Don't you see it, Major?" Trofimenko said. "He's after the same thing we are. The same target. What are your mission orders?"

Jiang eyed the men warily. It was entirely possible the enemy had baited a trap for him. Was he about to fall into it now? Once before, in the spring of '49, he had let the enemy feed him false intelligence. A serious blunder for a recon man. The Defense Minister Lin Piao hadn't been pleased.

Jiang knew he had better be careful. "My orders are highly classified."

"You're here to sabotage MacArthur's plans, aren't you?" The Russian was convinced of it. "He has the same mission we do."

Kitchens scowled at the Red officer. He was by turns bewildered, annoyed, irritated and apprehensive. He wanted to do right. The problem was: what was right? By every paragraph in the book, by his own oath of office, this was treason. Aiding and abetting the enemy. The Uniform Code of Military Justice was quite clear on the matter:

Article 104. Aiding the Enemy

Any person who:

(1) aids, attempts to aid, the enemy with arms, ammunition, supplies, money or other things; or

(2) without proper authority, knowingly harbors or protects or gives intelligence to or communicates or corresponds with or holds any intercourse with the enemy, either directly or indirectly;

shall suffer death or such other punishment as a court-martial or military commission may direct.

No question about it. Kitchens knew he was right on the edge.

"I ought to run your little Red butt up to Tokyo right here and now. Just talking to you like this could get me twenty years. Or a date with the hangman."

Jiang's eyes narrowed. His body tensed. He'd seen American treachery in Korea plenty of times. "Why don't you do your duty, like a soldier?"

"Don't tempt me."

The Russian tried to make peace. "Major Kitchens...this is absurd. Be

realistic--"

"Realistic? Hell's bells...realistic is this guy's a Red Chinese soldier. I should be drilling his chest with .45-caliber rounds about now. If I want to keep my job. And my neck."

"He can help us. He can work with us."

Kitchens wasn't convinced. "Working with this scum is bad news for my career...Fred, look, you gotta understand that. I lift a finger for the major here and I'm in violation of about half the Uniform Code of Military Justice. No thanks."

"Would you lift a finger to put out a fire?" the Russian asked. "If the fire threatened your own house?"

"Sure, but--"

"It's not written down, is it, that your military justice must know the identity of your sources? Can you not protect an informant's identity, at least for a time? If it serves the needs of the case?"

"Well, if you--"

"Come, Major...I'm an officer of the NKVD. You're an officer of a military police force. We both know some things about handling field intelligence, protecting our sources."

Kitchens was all for landing a few knuckles right on the Chinese major's perspiring noggin. "I can't have anything to do with an officer of the Red Chinese Army. He's the enemy, for Chrissakes!"

"But you can work a source, Major. You know how to handle informants, sources. Spies, moles...whatever you call them--"

"I'm not an informant," Jiang protested.

Kitchens considered the argument, reluctantly. "You guys are comrades, aren't you? Kissing commie cousins."

"'Fellow travelers,' as your Senator McCarthy would say--"

"You're really here, here in Kobe, to look for atom bombs?"

Jiang took a deep breath. "I have my orders, Major. MacArthur's planning an operation against my country. I'm a soldier, like you. What would you do in my situation?"

"Follow orders."

"Then we understand each other."

Kitchens shook his head slowly in disbelief. "I understand one thing, pal: whatever funny business MacArthur's up to here in Japan, it's got everybody in the States riled up, from the President on down."

"The major and I are officially assigned to the case, investigating this conspiracy," Trofimenko told Jiang. "By order of our highest leaders. Now it's clear...we must all join forces. Work together."

Jiang was wary, knowing he would need approval from Marshal Peng, perhaps even from Peking. He had to be especially careful dealing with the treacherous Americans.

"I agree with the major," Jiang said. "A cat and a mouse will never be allies. So it was with Chinese and Americans."

"Likewise, I'm sure," Kitchens came back.

Trofimenko was annoyed. "This is absurd. We all have the same orders. Why shouldn't we pool our talents?"

"Because enemies don't pool their talents," Kitchens explained. "That's called treason."

The Russian chewed on that for a few moments, then his face lit up with a suggestion. To Jiang, he said, "Why don't you come with us to Tokyo? You can contact your superiors through our Embassy." He knew the Chinese had no formal relations with Japan.

The Red Chinese major knew Marshal Peng was counting on him. Peng was sure MacArthur was up to something. Jiang had proof the Supreme Commander was preparing an atomic strike. It was his duty to try and stop it, anyway he could. But he needed more information: when was the strike planned? What targets? What heading and altitudes? It seemed this Russian and his American comrade had developed a great deal of information, useful information. An American Army investigator and a Soviet State Security agent--an unlikely pair, to be sure. Jiang figured if he was clever enough, he could use both of them--play them against each other--without risking too much damage to the Chinese position, or to Peng's plans for the next offensive. It was risky. But recon was all about risk, wasn't it? Stick your neck out to see if the enemy was predisposed to blow it off.

Better a lone agent than a few divisions.

Reluctantly, Jiang agreed. "Tactical collaboration seems the wisest course."

"Good, comrade. Very good. Now you must tell us what you've found," the Russian said. "Crushing this conspiracy means we'll have to collaborate, share information."

Not everything, Jiang thought. Still, necessity dictated strategy. Even Sun Tzu had praised the commander who won battles without a fight. A few morsels might loosen the cat's jaws....

Jiang related a few details of what he had found on his recon trip to Formosa. He described the renegade American submarine being fitted out at Shao Gun shipyard.

"I saw orders," he admitted, "mission orders. This submarine may soon be putting to sea, if it has not already done so, to find and sink your Navy transport, the one carrying the atom bombs."

"The Chesapeake--" Kitchens was instantly alert. "You got a course...speeds, dates--?"

"Only sketchy details," Jiang lied. "Indications...there seemed a shakedown trial planned first, then an operational mission. I saw no details of course or destination."

Kitchens was agitated, anxious to get moving. He looked around the clinic. "Where the hell's that nurse? Fred, you know what this means?"

The Russian was equally concerned. "The conspiracy has entered a new phase, Major...events are happening quickly."

"Too quickly. We've got to get back to Tokyo immediately. We've got a hell of lot of evidence of something going on here in Kobe. Now this--I've got to get word through the chain of command. Chesapeake may be in danger--Jesus, a submarine--"

"Then you will be our ally," the Russian told Jiang. "You spy for us."

Jiang acceded. "Russians and Chinese are fraternal comrades, as you say. A wise commander adjusts his tactics to fit the situation."

"Sun Tzu?"

"Jiang Chen Li." The Chinese major smiled faintly. "Tactics dictate we climb in bed with the Americans. But Peking will have to make the final decision."

The nurse finally returned and fussed over a few official papers she gave to Kitchens. The Army major scanned the releases and scribbled his initials. He supposed the clinic would be sending the bill to the Army for dressing Jiang's wounds.

No doubt someone's head will be on the block for that; it sure as hell wasn't SOP to stitch up Red Chinese spies on Uncle Sam's tab.

"Let's get out of here." Kitchens led the way, as the men made their way through the deserted streets of Kobe to the pedestrian bridge where Billings had hidden the car.

The CIA agent was half-asleep, an unlit cigarette ready to fall from his lips. He startled awake. Kitchens and the others climbed in. Jiang was hastily introduced. Billings stared skeptically back in the rear view mirror at the wounded Chinese officer, wondering if he were still dreaming.

"Get moving!" Kitchens ordered. They had a seven-hour drive back to Tokyo and GHQ, carrying evidence that Gallant Flag was a much broader conspiracy than anyone had realized. And launch day now seemed closer than ever.

Wednesday, 1-10-51

Taipei, Formosa

9:15 a.m.

To Brigadier General Paul Craft, the city of Taipei, Formosa wasn't much to speak of. A rude gathering of one and two-story brick buildings stuffed wall-to-wall in a valley, a sea of gray slate roofs wreathed in the smoke of hundreds of cooking fires in the streets and alleys of the capital, all loosely connected by the sluggish, coffee-colored Tanshui River. Nor was the Kuomintang staff jeep driver much to speak of either, Craft thought. He was not, to be sure, exactly an exemplar of military spit and polish.

The sergeant wore a greasy, half-torn olive field jacket over mismatched camou trousers, all tucked into black boots that looked like they had been boiled into a tar pit for a month.

No wonder the Reds kicked their ass off the mainland in '49.

Craft settled back and let the slovenly sergeant navigate heavy bicycle and pedicab traffic through the crowded warren of woodframe and bamboo houses making up the Paitou district of western Taipei. A few sudden twists and long bleats of the horn brought them out through Chungchen and its temples to the mustard-yellow Romanesque mansion that served as Kuomintang headquarters.

The jeep braked to an abrupt halt before the canopied entrance. More sergeants saluted as Craft climbed out. He snapped off a perfunctory return salute--the Praetorian Guard at Headquarters handling themselves with visibly more elan than he'd seen anywhere else--then spotted a general officer at the bottom step, hands smartly tucked behind him.

General Shih Lin Hu smiled broadly as Craft came across the drive. Decked out with scabbard and epaulets worthy of a Hollywood epic, Shih was a full four-star in the Nationalist Chinese Army.

"Dsao sharng nee-hao," General Shih saluted smartly, then extended a hand. "Welcome to China."

Craft grinned back. He'd known Shih as a courageous infantry commander in south China during the big war, guarding bomber bases along the Burma Road. "Dsao sharng nee-hao, General. It's been too many years."

Shih ushered him into the headquarters. They marched across a tiled reception hall with a gaily mosaic'ed cupola overhead, to an anteroom--almost a parlor--off the main hall. Shih reported that the Kuomintang had requisitioned the mansion as general headquarters from a wealthy tea planter after Mao had driven them off the mainland.

"It's quite a place," the Chinese general explained, showing Craft to a small arrangement of sofas. A porcelain teapot sat on a black lacquered table wreathed in steam. Shih served hot green tea in tiny cups. "Some of the offices upstairs were once used by our local ladies...one even has mirrored walls."

Craft sipped the hot liquid cautiously. "I suppose that could be useful in times of crisis...introspective soul-searching and all that."

"Quite so, my dear General Craft. What brings you to Taipei?"

After more tea and pleasantries, Craft related the real reason for his visit.

"General, I need your help." He briefly detailed the basics of Gallant Flag and MacArthur's strategy for breaking the back of the Chicom offensive. Shih listened gravely behind his tea cup, his pug's face wrapped in clouds of steam.

"General, we need the services of your Special Forces recon unit. General MacArthur has need of specific targeting information in north China and Manchuria. Our pilots don't have enough information for their target folders. They need map coordinates, weather conditions, local air defenses, that sort of thing. General MacArthur is well aware of the credentials of the Dragon's Tail. He'd like to use them for pre-strike planning. Gallant Flag's critical; I don't have to tell you that. It could change the war completely." Craft didn't add that the mission authorized by MacArthur was an atomic bombing mission.

Shih's face grew animated. His gray mustache twitched with excitement. "We would be most happy to do anything we can to help MacArthur defeat Communists in China. Wherever and whenever we can."

Craft used the edge of the lacquered table to unfold a map. He pointed out some of the particulars of the mission, especially the timing and strategic intentions.

"Gallant Flag," Craft mentioned, "is designed, at a minimum, to shut off the supply of men and material coming from China into the Korean theater. MacArthur wants to starve the Chicom forces already there. Give the UN forces a chance to counterattack, push the Commies back, at least north of the 38th Parallel."

Shih studied the map, following Craft's fingers. "We must put this before the Generalissimo, you understand. To commit such an important force must be discussed. Approved by His Excellency."

"I understand, sir. However, time is short. We must have good target information soon, to make the launch date, to take pressure off our boys in the field."

"May I propose," Shih explained, "that before this matter is put to His Excellency, you come and see our Heilungchun at their training base. It's in the mountains, below Tatun volcano. An hour's drive from here."

"I'd like that very much."

Shih left the room for a few moments, to make arrangements, then returned. His face was crinkled with smiles. "It's done, General. If you please, we depart immediately. The regimental commander has been good enough to make his staff car available."

"Where is this place anyway?"

Shih escorted Craft back to the canopied plaza entrance. "Sixty kilometers south, along the A-mu-p'ing Highway. Up in the Chan Hills, there is a small valley, near the headwaters of the Tanshui. All kinds of terrain, terrible weather at times. But it's very secure. And it serves our purpose."

They climbed into a black well-polished Hudson sedan with the Kuomintang sunburst emblem on the side doors.

"You train for--what, exactly? Amphibious assault, airborne, covert insertion?"

Shin climbed in beside Craft. He was grim. "We train to take our country back, General. The Communists have stolen China." He bit off his words. "We train to make right the mistakes of 1949."

Craft asked no further questions on the ride out to the An-ping base.

They had a two-jeep escort but Craft figured the terrain was bleak and forbidding enough to discourage even the most dedicated attacker. Steep limestone cliffs full of thick forestland, dense bamboo and palm groves, interspersed with occasional waterfalls gave the countryside almost a tropical look. Sand flats alternated with wooded ravines, serpentined around a gravelly one-lane road that switched back and forth up the mountainside with such suddenness that Craft was certain the driver would ultimately plunge them off one of the ever-steepening gorges.

He kept his eyes focused on the road ahead, the rear gunner of the front jeep bouncing like a child's doll over every rut and pothole and on the vigorous steering of the Hudson driver. It was the only way he could think of to keep his eyes off the vertiginous drops at every turn.

An hour's tortuous climb into the forested ramparts of the Chan Hills eventually brought them to a tilted but basically flat plateau wedged between two knobby protuberances. The road narrowed to a graveled path and the convoy was forced to slow--a company-sized column of Nationalist Chinese infantry was half-stepping up the incline in gray field outfits. On both sides of the road, peasant farmers tilled diligently at the scraggly furrows of rice paddies. Another group of peasants pulled wagons of lettuce and beans and corn along the side of the road, heading downhill.

The Hudson ground to a halt.

General Shih seemed eager with anticipation. "It seems we've come at the just the right moment, General."

Craft peered around uneasily. "What's going to--"

"Just watch."

At first, Craft couldn't believe what he was seeing. At some unseen signal, the wagon-hauling peasants suddenly dispersed in an orgy of shouting and threats, pulling knives, staves and spears of bamboo from the produce of the wagons. They set furiously upon the column of soldiers like a horde of bees, wading into the columns kicking and slashing like demented dolls.

The column fell apart at once and a melee of hand-to-hand combat ensued--bayonets, fists, feet and bamboo churned up dust and gravel as the assault swelled into a full-blown rout. Even as Craft watched in horror, bright flashes of blood darkened the gravel. This was no exercise, but a real assault, real weapons, real blood.

The gutters of the road swelled with lacerated, badly wounded men, on both sides. A few were still, impaled on bamboo staves. Even to his untrained eyes, Craft could see the peasants or whoever they were, were visibly superior in close quarters combat. Even weaponless, they were deadly martial arts specialists, landing punches, kicks and chops with deadly accuracy, swarming to each others's defense like angry hornets.

Then, as suddenly as it had started, the conflict petered out, heralded by sharp toots of a horn from the rice paddies. Soldiers and peasants disengaged in mid-fight, got up, dusted themselves off and bowed almost as one to a quartet of uniformed officers slogging through paddies toward the road. Injured and dead stayed on the ground; no one moved to help them.

The officers climbed up onto the gravel road. One, a stout mustachioed big mouth with a shiny bald head barked commands in guttural Cantonese. Instantly, the soldiers and peasants scrambled to assemble themselves into a ragged dress formation.

Beside Craft, Shih was amused, clapping his hands, chuckling with satisfaction. "Excellent show, no? The Heilungchun, General Craft."

"What the hell was that all about? You've got serious injured over there."

Shih acknowledged that. "Indeed, that is expected. Good training means casualties...more realistic, yes? The men appreciate realism in their training."

As they spoke, the bald-headed officer continued some kind of gruff post- mortem lecture to the assembled formation.

"This special forces group--? Craft asked.

"The Heilungchun were the peasants in this exercise. A tactical demonstration of assault from concealment and close-quarters combat. You can see the Dragon's Tail is a ferocious and determined unit. Hand picked volunteers, all of them."

"Impressive," Craft admitted. "I'd like to meet some of them. And their C/O."

"I'm sure that can be arranged. After the next demonstration."

Indeed, another practice skirmish evolved directly out of the formation lecture and drill run by the bald officer. To Craft, the officer's huge mustache and pugnacious build reminded him of some New Jersey prizefighter circa 1922. It was apparent he commanded absolute attention from his men.

The second demonstration featured a full live-fire exercise, an ambush scenario and more hand-to-hand fighting. Several men were hit with rounds from the M-1 Garands used in the assault. One died, hit in the head. Shih seemed unconcerned, even pleased at the 'realism.' Craft was left to ponder the differences in training philosophies.

Again, the 'peasant' detachment was declared winners in the wargame. The men were again dressed down and debriefed in formation. Two were called out and whipped on the spot, with a bamboo cudgel stick carried by the bald officer. They took their beating stoically and returned to the ranks.

The unit was then dismissed to muster all their equipment and fall in for the march down hill to an old Catholic convent now used as a barracks. With Craft in tow, General Shih climbed out of the Hudson and introduced the American to the Dragon Tail's command leadership.

"So, General," Shih asked, "do you think the Heilungchun can take care of themselves on a mission inside the Communist zone?"

Craft had been impressed, and said so. "Most definitely. With the right mission."

Shih and Craft chatted with several majors and captains, while the unit gathered its equipment for the march downhill. In the back of his mind, Craft couldn't help but compare the skills and esprit of the Heilungchun with the sloppy troops he had encountered around Kuomintang headquarters.

From even a brief talk with the unit's leadership, he could see a lot of the difference was in the spirit and professionalism of the force's lieutenants and the squad-level leaders. The command element of Dragon's Tail would have put any unit in the U.S. Army to shame.

After a short debrief alongside the rice paddies, Shih decided it was time to make another trip.

"You are meeting with His Excellency, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek today. This afternoon. It has been decided. He is nearby, further up in the Chan Hills, at his mountaintop retreat. An-shui Mountain is a beautiful setting, General. There's even a waterfall below the house. His Excellency is looking forward to discussing strategy and tactics with General MacArthur's esteemed representative."

The trip by winding mountain road lasted nearly three hours. When the convoy turned up into the graveled drive of the Generalissimo's retreat, Craft found himself before a massive stone and brick aerie, capped with a soaring wing of a slate roof and miniature pagoda-like turrets, a fantasyland citadel fit for an emperor.

Shih explained that the entire complex had once belonged to a wealthy tea planter, who had owned three thousand acres in and around the Chan Hills district.

Chiang Kai-shek greeted the convoy himself from the veranda of the main building. His Excellency, the Avenger of Nanking, the ling-dao of all China, stood hands clasped behind his back, resplendent in a gold-braided green uniform with a high collar studded with insignia. He had a nearly bald head; only a hint of white hair tufted the massive folds of his ears. He smiled down at Craft, and returned the American general's salute. Gold capped teeth stained from cigarette tar flashed briefly.

"My dear General Craft, welcome...welcome....so good of you to come." Chiang ushered him into the grand foyer of the mansion. Jade figurines lined the walls of the elliptical room, dappled with shadows from the late afternoon sun streaming in through clerestory windows.

Craft replied, "Your Excellency, it's an honor to meet someone who's fought the Communists so hard for so long." He extracted a letter of introduction from General MacArthur. "The Supreme Allied Commander wishes me to convey this letter to you. It explains a little of my mission here."

"Indeed." Chiang made sure Craft was well-taken care of in a small anteroom off the foyer, then unfolded reading glasses from a breast pocket and scanned MacArthur's letter. The letter laid out the basics of the proposed air attack against Red Chinese targets. Craft had drafted it himself.

Chiang's face beamed at the prospect of nailing his mainland nemesis once again.

"An excellent plan," he announced. "How can we help?"

"Well, Your Excellency, that's the real reason for my visit here." Craft had practiced his approach countless times in front of bathroom mirror at the BOQ. "The Supreme Commander had authorized me to request assistance from your special forces people. The Dragon's Tail unit. We need target data for our pilots. The kind of target data we need is best obtained from ground reconnaissance. Precise map coordinates of supply depots, troop concentrations, railyards, that sort of thing. We need data on air defenses, weather conditions, terrain features to watch out for. The Dragon's Tail unit would be perfect for this kind of mission. General MacArthur asks, in his letter, for your assistance."

Chiang was thoughtful. "General MacArthur has been a stalwart ally of China for many years. Of course, we will help. I must, you understand, consult with my commanders. The details of the mission will have to be worked out. How the Heilungchun are to be inserted onto the mainland? Where will they go? If the enemy engages, what is to be done? And how to retrieve them?" Chiang's face broke into a sly smile. "How much assistance are the Americans willing to offer this mission?"

It was a loaded question and both Craft and Chiang knew it. Craft knew perfectly well the Nationalists had no greater dream than to march right across the Formosa Strait and take on Mao's peasant army again, especially if he could get the U.S. Army behind him. MacArthur was already under strict orders from the President to promise nothing to Chiang. Still, the military advantages for Korea of a second front on the mainland were undeniable.

Craft tiptoed through the minefield Chiang's question had laid. "General MacArthur has authorized me to assure you that the United States will not leave our allies in the lurch. The truth is, Excellency, that the Supreme Commander must be circumspect in assistance, politics being what they are. General MacArthur is willing to provide material assistance to your special forces in transport, communications, weapons and logistics, just not from Japan or Korea. We'll have to muster supplies from elsewhere, maybe Hawaii. The General doesn't want to tip his enemies off."

"Whether in Washington or Peking, eh General Craft?"

Craft acknowledged the observation. "General MacArthur won't let you down, sir. We do need your help."

The meeting lasted for several more hours, well into the night. A dense cold fog settled over the An-ping complex. The Generalissimo even called in the balance of his General Staff for a working dinner. Consensus was important to the Chinese. Craft met a flock of three and four-stars, soon losing track of their unpronounceable names and positions. He had the impression that the Kuomintang leadership had descended en masse on the old stone villa like old crows at a favorite feeding trough. Rice wine, beer and Cantonese chao-fan (shrimp) flowed freely.

When it was over, on the downhill side of midnight, a detailed understanding had been hammered out, on Craft's personal assurance that the Supreme Commander would approve. The Nationalist generals agreed to make the Heilungchun available for a one-week recon mission across north and northeast China, including the Peking area and Manchuria. Their mission would be gather ground intelligence in enough detail to create valid target folders on high-value targets for Gallant Flag.

The data would be brought back to Taipei and be turned over to Craft or his designated agents no later than January 24, fourteen days hence. For their help in getting this intelligence, Craft was authorized to offer Chiang the opportunity to select one target of interest to the Chinese, a target which would serve Nationalist interests in regaining the mainland.

"An easy choice," Chiang Kai-shek admitted, puffing on a cigarette in a long ivory holder. "We select Peking itself, the headquarters of the Communist bandits' party and organization. Mao and his band of pirates, who stole our country from the people."

"Peking is your capital city, Excellency. To make it a target is to ensure its inevitable destruction. That's pretty extreme, isn't it?"

"When one's body is infected with a life-threatening disease, General, extreme measures are justified."

"Very well," said Craft. It wasn't worth arguing about. He wasn't even sure MacArthur would approve it. But he said nothing of any misgivings. "Peking it is."

Wednesday, 1-10-51

Eniwetok Atoll, The Marshall Islands

6:00 a.m.

Dr. Albert Ranier was grateful beyond words for the extra generators the Navy had seen fit to detail to the Chesapeake for Operation Greenhouse. Without the cooling capacity the four big diesels provided for the heavily shielded 'vault' down on C Deck, the innards of the Navy freighter (AF-18) would have long since cooked man and machine alike. Even in the middle of January, the tropical heat and humidity of Eniwetok Atoll was thick and palpable.

One step outside the compartment instantly brought small beads, then small rivers of sweat to the Czech physicist's forehead. He elected to stay secluded inside the vault this morning, alone in the early morning hours of the mid-watch, only an occasional Marine sentry checking in on him for company.

Ranier was systematically examining the arming and fusing wireways of the R-T devices stored in their steel 'cribs' inside the vault, checking continuity and connections for everything. He wanted to make sure his little children had survived the trip out from the States intact.

Ranier checked his watch: a few minutes past 0600 hours local time. He was due to be at the ground zero tower in less than an hour to help out with final inspection and sign-off on the Greenhouse Dog shot, now less than a day away. Dog was critical to Greenhouse. And to Gallant Flag, Ranier had to admit. Dog was to be the first test, the index experiment, of an 81-kiloton Mark VI standard fission device, emplaced at the top of a three-hundred foot steel tower on a small island at the eastern bow of the atoll, called Runit.

The Americans, for some reason he could never quite fathom, insisted on calling the place 'Yvonne.'

Albert Ranier fumbled the voltmeter for the third time as he tied into both sides of circuit QX12. Watch yourself, he muttered. QX12 was a delay circuit, part of the timing system for the Mark VI, that ensured the bomb was safely separated from its carrier aircraft before the arming sequence could begin. Dog shot wasn't going to be air-dropped tomorrow. The device was secured at the top of the steel shot tower, in a cab the size of a small cottage. Nonetheless, Dog was a full-up test of an actual Mark VI device and electrically, there wasn't any difference.

Ranier re-attached the voltmeter leads and took a deep breath. He was nervous, perhaps anxious was a better word. Not about the shot. Dog would go off on schedule tomorrow just fine. He was sure of that, as sure as anybody in J-Division could be. J was the testing branch at Los Alamos. At Eniwetok, as far as the installation of the bomb and its ordnance setup went, J-Division technicians were gods. Even the Navy had to follow their orders on the shot site.

Ranier was anxious about the days to come, the post-mortem period of scientific evaluation and data reduction after Dog and Easy, George and Item...the initially planned shots for Greenhouse. He was walking a very thin line, having pushed so hard for the added test shots, only to 'discover' design flaws that would make cancelling the later shots necessary. Getting the data he had doctored at Hanford and Los Alamos past his own colleagues' scrutiny would be tough. Ranier shook his head, attaching and re-attaching the voltmeter leads: QX13, QX14, QX15, baroswitch bypass circuit, condenser number 1, condenser number 2. Scientists were always the toughest audience. Walking bags of ego and reputation, contradictions and personality. He knew damn well the Joint Task Force Three science board would go over the 'flawed designs' of the R-T devices with an accountants' eye for facts and numbers. An inquisition was a foregone conclusion.

The papers he had shipped out detailing the design and production 'errors' would have to hold up to the scrutiny.

He hoped and prayed he had laid down the trail of facts well enough so that even his hard-headed colleagues would be inevitably drawn to a certain conclusion: the R-T bombs would never work. From that, the considered judgement of the science board would almost certainly be to ship the devices back to the States right away, aboard the Chesapeake.

And once that was done, Gallant Flag would have its atom bombs.

Ranier ran his fingers over the steel alloy casing, feeling for seams, imperfections, burrs or weldments that might crack when the devices were moved again. Atom bombs were surprisingly fragile things. A Mark VI could level a city the size of Chicago with no problem. Yet the casing was brittle and prone to chip or crack. Radiation embrittlement--loose neutrons--was the official explanation. Ranier wasn't so sure.

He continued his hand examination. The entire device was encased in a nickel-steel alloy jacket, eight feet long, six feet in diameter, a flattened egg with fins and a tail cone. His fingers followed metal conduit tubes welded to the outer surface...the wireways from the "box" at the tail to the fuse ring and its Composition B detonators and explosive lenses arrayed around the plutonium sphere inside, like a Christmas wreath. He felt no burrs, no obvious imperfections or grind patches; the casing was smooth, slightly warm to the touch, though the plutonium core hadn't been loaded yet. Perhaps it was only his imagination.

His fingers probed the barometric sensor ports, necessary to arm the bomb for detonation at altitude but not needed for the test. Ranier smirked silently at the word 'test.' The only test this baby would receive would be over some Chinese or North Korean target a few weeks hence.

Everything seemed to be fine. Ranier satisfied himself the first device was electrically and structurally sound. Final arming and fusing wire harnesses were still to be laid in, along with the plutonium core, stored in a lead-lined vault on another deck, plus the initiator and the tamper blocks of neutron-reflecting beryllium. All that could be done later, in Kobe, after the bombs had been taken from the Chesapeake.

Ranier stowed the voltmeter and retrieved a padlocked leather satchel he had brought down to the vault from his bunkspace. The Marine sentry had checked the papers inside thoroughly, not really understanding what he was seeing and passed them on. Ranier wanted to stow the 'doctored' production records and lab results in a special security locker inside the vault. All the test and measurement data in the satchel had to lead to one inescapable conclusion: the Ranier-Tolkach devices were duds.

The reality was that the devices were perfectly sound Mark VI fission bombs. But nowhere at the Pacific Proving Grounds were there any instruments to disprove the faked records.

Ranier was counting heavily on that, and on his ability to persuade his colleagues that production errors had been made.

Quickly, he stowed the papers and files in the locker and re-secured the lock. He checked his watch. Damn! He needed to be topside at the main gangway in ten minutes. A Navy LST would be moored off Chesapeake's stern, ready to make its regular early morning ferry run over to Yvonne and the shot site. He couldn't afford to be late.

Ranier hustled up topside and made the ferry run with several minutes to spare. He sprinted down the gangway and found himself a seat next to a Navy photographer in the stern of the Landing Ship, Tank. The craft was jammed with early morning commuters; the first run over to Yvonne always was. Ranier wriggled himself a bit more room, glancing with annoyment at the crush of travelers that had filled the vessel for the run over to the lagoon.

Physicists and botanists. Photographers and radiographers. Engineers and instrument techs. Oceanographers and doctors. Machinists and welders. Bosun's Mates and Army sergeants. Carpenters and zoologists.

Operation Greenhouse, like other atomic test shots in the Pacific before it, was an entire city of people assembled in the middle of the ocean, to build an entire civilization out of the coral reefs and mangrove swamps, then blow it all to kingdom come in a few minutes of cataclysmic violence.

Ranier shook his head at the thought of all the waste. Only Americans would do all this.

The ride into the shot site was relatively calm, a light chop in the turquoise water, and the aroma of papaya and coconut drifted in on the wind. Onshore at Yvonne, the late-shift workers would have a big breakfast buffet and a steaming iron kettle of stew going on the beach for the shift change...a daily production of the so-called Royal Order of the Radiated Studs, as the graveyard shift styled themselves.

The Navy photographer next to Ranier distracted himself with comic strips and scores from the bowl games. The newssheet was a local rag called The Daily Blast.

The ferry ride took about half an hour. From inside the craft, Ranier saw a scattering of coral humps--the lagoon was thick with reefs, though the Seabees had blasted most of them down to make the waters navigable--and low mangrove trees along the white sand beaches of the atoll's islands. Ahead, the trusswork girders of the three-hundred foot shot tower dominated a horizon now reflecting a pink sunrise off puffy cumulus clouds.

Eniwetok Atoll was shaped like a necklace of pearls. Three hundred miles from Kwajalein Island, a major U.S. airbase and ship anchorage, less than three thousand miles from Guam and Hawaii, the atoll encircled a fine deepwater lagoon suitable for anchoring ocean-going vessels of all types.

Isolated, with temperatures running from 67F to 97F, the atoll islands encompassed a total land area of less than three square miles. The highest point on any island was only thirteen feet above sea level.

Until man had arrived and constructed a tower. The native Eniwetokese, long since re-located to safer environs a hundred miles south, figured the white men had built the tower as a shrine to their gods. The peak was a wooden cab, constructed to shelter the Dog Mark VI device.

If all went well, in less than twenty four hours, the white men's shrine on tiny Runit (Yvonne) Island would disappear in a flash of cataclysmic violence, stripped in a millionth of a second to loose atoms and molecular debris by the inferno of a new man-made star being born.

Some wag had stenciled an affectionate name on the inside ramp of the LST: Up and Atom. The Navy craft beached itself on a short sand ramp at Yvonne Island and the passengers poured out, scattering like frenzied birds to a hundred last-minute tasks. Ranier was one of the last off.

For several months, the 53rd Naval Construction Battalion had swarmed over the tiny spit of sand and coral, steadily transforming it into a labyrinth of cable runs, long steel tubes, pontoon causeways offshore, seaplane ramps, water distilling plants, boat moorings, and scores of plank and woodbeam huts housing seismographic, photographic and other equipment. From the shot tower itself, a starburst of long metal tubes anchored in cement fanned out in all directions...scintillation tubes to capture and record the first flash photons of light from the instant of detonation.

Ranier made his way to the base of the tower and, after a short wait, rode in a rickety open-frame mechanical elevator up to the shot cab.

The top of the tower was brisk with activity. Ordnance technicians from Los Alamos' J-Division mingled with electricians from the Navy and physicists from the Atomic Energy Commission, buzzing around the black casing of the Dog device, for the moment draped in cables and shrouds, With practiced concentration and focus, they poked into bolt holes for cracks, checked connections, tested battery power and circuit continuity, measured radiation levels, secured fittings.

Ranier had been assigned to J-Division for Greenhouse by the Lab director, partly to use his physics background in the test shots, partly to get him out of Los Alamos and everyone else's hair. His main duty this morning was to see that all the required measuring instruments were installed and calibrated properly, both around the shot tower and in the scintillation tubes.

It was simple work for a trained atomic physicist, mindless, even humiliating work really, yet Ranier didn't mind. He was keenly interested in seeing that Dog work right and yield as expected, since he knew the Gallant Flag devices were exact copies. With yield data from Dog to calibrate, he would have precise information to turn over to Craft and the Gallant Flag people, to help with their mission planning.

They needed the data as soon as he could get it to them.

Dog was scheduled for a dawn detonation tomorrow. By Friday, Ranier knew he wanted to have his yield and effects calculations done and the data copied and packaged for sending. Conveniently, General Clayton LaSalle would be on hand that afternoon, with a contingent of Strategic Air Command officers from the Air Force, observing the test. Ranier had already worked out a scheme to get the packaged data on the test to LaSalle, at a planned beachside beer and barbecue bash Friday night at Bikini Atoll, a few hundred miles away. At that party, celebrating the first shot of Greenhouse, Ranier and LaSalle would wander off to an isolated spot on the other side of the island and the Czech physicist would give him the files describing the physical and radiation effects of the Dog device. The Gallant Flag bombs, still aboard the Chesapeake for the moment, would be identical.

Ranier was nervous as he pored over the test instrumentation rig in the cab, checking connections, setup, power, calibration records, everything. He had to squeeze between bodies to follow leads and conduits that snaked around all sides of the bomb casing. It was a contortionist's work, or maybe a gymnast, he thought. He could hardly keep his mind on the job.

After half an hour, Ranier was sweating heavily. A J-Division electrician named Shelby noticed his anxiety. The two men had climbed all over each other trying to follow lines and leads.

"You all right, Doc? You look a little pale."

Ranier dabbed the sweat from his forehead and neck with a monogrammed handkerchief. "Yes, yes, it's just the heat. Quite humid up here--all the people, you know--"

"Sure. Just watch yourself, okay? This isn't the best place to be careless, you know."

Ranier knew he had to get a grip on himself. He was so close to his goal, yet there were so many things that could go wrong. The detonation of an atom bomb seemed the least of them. He told Shelby not to worry. "It's just that I'm a bit scared of heights."

Both men laughed at the incongruity of such a fear, even as they climbed all over an 80-kiloton atomic bomb in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
CHAPTER 19

Thursday, January 11, 1951

Tokyo

8:00 p.m.

Back in Tokyo, Fyodor Trofimenko took Jiang Chen Li with him to the Soviet Embassy. Bret Billings went with Kitchens to the Dai Ichi, where the 5th MPs (CID) offices were located, in the basement.

The corridors of the subterranean maze of offices were mostly deserted when Kitchens unlocked the door. He found a grim Robert Blount inside, feet propped up on a desk piled high with case files. The FBI agent had been perusing evidence reports and surveillance logs. Papers were scattered all over the wooden floor.

Kitchens came in and tossed his cap on a nearby desk. "You're a sight for sore eyes. When did you get in?" He introduced Blount to Billings, the FBI shaking hands with the CIA.

Blount told them about the Chesapeake's trip out from San Francisco. "All the bombs made it okay. First test is tomorrow. I hitched a ride to see what was cooking here. Remember how we're supposed to be sharing information?"

Kitchens checked out the coffeepot, sniffing the dregs. His nose wrinkled. He decided to make a fresh pot. "Yeah, I remember." The Army major went looking for some hot water, found it, and came back to get the pot going. As he did so, he filled Blount in on what had happened in Kobe. "No question about it, pal...Tetsuko's up to his ears in this thing."

He described the warehouse and the shoot-out with Omisumi security. "We got away with some pictures--" he patted the boxy camera still on a strap around his neck. "Looks like the place is being re-built to store the bombs all right...right down to the Geiger counters on the shelves and lead-lined crates inside a shielded room. We got pictures, serial numbers, a quick and dirty inventory...."he shook his head. "Tetsuko'll have a tough time explaining this to the Army."

"Enough stuff to link Omisumi to the plot?"

"More than enough. I'm feeling it's about time to pay Mr. Tetsuko a little visit. A big-time squeeze ought to shake loose some very interesting facts."

Billings watched the coffeepot perk with some anticipation, silently hurrying it along. It had been a very long day and night in Kobe, and an even longer drive back to Tokyo. "I'm just wondering about Osawa. My informant. He never showed in Kobe. That's not like him."

"Maybe Tetsuko found he was a snitch. Made your informant disappear."

"Certainly a possibility." Billings finally got his coffee and slurped it down black. "I guess there's two big questions staring us in the face: how are the bombs going to be diverted and when do they arrive?"

Blount shrugged. "I thought something would blow on the Chesapeake. But the ride out to Eniwetok was perfectly normal, for a Navy ship with a load of A-bombs, I mean. It gave me a chance to watch Albert Ranier...the atomic guy from Los Alamos."

"That guy from Atomic Energy Commission fingered Ranier, didn't he? Doctoring records and pinching bomb parts, stuff like that."

"He's the one. I spent some time with the doctor, watched him work. Did a little snooping. Major, the guy's up to his eyeballs in this operation...you can smell it." Blount ticked off points on his fingers. "I ran across weaponization studies, core design papers, tamper and initiator calculations, all kinds of things in his files."

"How do you know he's not cleared to work on that kind of stuff?" Kitchens asked. "These physicists are like whores, they work on everything at Los Alamos, don't they?"

"Not really," the FBI agent told him. He helped himself to the coffee, taking the last sugar cubes. "They're compartmentalized. Ranier's cleared for work in the core...the plutonium part, tamper, initiator, the whole 'physics' package they call it. He's specifically not cleared for work with arming, fusing and detonating systems. That's highly classified, an altogether different group, different level, everything. Atomic Energy Security re-checked his classification and security background for me before I left. He's outside that level. Doesn't have a 'need to know.' Yet I found stuff about the bombs' detonation circuitry in his cabin on the Chesapeake. Ipso facto: breach of security. A felony under federal statute. Point one for us."

"Where's Ranier now?"

"Eniwetok Atoll. He's assigned to J-Division Los Alamos. That's the test support group. Specific duties in instrumentat calibration and operation. You ought to see that place, Major. They got more instruments than the New York Philharmonic."

Kitchens rubbed the stubble on his chin, thinking. He carved out an opening in the stacks of case files to lean on a desk.

"If five or so of the Greenhouse bombs are somehow going to wind up in Kobe, it makes sense that Ranier is too. But who's he meeting? Who's he in contact with?"

"Didn't see any names in his files when I went snooping," Blount admitted. "I did see what I took to be some initials, though." Blount pulled out a small memo pad full of scribbled notes. "All through one file, I saw pages and pages of notes on something called Ranier-Tolkach, or R-T. The bombs he designed and got added to Greenhouse. The whole file was like a history of these things, from first design to core fabrication to machining to assembly. Every so often, I'd see a cryptic notation--'P.C.'--like somebody's name. It may be nothing. Sometimes a date too. Recent dates, November and December. But I never found any kind of other time log or journal or diary."

"P.C?" Kitchens mulled that over. "Could be nothing. Could be everything. Look, I know Ranier's communicating with people here in the Dai Ichi. I just don't know who." He held up his own scribbled notes. "I got a lot of equipment serial numbers to backtrack. If I can get back to an original purchaser, I'll be on to something. Some of the equipment in that warehouse is pretty specialized, like the Geiger counters. It shouldn't be too hard to run down a purchase trail. I get a P.O. number, I can get a name. I get a name, then maybe I can find a link back here. That's what I need. A paper link to the Dai Ichi. That's the kind of evidence I can take to the Adjutant General."

"Who works for MacArthur, don't forget," Billings reminded them.

"And to the President," Blount added. "Anything you turn up, goes right back to the task force."

"Don't get your nose out of joint. The Bureau will be fully informed."

"It's not my nose, pal. It's John Edgar Hoover I'm worried about. He gets wind the Army's covering up any of this--" Blount just shook his head sadly. "It won't be pretty. I'll be out on the street in a heartbeat, playing canasta with the gutter bums."

Kitchens remembered Jiang and Trofimenko. "Rob, there's something else you should know about this investigation."

"Don't tell me: you're a card-carrying Commie too."

Kitchens didn't smile. "We've got a slightly expanded case team now."

"You mean this Agency prick here?" Blount nodded in Billings' direction.

"Him too. And a couple of others."

Billings never missed a chance to tweak a Bureau-man's nose. "He means we got a Russian spy and a Red Chinese major helping us out."

Blount glared back. "Very funny. That's all I need...a couple of wiseguys."

"It's the truth," Kitchens said. He described how Trofimenko, code-named Fox One, had been the one behind the aerial attack on the Army train. Kitchens related Fox One's capture in Mexico City, the Maryland safe house interrogation and how Hoover and the shakedown squad at St. Michael's had turned the Russian, even 'deputized' him onto the case. "He's even got approval from old Joe Stalin, so I hear."

Blount's face was a mask of disbelief. The time for joking was past. Before he could speak, Kitchens continued.

"There's more. The guy's here in Japan right now, on the case with me and Billings. And he's not the only new guy on the case."

"Really. Don't tell me: you hired Mickey Mouse too."

"Better than that...a Red Chinese army major. Intelligence officer. We ran into him at Kobe, exchanged gunfire, then wound up joining forces to fight off Omisumi security." Kitchens sucked on his own sugar cube. "The guy knows how to handle a weapon."

"Let me see if I've got this straight." Blount winced at the bitter taste of the coffee. "The same guy who tried to bomb the hell out of the Army train...is now working for us?"

"That's right."

"And now we got another Red spy working for us too--have I got that right?"

Kitchens nodded. "I don't believe it myself."

"Has anybody considered the possibility that we might be perfectly set up for a penetration operation."

"At least half a dozen times," Kitchens admitted. "Sometimes, I wake up at night and pinch myself. How the hell can we be fighting the Communists in Korea and working with them on a case at the same time?"

"I was hoping you'd explain it to me."

Kitchens shrugged. "The Russians are working the same case we are. Somehow--Fred...that's what I call Trofimenko...knows that SCAP is up to something. He was on a mission to sabotage an atomic strike. When you think about it, we're trying to do the same thing. But somebody has convinced the President to let the conspiracy go forward a little longer, so we can nab the big shots involved. Politics, if you ask me. Pure politics. All that and then this Russian shows up. He knows things we don't know about the plot. One thing leads to another, somebody gets a bright idea, and all of a sudden, Fred's on our team. Approved at the highest level...limited cooperation, sharing case files, the works."

"And you trust him?"

Kitchens was truthful. "No. Not completely. At least, not until Kobe. He gave a pretty good account of himself when we were under fire."

"He's a Commie, for Chrissakes! A Soviet agent. The enemy--"

"I know--" Kitchens held up his hands. "I know that." He shook his head, put down the case file he was flipping through, and jammed both hands in his pockets. "It doesn't make any sense to me either. I guess it's the times...you don't know who to trust anymore. The Rosenbergs. Limited war--what the hell is limited war? Atom bombs. Frozen TV dinners. The whole friggin' world's gone crazy...nothing makes sense."

"So what the hell do we do now?" Blount asked.

"Follow orders."

"And there's a Chinese agent too?"

The telephone rang. Kitchens snatched up the receiver. "CID...Major Kitchens. Yeah? What's that? Oh..." he cupped the receiver, mouthing it's the Russian. "Yeah. Yeah, Fred." He checked his watch. "I suppose so...if I can find it. Both of you?" Kitchens cupped the receiver again. To Bret Billings: "You know a place called the White Pearl?"

Billings nodded. "I know it. Noodle and sake bar. Right between a bank and an old Kabuki theater. Creepy kind of dive, if you ask me. Sometimes, the actors from next door show up, still in costume, after a performance."

"It's the Russian. He wants to meet us there. At eight. All of us."

Blount was cautious. "It's got to be a set up, Major. A fishing trip. We've got to take this--affair--one step at a time. Look, I'm an old Counter-Intel guy. I've dealt with Communist agents for years. You've got to treat 'em like the weasels they are. They'd as soon slit your throat as buy you a drink."

"We've got specific orders to cooperate," Kitchens said. "Use every source we can to move this case along. And we don't have the time to be finicky about politics. If the Russians can help, fine and dandy with me. Chinese too. My job is to crack this case and keep those bombs from being used without authorization. Before it's too late."

"I don't like it," the FBI agent admitted. "We're being used but good. I can smell it. The bosses don't know the street like I do. I'm telling you, Major, this whole deal is fishy. How the hell do the Russians know so damn much anyway?"

Kitchens and Billings were already pulling their jackets on. Kitchens re-checked the magazine of his service .45. He had an extra clip in his coat pocket. "How the hell should I know? Maybe they're better spies than we are. Come on--"

The three of them left the Dai Ichi and took Kitchens' Army Ford. The drive around the Imperial Palace grounds--now shrouded in a light evening mist--and over to the Nishi Shinjuku took half an hour through light traffic. The streets were slick with recent rains. Pedestrians had retreated to find shelter and were just beginning to fill the sidewalks again.

The White Pearl was a brick and bamboo canopied tunnel between the theater, now lit up for the evening's performance and a darkened Keio Bank. Subdued neon tubes flashing in kanji script illuminated a narrow flight of descending stairs. Big puddles of rainwater at the bottom awaited the unwary visitor. Kitchens soaked both legs halfway to his knee. He pushed through the doors into the dim red and yellow-lit bar swearing loudly.

The place was thick with cigarette smoke and a pungent brew of Kirin beer and sake. Raucous laughter erupted from one end of the bar. Foreigners--gaijin--backslapping each other over a pachinko game and some bawdy jokes.

Kitchens was momentarily conscious of his Army uniform. The C.I.D. patch and the 10th MPs' emblem--the 'sword and sunburst'--was prominent on his left shoulder. But no one paid any attention. To assist, protect and defend, read the escutcheon label on the patch.

Sure, pal. But defend who?

They found the Russian agent and the Chinese officer in a back booth, already well supplied by the bartender. Sake bottles, noodle bowls and sashimi platters littered the table.

Both men stood when the Americans appeared. Billings and Kitchens handled the introductions.

"Good news," Trofimenko offered as they sat down. "My comrade here has been in contact with his superiors in Peking. It seems the General Staff has approved the Major's limited cooperation with our investigation."

"Swell." Kitchens got a round of beers for the Americans and refreshed the sake for the Communist officers. "I suppose we'll be celebrating now."

Jiang and Kitchens warily sized each other up. They had hardly said a word to each other on the ride back from Kobe. Everyone had been exhausted. To Kitchens, in the dim light of the bar, the Chinese officer was feral, alert like a jungle cat, ready to pounce. When he spoke, his English was thick, and came out like a hiss. Kitchens instinctively patted the hard outlines of the .45 tucked below his chest in the shoulder holster.

Jiang never smiled; his eyes narrowed to slits as he spoke. "Cooperation must be limited, you understand. In no way does it mean military operations against the criminal aggressors in Korea will cease."

Trofimenko impatiently seconded that. "Of course, of course...that must be understood. The revolution of oppressed peoples everywhere goes on. But this is splendid, isn't it: a great crisis threatens the world and each of us brings unique advantages to the case. Each of us has a piece of the puzzle. We have but to cooperate and the case will be solved."

"I'd rather eat nails," said Robert Blount. He glowered at Trofimenko and Jiang. "Everything you two stand for is--" he stopped when Kitchens waved him quiet.

The Army major said, "The combat situation in Korea isn't the issue. I have orders to work with both of you on this case. My personal distaste for you and your countries and your whole way of life will not get in the way of a correct and professional collaboration. I presume you have evidence on the case you can give us."

Jiang seethed but the Russian tried to smooth over the raw loathing. "No doubt we're all quite dedicated to our causes. Comrade--"

Jiang spoke rough English through clenched teeth. "I've still got the scars from shrapnel of American bombs in my back and neck. Pyongyang, a month ago--forgive me, comrades, if I seem bitter. I dream at night of killing Americans...lots of Americans. You've murdered enough of my comrades--"

Kitchens bit off his words. "There'll be plenty more dead before we're through, pal. Unless you want to crawl back to that rathole you came from."

Jiang rose partially in his seat, tipping a bowl of shiritake onto the table. "Orders or not, I am a combat soldier. Enemies of the people are to be exterminated--"

Trofimenko grabbed Jiang by the seam of his jacket. "Be seated, comrade! Sit down!"

The men argued heatedly over politics for a few more minutes. It was evident to Trofimenko that arguing would get them nowhere. They were a desperately unhappy gathering, forced by circumstance into working together, explosives ready to ignite.

"Let us please make the best of this," the Russian pleaded. Everyone glowered back at him.

"Yeah," Kitchens said. "Focus on the investigation. Leave the politicians out of this." Even as he said it, he knew it was impossible.

Still, in crude, small, hesitating steps, they had to try. Over sushi and riceballs, starting with Trofimenko, the men slowly revealed what they knew about the case. Each man knew full well he couldn't tell everything he knew about Gallant Flag, to avoid compromising sensitive military or diplomatic secrets.

But as Kitchens recounted his part, the basic facts were not in dispute. "We know there's a conspiracy within Far Eastern Command to bring atom bombs into Korea, maybe China. We think the operation's been approved by General MacArthur. The President has not authorized any such deployment."

Robert Blount pitched in with a few more facts. He stared down at this beer glass, not meeting eyes with the others. "We think the actual bombs are somehow going to be diverted from those stockpiled for the Greenhouse test in the Pacific. There's a warehouse in Kobe--"

"--already fitted out," Kitchens interjected.

"--to hold the bombs for awhile. We have reason to think there are or will be five devices. The preparation, loading and launch site for the mission is unknown at this time. And we don't know what aircraft are involved either."

Jiang didn't want to be outdone. "Another fact--the Nationalist criminals on Formosa are somehow involved."

"And the Japanese industrialist Masuhiro Tetsuko is involved in this conspiracy up to his ears," added Trofimenko. "There. That wasn't so bad."

"Now what?" Blount asked. "What's the Formosa connection?"

Jiang also avoided eye contact. He used his sashimi strips and noodles as model objects, laying them out on the table to describe the refurbished submarine Sunfish. He didn't tell them what he had learned of her mission--some kind of rendezvous in mid-Pacific. Now it made sense: the submarine would assist in bringing the diverted bombs to the Kobe warehouse. He didn't know how, just yet. But it stood to reason that if he could get back to Formosa and sabotage the boat before she put to sea again, the American atom bomb mission would fail.

Jiang said none of this to the others.

"Looks to me like the next step for us," Kitchens said, "is a surprise visit to Tetsuko-san. An official visit from the U.S. Army. Dawn tomorrow. Shake the tree a little and see what nuts fall out."

"What about the aircraft angle?" Blount asked. "Somebody's already got to have bombers designated. Where are they, which ones?"

Kitchens polished off a beer. Japanese brews were weak to his taste, a bit bitter. He decided to forego the raw fish staring up at him from the platter. "That's a tougher nut to crack. There's got to be a connection at SCAP. But Twentieth Air Force operates out of Atsugi and that's Air Force country. My service badge won't even get me in the gate there. I'll have to work Far Eastern Command here...see what I can turn up at the Dai Ichi." He didn't relish the task. He felt like a small mole burrowing between the legs of flag-rank mastodons. A good way to get squashed.

"The aircraft could be anywhere," Billings observed. "There's air bases all over Japan, Okinawa, Guam. Maybe several dozen in all."

"Maybe squeezing Tetsuko-san will get us some answers. Tetsuko and Albert Ranier...we've got something on those two already. But who are they talking too...that's the key."

"I'll catch a flight back to Eniwetok," Blount suggested. "Keep tabs on Ranier and the bombs."

Trofimenko made a suggestion. "Major Jiang here is a trained combat reconnaissance officer. We should return to the Omisumi warehouse. Look for more evidence. It seems Tetsuko-san may be the weakest link of this chain. Apply pressure properly and we can make some progress. I'm sure of it."

"NKVD would know something about that, wouldn't they?" Blount sniffed. "First class experts at squeezing the truth out."

Trofimenko reddened and started to say something but Jiang cut in. "I should return to Formosa. This submarine is important...trained eyes need to be there. If she has a mission, I'll find it."

"And Osawa," said Billings. "Don't forget Hiro. He hasn't contacted me in nearly a week and he missed the Kobe meet. I'll see if I can follow that trail."

"You see," the Russian announced. "We are professionals all of us...just give us facts to work with. The rest is--how do you say--?"

"Crap." Kitchens nodded at Blount and Billings. "Let's get out of here."

The bill was paid and the men departed the White Pearl single file. Outside on the street, Kitchens turned back to Trofimenko and Jiang.

"You know, this is going to sound funny, but what the hell. Investigators have to follow leads wherever they lead. We don't know what kind of targets are being considered. Cities, bases, ports, Chairman Mao's potty stool...who knows? If someone could make a quick trip into China, talk with the right people, have a look around, we'd have a better idea what we're dealing with. It's like any crime. Put yourself in the perp's shoes: what am I trying to do here? If I'm knocking off a bank, I check out the bank. If I'm shaking down some poor businessman, I gotta know his business. If I'm running contraband across borders, I damn well better know the border guards' tactics. The targets might well point back to a certain base, maybe a certain type of mission. Maybe even to the launch base."

Jiang was cool to the idea. "Such a visit would never be permitted. Why would we allow our enemies the very targeting intelligence they desire? We would be defenseless against future air strikes."

Kitchens shrugged. "Maybe enemies have to stop being enemies once in awhile. I guess you're right." He knew all of them had a long way to go to be able to trust each other. Yet they had to trust each other, to be able to work the case together. Every hour spent arguing and insulting each other brought atom bombs that much closer. Kitchens openly wondered what the Russians would do if atom bombs were dropped on the Soviet Union, even though the strike was unauthorized.

Trofimenko shuddered at the prospect. "I'm sure my country would retaliate in kind," he replied.

Thursday, 1-11-51

Command Post, 1st Guards Army, Dresden, East Germany

6:45 a.m.

Six miles north of the center of the city of Dresden, just off the Magdeburg Highway, the estate house known as Fahrnhorst was a perfect gabled and turreted example of Prussian Junkers nobility, a fanciful stone and slate manor set like a Durer painting in a broad clearing in an otherwise primal evergreen woodland of linden and ash and birch trees.

Heavy snowfall had blanketed the clearing overnight, lending a timeless serenity to the scene. Snow had continued to fall during the early morning hours, big, fat, wet flakes whispering down in a faint rustle of bare branches.

Marshal of the Soviet Union Viktor Ivanovich Chuykov stood at the beveled window of his office in a side cupola of Fahrnhorst, admiring the pastoral beauty of the wintry Silesian landscape. A stainless steel samovar hissed steam on a serving cart next to the window, forming a wreath of ice crystals on the beaded glass of the window. Chuykov sipped pensively from a porcelain cup, letting the colors and textures of the fields and forests fall on his tired eyes. He had gotten very little sleep during the night. Now, he found the courage to allow himself a bit of indulgence, a few moments of quiet to savor the peace and beauty of nature's eternal hand.

Now, that seemed especially important, since three full platoons of the 11th Guards Tank Division had motored onto the estate grounds, chewed up the manicured lawns and disappeared like snorting steel beasts into the weissenwald of the surrounding countryside during the nighttime hours. The T-34s had revetted themselves into every hollow and fold of the land, waiting, just waiting. Waiting for what, he asked himself, though he knew the answer.

Waiting for the orders he silently prayed would never come.

Prayer, thought Chuykov, was a feeble crutch for feeble minds. The opiate of the masses, so said Karl Marx. If that were so, why then did the commanding officer of the 1st Guards Army of the Gruppa Sovetskikh Voysk v Germanii--the Group of Soviet Forces Germany--find particular solace this morning in the silly little ditty of childhood orthodox verses his mother had once taught him?

Chuykov's reflections were suddenly interrupted by a sharp rap on the door of his office.

"Vaideete!"

The door creaked open. It was Marshal Ivan Sergeyevich Konev. He had come overnight by staff car from Group Command Headquarters at Zossen-Wunsdorf, near Berlin. It had been a perilous nerve-wracking all-night trip on icy roads. There had been an accident.

Konev saluted, a papirosi cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

Chuykov glared with concern at Konev's disheveled, blood-caked uniform. He'd heard about the accident. He returned the salute, then the men embraced heartily.

"Ivan Sergeyevich...I thought you had been injured...I heard about the accident. The others--"

"--injuries only...a broken arm, a strained shoulder. The driver was the worst. Lieutenant Vasiliev's got multiple fractures, laceration, maybe a concussion. He's in surgery this morning--battalion hospital. He'll need a plate in his ankle."

Chuykov hastened to serve a cup of hot tea. Konev was grateful.

Konev sipped, winced at the scalding hot liquid, sucked at his teeth and spoke. "I brought the maps, comrade. The latest. GRU intelligence has already gone over them."

"And?"

"The Americans haven't re-deployed in numbers...yet. Their Third Army has six platoons of Pershing tanks, with infantry and artillery support, on a line of bases from Regensburg to Munich. No change in status this morning, no unusual radio traffic, no movements of consequence. As of 0600 hours this morning, anyway." Konev finished the hot tea. Chuykov pulled out a tiny metal flask of brandy and properly seasoned the next cup for his favorite commander. Konev smiled and winked back.

"Looks like Zhukov's little scheme might just work," Chuykov observed. "The snow helps. Most of the tread tracks are already re-covered this morning. We were lucky. Three platoons went into position overnight. Two more--the Sixth and the Sixteenth move tonight."

Konev sniffed. He seemed to be catching a cold. "Five platoons--sixty tanks in all--half a day's drive from the Fulda Gap."

"By tomorrow at this time, the numbers will be double that."

"Let's hope Zhukov's deception still works."

Chuykov sat down at his desk. Konev opened a locked leather satchel and pulled out the maps he had brought from Zossen. "Here are the latest NATO dispositions...American Third Army, British First Argyll Regiment, all of them. Our latest intelligence."

Both marshals studied the map for a few moments, making imaginary countermoves to hypothetical NATO deployments. The map was soon covered with pencil marks.

At length, Chuykov looked up. "Has the 'special equipment' arrived yet, comrade?"

"The special train pulled into Schweinfurt last night. All the devices have been removed and secured."

"Any problems?"

Konev shook his head. "Our 'babies' are doing fine."

"I want a staff car made ready immediately," Chuykov decided. He summoned a sergeant and gave the order. "I want to see these 'babies' for myself."

While a car was brought around and guard elements mustered for the convoy up to Schweinfurt, Chuykov told Konev to summarize the rest of his briefing on force dispositions along the frontier.

For the past eight days, under cover of darkness and routine field exercises, aided by a succession of winter storm fronts across Central Europe, the Group of Soviet Forces Germany had managed to re-deploy four tank and two motorized rifle divisions to forward positions along the inter-German frontier. The forward bases were crude but well-concealed revetments in forests and ran in a line from Schwerin in the north, along a bend in the Elbe River, to Ohrdruf in the Thuringian forest of the south. By 2400 hours tomorrow, the 12th of January, the division would be supplied for full combat and locked down on full readiness for a quick strike across the Fulda Gap, driving a deadly armored dagger into the very heart of that bastard creation of the West known as West Germany.

The plan, known as Operation Magadan, was to roll forward at least to the Rhine River in a lightning strike, seizing all of Germany for the Communists. There was no intention, under the basic plan of Magadan, to go any further. However, Chuykov well knew, that Magadan was only the ground component of a larger campaign. Even as Konev's T-34s were belching their way across the German countryside, Soviet Tu-4 bombers of the Dal'naya Aviatsiya (Long-Range Aviation) Second Air Army would be making strikes with Mark I 'Belka' atomic bombs on U.S. Air Force and British RAF bases in the United Kingdom. Certain French bases would also be hit.

Neither man had any illusions about the impact Magadan would have on the future of Europe. Or on their own futures, for that matter. Both men knew full well that such strikes, if carried out, would almost certainly inaugurate World War III. Stalin had ordered the plan to be prepared and men and equipment readied, just in case the situation in the Far East got out of hand.

As they climbed into the Zhiguli staff car, Chuykov told Konev there was a rumor going around the Red Army command in Germany. "A very disturbing rumor, comrade."

Konev bundled up against the cold wet wind. The car heater was struggling. "A rumor...don't tell me. Zhukov's a fag?"

"Worse. Josef Vissarionovich has uncovered a plot by the Americans. A plot to use atomic bombs against our Korean comrades. Maybe China and Russia too."

"Dezinformatsiya. It has to be. No one would be so stupid."

"Or desperate. Rumor says Stalin's secretly hoping the Americans succeed. Even though it would mean general war."

"What is he--insane?"

"Stalin is Stalin. Insane...crafty as a wolf, who can tell? Look at the possibilities though. Atom bombs start falling on China. The Americans are pre-occupied in the Far East. The Sovetskaya Soyuz uses the occasion to correct some 'historic mistakes' concerning borders here in central Europe. Why not use our glorious Red Army while it's in position? Finish what could not be finished in May 1945? Reunify all of Germany under our control. It would be a bold move."

"Risky too."

"It would surely change the correlation of forces in Europe, perhaps the world."

"If we survive at all."

The journey north to Schweinfurt base took a long two hours, over icy roads in swirling snow. Twenty-five miles southeast of Berlin, the Red Army base was a Rear Services supply depot, crammed with acres of T-34 tanks, tube artillery, armored cars and uncounted thousands of crates and pallets of ammunition and infantry weapons. From Schweinfurt, no less than six divisions drew their combat stocks. Central Issue was a cavernous former Luftwaffe hangar with cement patches covering shell holes and a drafty breeze inside.

Behind Central Issue at the very end of a long row of Tu-4 bombers lined up wing tip to wing tip along the runway, a smaller hangar was surrounded by several platoons of infantry and concentric rings of wire fencing. At each corner of the fence, muzzles trained outward, were a pair of T-34 tanks, engines belching black diesel smoke into the snowy air.

The convoy entered this compound and pulled up to the massive hangar doors on the ramp side of the building. Chuykov and Konev went inside.

An inner wooden barricade, drawn into a rectangular corral, surrounded ten huge metal dollies spaced around the enclosure. A tarpaulin shroud had been hung from wooden poles around each dolly, as though an emergency operation were being performed on each patient.

"Here's our first 'baby,'" Konev said. He drew back the edge of the canvas from one dolly. Inside, under bright floodlights, the 'baby' gleamed a dull gray-black. Belka, thought Chuykov. The damn thing even has a name. Belka was a stout nickel-iron beast with cruciform wings for feet and a blunt conical cap for a nose. The cap was off, exposing thick ganglia of wires and cables.

"Meet Belka," said Konev. "Twenty-five kilotons nominal yield, implosion-type plutonium fission device. One of Kurchatov's playthings, straight from Chelyabinsk."

Chuykov ran his hand lightly over the machined alloy surface of the bomb. Eight feet long, six feet in diameter, shaped like a stubby, snub-nosed cylinder, Belka tipped the scales at nearly nine thousand pounds. The surface felt cool to the touch.

"What's that opening for?" Chuykov indicated a conical cavity at the widest part of the cylinder.

"The Americans call it the 'physics package.' It's for a plug of plutonium. Inserted into that cavity, the plug gives Belka enough mass to go critical, or nearly so. When that's inserted, she needs only a kick from those detonators--" Konev fingered one of the wires--" and she develops a very nasty bite."

"I'm sure of that, comrade." Chuykov had the impression from the exposed wiring and openings in the bomb casing that major surgery was being performed. "Is everything proper here? How long to make her flight ready?"

"With your order to begin final preparations, we can insert the core plug, close the casing up and secure the wiring, and load Belka and her sisters in forty hours, maybe less."

Chuykov tried to mentally grasp the immense destructive power of the thing. He gave up trying. Stalin and Zhukov had already vested him with the authority to begin preparations. The bombs could be made ready and even be hoisted from their below-ground loading pits into the belly of the bombers and made fast. However, the Tu-4s could not be launched on Chuykov's authority. Only a direct wire from Stalin himself, properly verified, could release the aircraft to their missions.

It's just as well, Chuykov thought. No sane man could live with the responsibility.

Chuykov watched a pair of electricians gently thread a bundle of wire through a conduit welded to the outer surface of the casing. For the detonation timing circuit, comrade Marshal, they explained.

He shuddered involuntarily. Infernal things, these massive bombs. Not fit for proper soldiering.

But he had his orders. Zhukov had been clear. Chuykov quietly gave the command to begin final preparations.

Thursday, 1-11-51

Washington, D.C.

Noon

Harry Truman was grim and frustrated. His secretary Rose Conway could see that much by the way the President chewed on his roast beef sandwich, like a lion with freshly caught meat after a bad day on the prowl. Conway finished serving lunch and drinks to the rest of the Blair House gathering and quietly slipped out of the stuffy, sweltering kitchen.

She had the impression that given half a chance, the President might eat one of his advisors for desert.

Marshal was there, pointer in hand, as he recited a litany of bad news from the front. Collins, Army Chief of Staff, Vandenberg from the Air Force, the Navy's Sherman and Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had also been summoned to the kitchen briefing room on the first floor of Blair House.

Marshal had the room draped with maps--the table, the Formica counter, the walls...charts and maps from every combat sector. He had spent the last fifteen minutes telling the President one thing: the UN situation in Korea was no longer desperate. It was critical.

"--in the west, Mr. President, the Brits are holding on by their fingernails. Twenty-ninth Brigade is clinging to a thin bridgehead here--" Marshal tapped a map on the table with his pointer. "--at Pyongtaek. Without reinforcements, they'll break in two days, maybe less."

"Lightning Joe" Collins cut in. "The middle of Phase Line D is sagging south badly, sir."

Truman chewed on his roast beef. "The South Koreans?"

"Yes, sir. The ROKs just can't hold, sir. The enemy pushes hardest there...they know the ROKs are the weakest point in any line. It's only a matter of time, maybe hours."

Marshal went on. "Ansong to Wonju...that's our soft underbelly. If it snaps, the Chinese will be through in no time. If they follow their usual tactics, they'll turn and try to cut off our 23rd and 2nd Infantry on the Chungju Road. We could lose thousands of men."

Truman had stopped chewing, though his mouth was still full of roast beef. He didn't even swallow. "What kind of strength does the enemy have up here, between Line D and Seoul?"

Marshal ticked off the known units, now engaging or pouring south out of the Han River valley. "Peoples Liberation Army 50th, North Korean 1st, PLA 39th here in the west. Probably fifty thousand men. In the center, another forty to fifty thousand...that's the PLA 38th and 60th. We think the 40th is being held in reserve up here around Yon'chon. The North Koreans have two full corps themselves, reconstituted units, in the east: the 5th and the 2nd. All in all, we're facing a front comprising at least one hundred and fifty thousand men."

"Ridgeway's Second Infantry's holding now around Wonju but it's dicey," Collins told the President. "The enemy's infiltrated these hills to the north. They're sending human wave assaults into the city...Ridgeway's boys mow 'em down until their guns jam...or melt from overuse. But they just keep coming. And the weather stinks. We haven't been able to get any air support into the area."

Truman finally swallowed his roast beef. It stuck in his throat and he started to cough. A little iced tea helped.

"Then the question is: can Ridgeway hold at Wonju?" Truman looked around the room. All eyes stayed on the map, where Truman's finger had tapped Wonju. Nobody disagreed with the assessment. Nobody said anything.

It was apparent to Truman that the situation was increasingly desperate for the UN forces in Korea. The Reds had re-taken Seoul for the second time in six months and were steadily pushing the Allies south again.

"Ridgeway's trying to implement changes since he took over for Walker," Marshall explained. "Eighth Army's still shell-shocked from the beating the Reds gave them up north. It may be too late."

Truman glanced up sharply when Marshall said that. "George, nobody talks like that around this kitchen."

"Mr. President, we'd better get Pusan ready," Collins advised. "Just in case that becomes our bridgehead again. We may have to evacuate."

Truman's mouth tightened. "No, Joe. That won't be necessary. Three weeks ago, I issued orders for a state of national emergency. We're still calling up reserves. We just have to hold on a while longer and the tide will turn."

The men debated strategy for a few minutes. More sandwiches, tea and coffee were served. Bess's apple pie didn't have any takers. Bradley drew a diagram of a typical Chinese double-envelopment assault on the film of frost on a kitchen window.

Truman felt the meeting slipping away from him. One by one, he circled the kitchen, slapping backs, squeezing arms, getting general, if reluctant, consensus. It was vital the leadership show cohesion, now and in the coming weeks.

"Gentlemen, the way I see it is this: this war is probably not winnable without widening it to include China and possibly Russia. And we're not going to do that. I want everyone here to be clear about that." Truman glared at the assembled brass. There was no dissent. "This is not the time and Korea is not the place to start World War III. General Bradley, you made a statement last November that sums up this strategy very nicely. Would you repeat it now, please?"

Omar Bradley, the soldier's general, wet his lips. "Yes, sir. 'Fighting China is the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy.'"

"Are there any questions about what the policy of the United States is on this matter?" Truman's eyes blazed behind thick glasses. He sipped more iced tea. Drops of perspiration from the steam heat rolled from his forehead. "Very well, let's look at our alternatives."

Marshal interjected some fresh intel he had just received from Europe. "SACEUR's been monitoring Soviet military radio traffic in East Germany the last few days. It appears that the Soviets are re-deploying several tank divisions to forward bases...we're checking exactly which units, what strength, what level of readiness."

"An exercise?" the President asked.

"We're not sure what they're up to," the SecDef said. "It may just be precautionary. Of course, Stalin knows all about Gallant Flag. It's conceivable he may make a move in Germany or central Europe if the plot isn't stopped."

"Or take advantage of the situation," Bradley noted.

Vandenberg and Collins both asked the President to reconsider his statement on introducing atomic weapons into Korea.

"We don't have to actually do it," Vandenberg was explaining. "Just threaten it and make the Reds think we'll use them."

But Truman shook his head, dead set against the idea. "If we threaten atomic warfare in Korea, Stalin will threaten in Europe. Then we'll be fighting in two theaters again. Men, we just finished doing that five years ago. The whole country, hell, the whole world isn't ready for world war again."

Truman decided to change the subject. He'd already been cornered by a newspaper reporter into saying too much about atom bombs and Korea. That wasn't going to happen again. He decided to ask about the status of the Gallant Flag investigation instead.

"I'm seriously thinking about calling off Greenhouse. I don't know what Stalin's up to, what he's thinking. I don't want to run the risk of even having any atomic devices in that part of the world."

Collins had just scanned the task force reports from the FBI before coming over to Blair House. "Mr. President, all the Greenhouse devices are safely at the Pacific Proving Ground. Under very tight security and all accounted for."

"I sure hope your investigators can close out this case pretty soon," Truman said. "Otherwise, I'm pulling the plug on Greenhouse."

Collins reported the recent discoveries made by Major Kitchens and the CID team in Japan. "A well-known Japanese tycoon seems to be involved." He described the reports on the Kobe warehouse and the possibility of a Formosa connection.

That made Truman shudder. "We've got to do everything we can to keep Chiang and the Nationalist Chinese out of Korea," the President warned. His face darkened. "I'm sure I see the hand of Mr. Brass Hat, Prima Donna MacArthur everywhere in this matter."

Marshal took the moment to inform the President of some new developments in the case.

"Mr. President, in addition to the limited Russian cooperation you approved a few days ago, Major Kitchens has run across a Red Chinese agent in Japan who's also working the case. Apparently, Soviet and Chicom intelligence people talk to each other."

Truman just shook his head sadly. "I should never have agreed to let the Russians in on this case. They've already had their hands in our pockets for years. Don't these loyalty oaths mean a damn thing to anybody? China's the enemy, damn it! Russia too!"

Marshal let the President vent his frustration for a few moments. "The Chicoms seem to be running their own operation here. The agent in question is a major in the Peoples Liberation Army. Attached to the General Staff in Peking. He seems to have information relevant to the case. Stuff we don't have. Kitchens reported the contact yesterday to Joe here--" Marshal indicated General Collins. "He's asking for guidance on how far to pursue collaborating with the fellow."

Truman stared out the frost-rimmed kitchen window at the boxwood gardens and hedges behind Blair House, now dusted with new snow. His hands were jammed in his pockets. "How the hell should I know? In my book, aiding and abetting the enemy is treason. But if the enemy has information we need to crack this case, does that outweigh the risk of giving away military secrets...or losing Korea to the Communists? Gentlemen, I'm not even sure who the 'enemy' is anymore. Who's the greater enemy: the Communists trying to swallow the free world one country at a time? Or the people who want to blow up the whole shebang in one big atomic holocaust?" Truman turned back to face Collins. "Your man Kitchens...he's a good man? Reliable, thorough, resourceful and so forth?"

Collins was quick to reply. "He is, Mr. President. First-rate record in Europe with the 10th MPs. He's been involved with some pretty big espionage cases for us the last few years. You remember that Wynne fellow last year--2nd Armored Division officer who was using Army facilities to recruit for the German Communist Party? Kitchens did a lot of the legwork to bag that guy. And he was key to cracking the 'Mink and Mutton' affair. That was back in '48--extortion racket going on inside Seventh Army Group to siphon off military supplies and sell 'em dear to the Germans. Kitchens received a promotion for that one. Plus he got command of the 10th MP's CID section and a letter of commendation from the German Bundespolizei. Yes sir," Collins concluded, "I'd say Major Kitchens is the right man for this job."

"I'm a believer in letting my field commanders do their jobs without a lot of interference," Truman told them. "I always hated some big shot breathing down my neck." The President sat down at the kitchen table, toyed with the last butter roll on his plate, then steepled his fingers. Reluctantly, he approved the new arrangement... Kitchens working the case with a Soviet spy and a Red Chinese intelligence officer. He shook his head again.

"Gentlemen, it's a hell of a world when we have to cooperate with our enemies to keep our own people from destroying the world. I should just can MacArthur and be done with it."

It was General Marshal who observed tartly, "With all due respects, sir, without more evidence, such a move would probably result in you being impeached."

Truman was glum again. "I know that. Now I know how a fly feels when he's caught in a spider's web. Anything I do only makes things worse."

Thursday, 1-11-51

Anjiin, Manchuria, Peoples Republic of China

Midnight

Ray Skiles knew for an absolute fact that he had never been so damn freezing cold in his entire life. The end of the tunnel was cramped, dark, lit only with a guttering candle and dismally dank. Snowmelt was dribbling down seams in the rock walls. The stench of fear and sweat was thick in the smoke and dust of the tiny space.

Now, they were chopping and hacking their way up, up toward the frozen surface. Just a few more feet, hopefully, well outside the outer perimeter fence of the camp and they would finally breach the ground and be on their way. Freedom and a warm bed, a meal of hot stew and a scalding hot shower, anything hot...that's all Skiles could think of as he pawed and hacked and sawed with the piece of wooden bedframe he'd been using to dig the last few hours.

Hot and a million miles away from this godforsaken rathole of a place. That's all he could think about.

The night guard detail at the Anjiin Prisoner and Corrective Labor Camp Number Seven was bored, sleepy and listless, huddled around a tiny kerosene lamp in the tower that gave only a meager output of warmth. Gusting winds drove snow sideways through the beams of the searchlights, rocking the tower back and forth. It was bitterly cold, inhumanly subzero cold outside and snowing hard.

The two guards hunkered down in their quilted parkas like hibernating bears and paid no attention to the stretch of fence that was their patrol sector. They had only one interest: staying as warm as possible in the midst of a blizzard that had come roaring out of the Siberian tundra that afternoon.

Which was just as well, for not fifty yards away, outside the barbed wire fence on the camp side of a grove of bushes, something was pushing up through the frozen ground and snow. Only the howling wind masked the sound of the ground being broken.

One by one, five men, including Skiles, Luke Noland, a limping Stan Benecky, and two others wriggled up through the hole they had made, dragging themselves off through knee-high snowdrifts into a thicket of wiry underbrush. It was Ray Skiles who squinted through the swirling snow, trying to get his bearings. With a growing sense of unease, he realized the tunnel had stopped ten feet short of their intended destination.

Another screw-up by that friggin' doggie Noland. Skiles clenched his teeth to keep from slugging the Army sergeant still burrowing through the snow toward cover. It had been Noland's bright idea to jog the tunnel left to avoid going under the guard tower in the first place. Now, the damned doggie had brought them up on the wrong side--the fence side, for crying out loud--of the bushes.

By some miracle, the guards seemed not to have noticed them.

The men shivered in their rags as ice-flecked winds blasted across the hilltop on which sat Camp Seven. Noland and Skiles snapped off several limbs of the nearest shrub and quickly swished them across the tracks they had made in the snow. With fresh snow falling fast, any evidence of the tunnel opening and their escape would soon be covered.

Skiles gestured to Noland angrily about where he'd brought them up. Noland just shrugged, as if to say so sue me, you asshole jarhead. We're outside, aren't we?

For the moment at least, the guards seemed unaware of the escape. Somehow, they had made it. But Skiles was wary. Benecky had killed Betters ten days ago when they had learned the corporal was double-crossing Charlie Barracks, working for the 'Mayor' Liu Si-lingh as a stool pigeon. Skiles was sure Liu knew all about the tunnel; he had to know. Probably their general plans too. Christ, Betters had been in on every discussion. Now the question was: where the hell were the guards?

Noland was impatient. He cupped a hand to Skiles' ear to keep his voice from carrying. "We can't wait around here, jerk! Let's get going!"

Skiles was still cautious. "It's a trap! I can smell it. Liu has to know what we're up to!"

"So what the hell? Are we just going to sit here like clay pigeons? Move, man!"

Skiles figured he was right. No sense wondering. They were outside the fence, after a month of digging, free after two months of starvation and beatings, dysentery and fever, delirium and death. Every muscle screamed GO! Skiles squinted through the driving snow again. It was a black, windy, arctic nightmare of a night in lower Manchuria. Only animals would be out in weather like this. Animals and desperate men.

Scram! He mouthed to Noland. Which way? Does it really matter?...Skiles gestured off, away, anywhere, GO, MAN...GET THE LEAD OUT! MAKE TRACKS, YOU SLIMEBALL PRICK!!

Hunkered down against the driving snow, armed with a few makeshift knives and stakes, the group scrambled deeper into the bush. The bush thickened to a stand of wiry trees, branches low with snowfall. Footing was treacherous...fallen limbs, icy patches of leaves, holes, ropy tangles of frozen undergrowth.

They had stumbled through the dark blindly for about ten minutes, tending downhill, off the top of the hill, Skiles realized, when suddenly, brilliant lights stabbed the darkness. The men dropped to the ground and were dead still.

Then, the sound of dogs barking drifted through the trees. Only yards away! Seconds later, shouts, curses, more shouts, more barking.

"Jan tu! Jan tu!"

A pair of dogs burst down into the gully where the prisoners had dropped and barked and whined excitedly. Lights slashed through the snow--flashlight beams bouncing around crazily--seeking targets. One beam caught them...then another...until the lights fused into blinding beams crisscrossing the gully. Rifle bolts clicked, rounds were chambered as heavy feet whuffed through the snow.

Men burst into the clearing...a lot of men, sliding down the gully slope. They were quickly surrounded, cut off, several platoons of Chicom soldiers peering in at them, weapons trained.

Caught again!

The standoff lasted about thirty seconds. To the Chicoms' surprise, the Americans refused to surrender. Desperation steeled them. Skiles set his jaw, tightened his grip on the wooden stake he had whetted down to a fine edge over the last two weeks, and charged out at the nearest soldiers. The rest of the men didn't hesitate to follow.

Momentarily astonished, the Chicoms were at first slow to react but they quickly recovered. Even as Skiles fell upon a chubby rifleman straddling a fallen log, burp guns chattered and deadly fire raked the gully.

Shouts, slashing knives, fists and 7.62-mm rounds filled the clearing. Bodies careened everywhere as the scuffle kicked up snow and dead limbs and icy dirt. In the ensuing melee, some Chicoms accidentally shot their own men. Blood stained the snowfall in hissing bubbles of red.

Skiles had grappled with his first opponent and the two had wrestled each other to the ground. After a few seconds' struggle, the Chicom had gone still, dead of several rounds taken in the back, a victim of wild, undisciplined gunfire. Skiles wriggled his way free and spotted one-legged Benecky limping and clawing his way up the gully slope against a collapsing snowbank.

The two of them took advantage of the confusion and shouts and staccato bursts of burp gun fire and driving snow and thrashing brush to hit the ground. Skiles helped Benecky to the top of the slope. They kicked into some undergrowth and slithered out of sight.

Even before they realized it, they had slithered and crawled and stumbled a hundred yards away. Incredibly, no one seemed to be following them. They stopped for a moment, hearing more bursts from the Chicoms, and caught their breath, heaving and wheezing out clouds of steam as they both swallowed snow and buried themselves in the drift.

Still, no one came.

Emboldened, Skiles hoisted Benecky up and wrapped the corporal's arms around his own waist. They hobbled on and soon found a narrow icy trail leading down the hill, through more brush. Tree limbs tinkled with ice crystals as the wind kicked up again.

Through the bare limbs of the trees, they saw some lights. It was the outskirts of the town of Anjiin. The men stumbled and staggered, freezing and numb, toward the lights.

Through the snow, they homed on a particularly warm glow of yellow and found their way to a small mud hut, it's thatch roof groaning low with the night's snow. The light had been a candle in the near window, masked by cloth.

The two Marines burst into the hut through a cobbled door of mismatched wood pieces and fell into a hanging line of oily rags and more cloth, a crude sort of clothesline and partition.

A terrified family of Manchu peasants cowered in a dark corner, around a dingy gray kettle, hissing steam. A wrinkled old mama-san in a dingy quilted jacket and tattered leggings huddled with two small girls. A sneering boy, a teen-ager, glared back at the Marines with barely disguised hatred.

A low fire guttered in a pit ringed with blackened stones in the dirt floor of the hut. An iron pot had been propped on top of the stones. Inside, steam clouds of potato and garlic aroma swirled. An iron rod had one end in the flames; the opposite end was draped with rags tied on by twine.

Skiles moved first. Quickly, he lunged for the iron rod poker, red hot from the fire, and brandished it as a weapon.

"Stay back, pigs! Just stay back there!" He slashed the poker through the air and ashes fluttered in its wake. The mama-san cringed, buried her girls' heads in the folds of her jacket. "Benecky...get the fuck in here! Shut that door, will you?"

Benecky limped in and collapsed by the firepit. The meager heat flushed his face red; it felt good.

Wielding his new-found weapon, Skiles rummaged around the hut, overturning baskets and boxes. After a few minutes' of threats and hand gestures, the Americans got what they wanted: some jackets and wraps, half a loaf of coarse black bread, a bowl of cold riceballs, a few rock-hard potatoes and garlic bulbs. These Benecky wrapped in more rags, fashioning a sort of knapsack to carry the vegetables. While Skiles was filling up a few tins with water and snow, Benecky cupped his hands and slurped up some stew from the iron pot. The stew scalded his hands and he cried tears, but he didn't stop. Soon, his face and beard were matted with dribbles of garlic and potato bits.

They decided to spend the rest of the night as guests of the Manchu peasant family, taking turns at resting.

"We'll head out in the morning, " Skiles decided. "Just before daybreak."

The two Marines spent a fitful, anxious night, sleeping in shifts, instantly alert at the slightest rustle of the mama-san or her children. After a tense first hour, Skiles motioned them over to the iron pot. The girls slurped hot stew hungrily. The boy just glowered, refusing to eat. Skiles figured him for twelve, maybe fifteen years old. This one we gotta keep our eyes on, he muttered to Benecky.

The mama-san took no stew for herself. Instead, she squatted in the corner and pecked at a riceball she dipped in the broth. She had buckteeth, badly stained, a few missing. She never took her eyes off the Marines.

They had no real idea where they were. Or where they were going. But Skiles had a plan. In the darkest corner of a very long night, while the peasant family huddled on top of each other like sleeping dogs, Skiles whispered to Benecky.

"Hey, scumbag...you awake over there?"

"Yeah? What do you want, Sarge?"

"I got an idea."

"Great...glad to hear it."

"What we're going to do, see, is work our way south by southwest, soon as we get some light. Toward the coast. See if we can't find our way to the sea and get picked up by the Navy."

Benecky was in a lot of pain; his missing foot burned like fire. He was dazed, numb, half-delirious from exhaustion.

"We ain't got no maps, Sarge. Or a compass."

Skiles poked at the firepit stones with the iron rod, stirring embers until they flared red, popped and hissed. He enjoyed making the boy twitch and jump with each little crackle. "So what? We got the sun, don't we? And I aced Land Navigation at Pendleton. We'll just go along like old-timey explorers."

"Yeah, friggin' Lewis and Clark...that's us. It'd be better if we went at night."

"But not tonight," Skiles said firmly.

"No. Definitely not tonight...too friggin' cold. I was just getting cozy here."

"Liu will have his Indians out looking for us in the morning. He'll shit when he realizes two of his guests have flown the coop."

The Marines decided to rest a few more hours, then leave before dawn. Skiles figured they would be better off staying in the woods for the first few days. "If there are any woods in this goddamned frozen tundra hellhole." Both men knew the cold and the elements would make surviving difficult.

"I'd rather take my chances out there and die free than rot like a maggot back in that camp," Benecky muttered. With that, he bedded down again in a clump of greasy rags for a few more hours sleep.

As Benecky nodded off again, the terrified mama-san and her children cowering in the shadowy corner of the hut, Skiles looked around for something they could take along, something that could be used as shelter in the open.

He spied some heavy bedding he hadn't seen before, and some canvas window strips and wall coverings. Canvas was good tenting material. The germ of an idea began to take shape in his mind.
CHAPTER 20

Friday, January 12, 1951

Tokyo

8:00 a.m.

Major Lyle Kitchens had decided this was to be the morning he would pay a little visit to Masuhiro Tetsuko at Omisumi's headquarters in Shinjuku, a few miles west of the Imperial Palace grounds. Tetsuko's office was a top-floor suite of a five-story mustard-yellow brick building, overlooking a district of construction cranes and bulldozers, another part of Tokyo gradually rebuilding itself from wartime rubble.

It was early morning and Kitchens came calling on the pretext of a routine inspection of business records, posing as an administrative official with SCAP's Government Section.

Tetsuko turned out to be a short, rotund, almost cherubic soul, chain-smoking Pall Malls while he squeezed crumpled balls of paper in one hand. He had powerful shoulders and arms and a suspicious squint to his eyes.

The industrialist greeted Kitchens perfunctorily, after examining Kitchens Army ID folder. He was not a typically deferential Japanese man. His handshake and eye contact were as direct as an American's, a product, so said Bret Billings, of having bribed every American official he could get his hands on, this side of Pearl Harbor.

"Please to come in, Major...." Tetsuko offered Kitchens a seat by a credenza. A traditional Japanese kyusu or teapot steamed on a cherrywood cart nearby, the aroma of hot green tea filling the air. As Kitchens sat, Tetsuko served him a tiny cup, then served himself and sat in a chair beside the credenza. He studied the Army major through a wreath of steam. "Most unusual that the Government section would send Army man to inspect my files. That's not a job for a warrior. This is usually done by a civilian."

Kitchens had heard an earful about Tetsuko already. "We're fresh out of civilians at the moment. Guess I'm the lucky man."

"You have not been in Japan very long." It was a statement, rather than a question. An enigmatic smile creased his face.

"Only a few weeks," Kitchens figured it was better to start with the truth. He had a strong suspicion the Japanese industrialist could see right through him. "My orders are to do a routine inspection...same as always. Monthly statements, supplier lists, bills of shipping, major customer files, inventories, that sort of thing."

Tetsuko regarded the major warily. "My files are always open for your inspection, Major Kitchens-san. Omisumi wishes only to operate as an honest business. We have excellent relations with the Army."

"I'm sure you do. Shall we get started?"

Tetsuko was used to the directness of Americans. It was a trait he admired, unlike most of his countrymen. "Please, I will assist..." He showed Kitchens to a row of file cabinets beside the windows. Through half-open blinds, a pall of construction dust was already thick across Shinjuku, dust and smoke from thousands of wood-burning fires. It was a chilly, frosty morning in the Japanese capital and a rime of ice had coated the window edges.

Kitchens drew out a handful of folders, spreading the pages out on a table before the credenza. He examined records for awhile, not really looking at the pages, but observing Tetsuko's mannerisms and nervous fidgeting out of the corner of his eye. The industrialist hovered nearby, always ready to answer any question. He crinkled and uncrinkled a wad of paper in his right fist, swallowing audibly as Kitchens flipped page after page.

What the hell's eating this guy? Kitchens watched Tetsuko light one cigarette after another, chain-smoking his way through half a pack in no time. When Kitchens looked up, Tetsuko smiled apologetically. "American cigarettes," he shrugged. "I have a certain weakness for these--"

Kitchens nodded. "Not as dangerous as an atom bomb, pal, but they'll kill you all the same."

"Perhaps, for my health, I should cut back. Since the Occupation, Americans have brought us many new vices and temptations. These--the Coney Island dog, the jitterbug--"

Kitchens knew what Tetsuko was trying to do. He went on flipping pages. "You know, riding in a submarine can be just about as bad for your health. Especially, old submarines."

Tetsuko's nervous fidgeting suddenly stopped. He froze still. "You are not an investigator from SCAP, are you, Major Kitchens?"

The major looked up, caught Tetsuko sizing him up like a slice of sashimi come to life. "U.S. Army, Criminal Investigation Division."

"Am I under arrest?"

"Should you be?" Kitchens went back to his folder, flipping idly. "Not yet, I suppose. I'm just here to check out certain irregularities in Army contracts with local companies. Fraud, bribery, the usual stuff."

Tetsuko was instantly alert. He wondered just how much Kitchens knew. The major answered that question quickly enough.

"Major Kitchens-san, I have only the most proper relations with the inspectors at the Dai Ichi. You must know this."

"I'm sure you do. That's why you've been so successful, browbeating and intimidating your competitors."

Tetsuko reddened. He got up, paced to the windows and stared out, hands clasped behind his back. "Omisumi is an honorable company. We employ many people. They work hard and we make competitive products. The Army uses our products because we build good quality products. Our radios and clocks are the most popular in Japan...your own Dr. Deming has shown us how to do this. Omisumi is like a family. Our employees are brothers and sisters to each other." Tetsuko abruptly turned around. His eyes were slits. "Omisumi has correct relations with the Army. Always. Correct and perfectly normal."

"Sure. But perfectly normal doesn't mean it's legal. Look, there's no sense in pussying around about this. I want you to agree to be formally deposed in a hearing downtown, under oath. You've got a rap sheet a mile long with SCAP already. You're going to go under oath, my friend, and answer all the charges about improper use of influence with your cronies inside the Dai Ichi. I don't know who's sucking Omisumi tit or who's sleeping with who there. And I don't care. Mr. Tetsuko, you're going to answer charges under oath or the Army will shut down Omisumi for good."

It was plain that Tetsuko didn't scare easily. He glared coldly at the Army major. A stone face confronted Kitchens--the big shikirinaoshi, Billings had called it, like the sumo wrestlers used to stare each other down. Kitchens glared back.

Tetsuko gave in first. "Major Kitchens-san, perhaps you are unaware that Omisumi has an excellent reputation within the Dai Ichi. We have friends, as you say, in high places."

Usually, a Japanese businessman was a little more subtle in arm-twisting. Tetsuko had learned well from his American friends. Too well. Kitchens decided to drop his biggest bombshell.

"What's going on down in Kobe, Tetsuko-san? I've just come from an Omisumi warehouse, near the waterfront. Must be some important stuff coming in, to judge from all the work going on. Not to mention your guards trying to put about two dozen bullet holes in my chest."

Tetsuko was smooth. "Ah, so desu ka, Major Kitchens-san. I'm glad you appreciate our newest investment. This warehouse is my pride. We're using it to store imported goods for transshipment to other places."

"What kind of imported goods?"

Tetsuko shrugged slightly, lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply, blowing smoke from his nostrils. "Mostly machine parts. Tractor engines. That sort of thing."

"Atom bombs too?"

Tetsuko turned visibly pale. He stammered a bit, but recovered quickly enough. "You are a professional skeptic, Major. Please--" he swept his hands toward the file cabinets, "--check our shipping records thoroughly."

"That won't be necessary. You and I both know records can be altered. I've got better evidence than that. I made a little trip to Kobe just two days ago. Did a little snooping on my own." Kitchens ticked off evidence on his fingertips. "Let's see...there were the shelves full of Geiger counters, and other radiation monitoring gear. Then there were the cranes and dollies, oh and the special gauge tracks. Handling something heavy, eh Tetsuko? Tractor engines, my ass. And the shielded room...lined with lead sheet, no less. Nice. How hard was that to obtain? I checked with SCAP Economics Section...General Marquat's shop. It turns out that lead is on the list of controlled materials, allocated strictly by industry. Looks like you've pretty well cornered the market and shipped the whole year's output to Kobe. How come? Those tractor engines kind of hot?" Kitchens stood up, jammed his hands in his pockets, strolled over to the open file cabinets. "Or are we just installing equipment needed to handle something else, something like an atom bomb or two?"

Tetsuko said nothing. He glared at the Army investigator. Kitchens prowled the office like a dog picking up a scent, overturning papers on the desk, peeking behind books on a bookshelf, rifling through more files, even examining the bonsai pots in a glass etagere in the corner. How do you like being sniffed in your own territory, pal? Kitchens could feel cold daggers of hate tickling his backside as he slid around the office.

Tetsuko was smart, though. Kitchens gave him credit for that. He said nothing, just glared and hated, following every move the major made. Like two dogs stalking each other. Kitchens made sure he did a casual exploratory circuit of the entire office, a leisurely circuit. He left nothing untouched or unexamined. The Japanese industrialist smoldered with barely contained anger the whole time. Kitchens figured the tycoon wasn't accustomed to dealing with an American he couldn't bribe.

Tetsuko's response, or lack of one, had told Kitchens a great deal. But his responses and files still produced little hard evidence, certainly not the kind of evidence the CID officer needed to bring charges, either against Tetsuko or anyone in the Army. Walking through a minefield would have been easier. Kitchens was nominally attached and assigned to Far East Command. How the hell was he supposed to investigate and prosecute the very people who served as his superior officers?

He'd heard the Red Chinese agent, Jiang Chen Li, talk of consignment papers for a cargo transfer to a ship called Orient Star, a Navy contract transport job being run by Omisumi. That was more than enough to raise a good investigator's suspicions, but he knew he needed more. He needed hard physical evidence that the diverted bombs would come to Kobe--a written memo, a letter of agreement, anything. All he had now was circumstantial evidence, a lot of it provided by Tetsuko's staff assistant, Hiro Osawa, whom nobody had seen for awhile. Though the standard of proof he needed might be somewhat less rigorous than in American civilian judicial procedure, he still needed some real proof.

Especially if he had try to take down a force of nature like General Douglas MacArthur or one of his Bataan Gang.

To get something "official" out of this visit as a contract inspector, Kitchens knew he would have to "find" something out of order in the files he had been examining. Under Occupation law, he had the authority to seize files for later examination. Kitchens went to the file cabinets and scooped up an armful of folders, stuffing them in a wastebasket, after he had dumped the contents of the basket on Tetsuko's desk.

"This will do nicely," he said. He jammed a batch of folders into the metal can. "These will be needing further examination." He smiled at Tetsuko. "Probable cause, you understand." He gathered up his field jacket and briefcase, and started to leave. He stopped at the door.

"One more thing. There's an investigation underway into the whole business of contracting with the Army. Your sworn testimony will be required...soon. For the time being, you're going to have a little company. I'm ordering a detail of Military Police to this office. As of 1200 hours today, this detail will be in place right outside this door. All admittances and withdrawals of papers will be logged. If I were you, Tetsuko-san, I wouldn't try to leave Tokyo anytime soon. You'll need written permission, request submitted at least a week ahead, to the 5th Military Police Company, Far East Command, before you can leave. Is that understood?"

Tetsuko made a slight, abrupt bow, seething with anger as Kitchens left with a wastebasketful of file folders.

Heading down the stairwell, Kitchens was satisfied he had accomplished his mission. He had achieved a key aim with the visit: shaking up Tetsuko a little to see what might fall out. Now he was more convinced than ever that the industrialist was intimately involved in Gallant Flag. As he left the Omisumi building, he spotted the Army 5th MP surveillance team across the street. A black sedan, the white star prominent on the doors. Inside, two sergeants were scanning sections of Stars and Stripes.

Neither side gave any indication of noticing the other but Kitchens was satisfied to see they were already in place. Tetsuko's movements over the next few days would be closely monitored and logged.

As Kitchens climbed into his own Ford staff car, he was certain of one thing: Tetsuko's involved. A little more squeezing, a little more pressure, and he just might help us blow the top off this whole thing.

Friday, 1-12-51

The Marshall Islands--Pacific Proving Grounds

6:45 a.m.

Dog Day had dawned on the western Marshall Islands the same as all the others: hot, sweltering, eerily calm. The first shot of Operation Greenhouse, known in the sequence as Dog, was in the final minutes of its countdown. Albert Ranier, Edvard Tolkach, General Clayton LaSalle and hundreds of others were aboard the command ship, the Curtiss, keeping station in the exact center of grid square Nebraska Charlie fifteen miles from ground zero, stenciled on the maps as Runit Island, 'Yvonne' to the team, where atop a three hundred foot steel tower, the 80-kiloton device known as Dog sat waiting for the detonation signal.

Only minutes before, the firing team, composed of technicians from Los Alamos J Division, had closed out the site and boarded the LST at Yvonne's black coral beach. When the team leader, a bearded physicist named Cantrell had radioed the Curtiss that the team was clear, the Commanding Officer, Joint Task Force Three had ordered the twin yellow and red stripe 'Safety' pennants flown on the ship's masts. Throughout the safety zone, ships lay at anchor, poised to maneuver out of harm's way if the radiation levels shifted on the wind. Scientists made final adjustments on television, movie and still cameras.

On the fantail of the Curtiss, Albert Ranier chain-smoked nervously, watching as the last of the LSTs circled for its approach to the assault carrier Juno, ten thousand yards to stern of the command ship. Ranier was nervous knowing that after the shot, his real job would begin. Already, he had spent the last few nights doctoring some of the measurements he had made of the R-T devices, measurements to 'prove' the devices would not yield as expected. It was a safe bet there would be a lot of anger and criticism at the science briefings the next few days, when he made these measurements public. The R-T devices were his babies and he had pushed hard to have them included in Greenhouse. Now he would have to 'prove' and 'admit' that all his calculations were wrong. He had stepped on enough egos in Washington to last a lifetime. Now, his enemies would have their day.

He was sure the wild animals would make the briefings into a feeding frenzy when it was all over. But it was a necessary sacrifice. Albert Ranier was resigned to the inevitable pillorying he knew was coming. Three decades in atomic physics had taught him one eternal truth: reputations were just about as ephemeral as atoms themselves. Just as sufficient force could transmute any element into another, so it was with reputations in the world of physics. Everything had a half-life.

More important that the menace of Red communism be stopped. A few atom bombs would do very nicely for that.

Clayton LaSalle had been watching Ranier smoke and fidget as the final minutes ticked down. The announcer's voice over the public address system of the Curtiss intoned "One minute to D-hour, one minute to go," as LaSalle slid along the fantail railing and put a comforting hand on the Czech physicist's arm.

"Relax, will you? It's going fine."

Ranier jumped at LaSalle's touch. "I was just thinking of the briefing tomorrow. It's not going to be pretty."

LaSalle was already fiddling with his dark goggles. "Giving birth isn't pretty. It's necessary to spill some blood. We do this thing right and our grandchildren will be thanking us for generations to come."

"I know. Still, I feel like I'm going into the lion's den tomorrow. I've known some of these scientists for years, known them like brothers. They believe in truth. Truth and facts. What I'm giving them isn't either."

"Maybe not--" LaSalle said, but was interrupted by the announcer's theatrical voice.

"Thirty seconds to D-hour. Adjust your goggles, all personnel...adjust your goggles now...."

"--but there is a higher truth. What your giving them is even more precious that scientific truth. You're giving them freedom. They may ridicule and denounce you tomorrow. Later, when the mission is done and the enemy's stopped, they'll think differently."

From somewhere behind them, a scratchy phonograph recording hissed through the still morning air. It was a tinny rendition of "You Are My Sunshine." Eight thousand miles away, NBC Radio in New York had already interrupted its Thursday evening programming, the last movement of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, to bring its listeners a special announcement:

"Ladies and gentlemen, we're just seconds away from the first atomic bomb detonation of Operation Greenhouse, known as Dog shot. Our reporter on the command ship Curtiss, Jim Utley, is standing by now, barely fifteen miles away from the shot tower, on a small island known as Yvonne...."

Amidships, a small platoon of news correspondents paced like expectant fathers, as the ship's announcer counted down the final seconds....

"Five...four...three...two...one--"

Jim Utley, along with hundreds of others, fixed his darkened goggles into position, and muttered into his microphone:

"--attention, world! This is Greenhouse!--"

"...zero..."

The only sound at first was the hiss of waves breaking over the bow of the Curtiss. Fifteen miles away, at the top of the shot tower on a coral atoll island known to the natives as Runit, a standard Mark VI strategic device known as Dog initiated a complex sequence of atomic events. Dog was a stockpile weapon, drawn from inventory, with a How Double Prime composite uranium-plutonium core. Essentially an improved version of the Fat Man device that had leveled Nagasaki five and half years before, Dog was 60 inches in diameter, 128 inches in length and weighed 8500 pounds. The device had a 60-point implosion system for greater core compression and higher efficiency.

The expected yield was in excess of seventy kilotons.

Detonation occurred exactly as planned when the Curtiss radioed a 440-cycle signal to the receivers in the shot cab.

Instantly, the sunrise ground burst flashed a bubble of light on the horizon, lighting up the western Pacific for hundreds of miles around. The main explosion followed split seconds later, still without sound, as the force of the detonation thrust a vast ball of roiling flame thousands of feet upward, like a meteor heading the wrong way. The bubble of light flared and flattened out, obliterating the sun itself for prominence on the Pacific horizon. Then, as if it had been a balloon punctured by a pin, the bubble of light exploded.

"Beautiful....just beautiful!" someone breathed behind Ranier.

"--look at that sucker go!"

A maelstrom of swirling flame boiled upward, red, purple, and white clouds erupting in slow motion from the lagoon. The clouds twisted upward, churning and coiling. From the center of the boiling mass of clouds, a column of white smoke fingered up at a faster rate, climbing to 20,000 feet in seconds, and from its top emerged the now-familiar mushroom-shaped cloud. Initially, the cloud surged up at a speed of nearly 100 miles a minute. Eventually it topped out and flattened into an anvil at a height of more than 40,000 feet. Towering over the atoll like some genie escaped from a bottle, the cloud kept boiling, growing, spreading, changing colors, like a thing alive. The mushroom head broadened further as it rose, eventually widening out to two miles before it sheered off into the upper stratosphere and floated off to the west.

Then the sounds came. From somewhere deep in the bowels of the ocean, a primal rumble vibrated the air, a low-grade buzz, deepening after a few seconds to a steady roar. Flags and pennants and jackets flapped steadily in a freshening breeze building out of the west.

The blast had annihilated only a few grams of matter, converting it into energy. The total energy released was enormous, however. In an infinitesimal fraction of time, literally one ten-millionth of a second, Dog had liberated the explosive energy of nearly 81,000 tons of TNT, 81 kilotons, a yield even greater than calculated at the pre-shot briefings two days ago. The surface temperature of the fireball was over 100,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than the surface of the sun, itself just now peeking over the eastern horizon.

"Like watching the birth of a star," muttered Ranier, adjusting his goggles, then raising them to watch the cloud bubbling skyward, now beginning to gain a noticeable tilt to the west.

"Birth and death," added LaSalle, "all in a single instant."

"Alpha and omega in a span of a few seconds," Tolkach said. "The light of a thousand suns. A light not of this earth."

The crew and scientists of the Curtiss watched the spectacle for the better part of half an hour. The task force commander, Admiral Blanchard's voice then crackled over the loudspeaker.

"Well done, men. Well done. A super start to Greenhouse. All hands, thanks for your efforts. The smoking lamp is now lit. All hands lay below to the crew's mess by departments for the start of the celebrations."

The crew's mess was belowdecks, B Deck by the Navy's way of reckoning directions, and Ranier and LaSalle and the rest made their way through crowded corridors and gangways to the line that had formed outside the compartment. Inside, pitchers of Seabreeze, a gin and citrus concoction that had become popular around the Islands, was dished out liberally in any container at hand. Once the line had passed the chow stand, Ranier took his cup of Seabreeze and chili bowl and found an end of a table in the back. A detail of Gunnery sailors from Curtiss' aft 5-inch turret crew gave up their seats for the scientists, eyeing LaSalle's twin stars.

In the din of the mess, the scientists talked quietly about the RT devices and the situation in Korea. LaSalle was slurping chili and stuffing garlic bread into his mouth hungrily. Ranier sipped Seabreeze.

"It's pretty grim right now," LaSalle was saying. He described the latest Red offensive, the desperate UN stand at Wonju and what the men at the front lines were saying about Ridgeway, their new commander.

"He's got balls, I'll give him that," LaSalle muttered. He washed down some bread with the potent local brew. "Maybe it's the grenades he keeps taped to his field jacket. The men like that. But we've got to get our babies on their targets as soon as possible. Otherwise, it's gonna be just like friggin' Verdun. Chicoms are already digging in, building trenches. We can't get sucked into that kind of war, trading American bodies for a few miserable yards."

Ranier was curious. "What kind of targets are we talking about?" He kept his voice low, just below the racket permeating the mess, careful to speak in generalities.

LaSalle parried the question, giving the Czech physicist a look that said not here. "There are all kinds of legitimate military targets."

"No cities," Ranier decided. He didn't want innocent civilians to die.

LaSalle flat out lied, promising, "No cities." He knew full well, after enough late-night planning sessions with Craft and his pilots that Peking itself was practically number one on the list.

That afternoon, the first tapes of measurements from airborne sensors had been brought to the Curtiss. A squadron of reconnaissance B-29s and B-26s had been orbiting around the atoll, measuring air density, radiation levels, scooping up decay products from the explosion, temperatures, carbon ratios, dozens of measurements. The first of the planes had gone on to Andersen Field at Guam and the tapes had then been loaded aboard cutters and couriered back to the task force anchorage at Nebraska Charlie several hours after the explosion.

Ranier and Tolkach were keen to have a look at the yield parameters, the radiation decay products, the atmospheric effects of the blast. They closeted themselves for hours, in Ranier's cramped lab space on C deck, allocated to the T-Division contingent that had come over from Chesapeake for the shot. The two of them spent hours reducing and graphing and massaging the data, even skipping dinner that evening.

By midnight, working together, Ranier and Tolkach had created some 'results' that showed what they wanted. The data manipulations were risky. The science briefing on Saturday would be packed with physicists who were more than qualified enough to point out any 'errors' in their calculations. Ranier was banking on his reputation to keep unnecessary inquiries to a minimum. There was a good chance the entire briefing would degenerate into a shouting match anyway. Ranier figured the more heated emotions came into play, the better. It would distract from any detailed examination of the fudging he had done, before and after the shot.

"Albert, let's get some sleep." Tolkach's hair was wet with perspiration; the fans in the lab workspace had never been adequate to keep C deck ventilated. "I'm beat."

"You go ahead. I want to re-check a few of these calculations...especially the composition ratios from Hanford. They have to hold up to scrutiny. That's where the problem has to show up, to be credible."

"You've gone over them a hundred times already. What is there to check now? We've already followed the paper trail several times, all the way from the Batch Precipitation at Hansford to the shot tower at Yvonne. It'll either fly or it won't. If you don't get some rest, you'll just be tired and irritable. It's going to be a furball tomorrow as it is. Why not be rested enough to deal with it?"

Ranier found a stool and propped it against the bulkhead, then sat on it and leaned back. Machinery vibration from somewhere behind him made the stool hum against the steel of the bulkhead.

"You think this will work tomorrow? Have I forgotten anything?"

"Only how to act like a human being. Albert, look...we both know the conference is going to be tough. The others will drag your data through the mud and vent their frustrations and generally act like the spoiled brats they are. That's a given. Focus on what has to happen to make this briefing a success, from our point of view. The R-T devices have to be removed from the shot list...that's number one. Then we have to convince Admiral Blanchard and the science board that the devices may as well be shipped back to the States, for security and handling. That's number two. If those things are done, we've given Craft and LaSalle all they need. We're done. Understand, Albert? We've completed our mission and done our job. After the briefing, the rest is up to Craft. We do these two things, and we can take off our masks and start being physicists again, and stop playing spy or saboteurs. That's what's been such a strain, on both of us. Look what it's done to you."

Ranier closed his eyes. Momentarily, he was back at Number 9 Sadovoy Lane in Prague, filing papers and filling inkwells and sharpening pencils for the proctor, Herr Professor Kurri. Ranier smiled faintly. The smell of creamed potatoes and mutton was strong in his nostrils. They always had potatoes and mutton for dinner. Truth was he missed arguing with the great man most of all. He'd even argued briefly with Einstein himself at Gottingen, after the great physicist had finished a guest lecture. Arguing and debating and hypothesizing about atoms and nuclei and decay processes and transmuting elements....it had all been a stupendous wonder for a ten-year old boy, magical dreams and futuristic machines and wonders without end. That's what he missed: the arguing and the sense of wonder and the limitless possibilities of a new age spread out before him like an unfinished canvas.

Ranier opened his eyes and let the stool rock to a thump onto the lab deck. Well, at least, the arguing part was there. He yawned and stretched.

"Edvard, you are ever the voice of reason in my life. Let's hit the bunks, as the Americans say. I probably won't sleep at all, tossing and turning, playing judge and jury in my mind all night. One last cigarette topside and I'm for bed."

"It's going to be a hell of a day tomorrow," Tolkach admitted. He followed Ranier out of the lab, as they went hunting for the right hatch to head up.

The first hour of the post-blast review and briefing was a factual recitation of observations and measurements that had been collected by sensors stationed around Eniwetok atoll itself. Some had sent their data scant fractions of a second before being vaporized in the blast itself, like the long wooden tubes capturing early-flash photons from the light bubble at the instant the detonation first escaped its nickel-steel casing.

The early review was followed by film footage of Dog shot, Rapatronic imagery taken from the observation B-29s orbiting Yvonne at altitudes ranging from 15,000 feet up to nearly 35,000 feet. The initial flash and shock wave across the lower levels of the atmosphere were clearly visible, as was the titanic wall of water raised by the blast wave. The jerkiness and shudder of the camera were visible evidence of the pressure front reflecting upward from the atoll. The lifting of the mushroom cloud was a mesmerizing image of boiling menace, a flexing fist punching up into the heavens.

"--just fantastic...."muttered someone from the back of the wardroom. There were murmurs of assent all around.

The wardroom was packed and sweltering. Fans whirred at the rear, mixed in with the chattering of the film projector. Ranier ticked off familiar names and faces: there was Bacher, the test director, assigned to Greenhouse by Lewis Strauss himself from the Atomic Energy Commission, Bacher perpetually wiping his high forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief. Tolkach and General LaSalle, observing from the Far East Command's 13th Air Force in Japan. Ranier avoided any eye contact with the general. They would be meeting soon enough, privately.

There also was Admiral Blanchard, commander of Joint Task Force Three, silver-haired and gravel-voiced. And Weisskopf and Carson Mark, physicists from Los Alamos. No friends there, Ranier noted. Mark was a Canadian physicist who had taken over leadership of T-Division from Bethe after the war.

One unknown was Horace Cheverly, the British physicist from the Cavendish Lab. Cheverly was quiet, thoughtful, said to be a confidante of Lord Rutherford himself. Ranier studied the man during the film; he found nothing to suggest enmity, only a certain cool reserve.

When the film was done, Eugene Bacher rapped on a formica counter with his coffee mug for attention.

"I want to personally thank the Air Force for the footage we just saw. Much of it was taken a close range and great personal risk by their pilots." He nodded at LaSalle. "Well done."

There was a smattering of polite applause. Bacher consulted some hand-scribbled notes.

"From all the preliminary results, it appears that Greenhouse Dog was a big success. Yield about what we expected--I believe Dr. Cheverly calculated in excess of 81 kilotons. Fallout nominal and within the safety zone, thank goodness. We had a last minute wind shift above ten thousand feet and Admiral Blanchard was concerned about the task force anchorage, especially grid squares Alabama Bravo and Idaho Echo. Fortunately, nobody got dusted. The rad people are measuring now, just to make sure."

"We were lucky," Blanchard growled, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

"In any case--" Bacher was about to launch into a description of the detonation physics when Ranier's hand went up. "Yes, Albert--"

Ranier stood, uneasily. "Could I take a bit more time for something unexpected, Dr. Bacher?"

Bacher frowned. Keeping scientists to an agenda was like trying to herd cats. "I suppose--what have you got?"

Ranier sat back down. "I've been doing some initial calculations from the decay products the Air Force weather squadron picked up, assay tests down in my lab. I've seen some rather disturbing things--"

"What kind of things?"

"Well," Ranier adjusted his glasses, studied his hand notes, "although Dog uses a somewhat different mechanism for fissioning the core, there are enough worrisome indicators here to lead me to conclude we may have a problem with the later devices. The Ranier-Tolkach devices. R-T uses a deuterium-tritium layering in the tamper, as you know, to react the core plutonium a bit faster during the initiation phase of the chain reaction--"

Weisskopf muttered out loud, "A fantasy design, for sure--"

Ranier ignored the needling. "It now appears that some serious errors have been made in the original calculations about the fission boosting in the R-T design." He cleared his throat, folded up his notes, stowed his glasses. "My best calculations show that the R-T devices will be duds. Based on the actual physics of the Dog shot, that's my opinion. We may as well ship them back to the States," he concluded glumly.

The conference then erupted into an uproar and Bacher had great difficulty settling things down again.

Carson Mark was incredulous. He turned around in his seat. "Albert, after all you went through--we went through, to get these shots added, you mean to say--"

Weisskopf was sour. "A colossal waste of taxpayer money...and kindergarten physics to boot. I said as much at the meeting in Washington--"

"--we should have listened to Teller--" someone muttered.

"This cinches it for Super--"

"Now, hold on, hold on just a minute," Bacher had both hands up, waving them around like a school guard trying to keep kids under control. After a fashion, and a few sharp knuckle raps from Admiral Blanchard, the wardroom calmed down to some kind of order. "Hold on, gentlemen...this isn't the end of the world."

Dr. Cheverly had raised a hand. Bacher called on him.

"Yes, Dr. Cheverly."

Cheverly rose slowly, standing in the center of the darkened room, with hands clasped behind his back. Next to him, a Navy technician was re-threading the 8-mm film back onto its spool.

"We must see this data that Dr. Ranier has developed. I myself am not a believer in the boosting process Drs. Ranier and Tolkach propose. Uses too much of the core to be efficient with our scarce plutonium resources. But we must have open minds here. Science deals with facts."

Bacher had a thought. "Why don't we form a committee? Dr. Cheverly, you head up a team to do an independent assessment of Dr. Ranier's calculations. We'll suspend judgement on the matter until they report. Is that agreeable to everybody?"

There were murmurs of assent, mixed in with more grumbling and complaints. Admiral Blanchard added a point. "I'd like to remind everybody that data reduction can't take forever. We've got a schedule here and we better stick to it. Greenhouse is tying up a hell of a lot of ships and men and there's war on. By the schedule, the next shot is Easy and we got the shot tower to erect and all the instrumentation. That one's set for Enjebi and there's still dredging work needed to even make the atoll accessible. So don't take forever on this analysis."

"Duly noted, Admiral," Bacher said. Managing scientists was hard enough. Keeping the military mollified added to the burden. "Dr. Cheverly--?"

Cheverly nodded his assent. "I'll look at Dr. Ranier's work right now. If he would hand over his calculations--perhaps, in one of the labs down below?"

Ranier agreed and met the Englishmen in a tiny space on D deck, aft of the bunking spaces the Navy had assigned to the Los Alamos contingent. The lab was crammed with microscopes, scales, calipers and metal chests full of electrical parts and cable.

Ranier laid out the lined tablet sheets he had done his calculations on and went through the sequence of the boosting process step by step. Cheverly stood before the drafting table, puffing on a briar pipe, nodding and wheezing as his fingers followed Ranier's. At length, the English physicist said, "Yes, yes, I see where you're going with this. The critical point is here, is it not?" He tapped a few equations surrounding stick-figure drawings of fissioning nuclei. "When the tamper first spalls off early neutrons...the question is the energy, always the energy." Cheverly removed his pipe and tapped the stem on the page. "Electron volts, my dear Albert. You don't have the electron volts."

Ranier acceded the point, not because Cheverly was right. He needed for the Englishmen to follow the sequence he had diagrammed exactly. That way led to only one conclusion...the conclusion Ranier had designed into the argument from the beginning. The conclusion that the R-T devices wouldn't work, that they were designed wrong from the start, that they should be returned to the States. Ranier needed Cheverly to see that very clearly, from the start, and report that to Bacher and the rest. Coming from Cheverly--a man who had worked with the great Rutherford himself--the conclusion would add to Ranier's argument.

If Bacher and the Admiral and the others followed Cheverly's analysis and came to the same conclusion, then Gallant Flag would work. LaSalle and Craft would have their bombs after all. If not...well, Albert Ranier was a realist and a scientist. He was trained as an atomic physicist to deal with measurable facts. And, if Bacher and Admiral Blanchard didn't see the argument the way he was trying to shape it, the fact was that Gallant Flag would fail.

And from that fact would come inexorably a darkness upon the world that no amount of science or hope could stop.

"I'll leave you to review the facts," Ranier said at last. "It's tragic such a mistake has been made. I am ashamed to even be here--"

Cheverly didn't look up from the equations. "Nonsense, Albert. Your arguments are wrong on basic principles but they have helped sharpened the debate over the Super. Teller's going to win. Not because he is right. Because he is a politician. He has the President's ear. The logic of these weapons is undeniable. If we don't build them, the Soviets will. Better the West have doomsday in its hands than Stalin."

"I'm glad to hear you say that, Dr. Cheverly. There is hope after all." Ranier left the lab and headed up. He ran into Tolkach coming through a watertight hatch on B deck.

Tolkach said nothing, only raised his eyebrows. Ranier nodded silently, then pointed topside. The two physicists made their way to the Curtiss' aft deck and stood by a railing overlooking the ship's windlass and anchor mounts. The late afternoon tropical sun was momentarily hidden behind a veil of cumulus clouds, inexorably sliding toward the western horizon, still reddened from suspended dust particles thrown up by the Dog blast.

Both men knew how critical the next few hours would be.

Tomorrow was Saturday, January 13. The Orient Star and the Sunfish would be moving into intercept positions, according to the timetable Craft had laid down six weeks ago. Chesapeake, stationed a few miles off the Curtiss' starboard bow, would have to be heading east by Monday, to make the intercept work. Heading east with five Mark VI atomic bombs, the now-suspicious Ranier-Tolkach devices in question. Even as Ranier and Tolkach stared off at the incipient sunset and the vast armada that Greenhouse had brought to the western Pacific, aboard the Chesapeake, Commander John Ward was poring over schematics of his ship's boiler room piping, trying to concoct an 'accident' that would render the Navy auxiliary temporarily powerless in mid-ocean but not so damaging as to seriously hurt the ship. It was to Ward a tricky exercise at best, one he was seriously considering not doing at all, except for one salient fact. He'd promised General Paul Craft that Chesapeake would be part of the special operation MacArthur had approved.

It was just that deliberately sabotaging his own ship went against the grain of everything Ward had learned about command and seamanship since his days at Annapolis.

Ranier was nervous and lit up a cigarette. Tolkach stared out to sea. If Eugene Bacher and Dr. Cheverly and Admiral Blanchard didn't agree with Ranier's calculations, Gallant Flag would fail. And very probably, the Chicoms would push the UN forces completely off the Korean peninsula. Another domino would fall for Stalin. A lot was at stake.

"Albert, we've done everything we can do. Now it's in the hands of others."

Ranier was philosophical. "The others don't know what we know, Edvard. They don't understand the stakes."

"You can't fight Stalin all by yourself. You're not alone. You're not an army of one."

"Sometimes I feel I am. Americans and English...they're all the same. They fight each other as much as they fight the enemy. Depressing, hopeless...can't they see the larger picture? Don't they understand? Here I am trying to help America use the weapons she has, and we have to resort to subterfuge, tricks, deceptions, just to get them to do what has to be done. They're like children...naïve, trusting, absorbed in the moment. Not realizing what kind of monsters are right outside their bedroom doors."

"I know, I know." Tolkach unbuttoned his shirt, revealing a tuft of black hair, to catch the freshening tropical breezes. The air was damp, clammy, electric. Sheet lightning had begun to flash behind the veil of clouds. "One thing's for sure. Whatever Bacher decides, we're done for at Los Alamos. Mark will be after your neck. Strauss too. And I'm no better off. We'll both be hooted off the Hill, 'pack your bags, fellows, you're on a train to somewhere else, anywhere else.'" Tolkach half laughed. "How long you think the celebrations will last after we're gone...after you're out of Teller's hair?"

Ranier smiled. "Days, I should think. When a broken arm finally stops hurting, you always feel like a new man."

"So what will you do, Albert? Where will you go?"

Ranier took a deep breath, flicked his cigarette off into the sea. Whitecaps were hissing foam around the stern of the Curtiss. "Perhaps, I'll volunteer for this new Central Intelligence Agency, become a spy behind the Iron Curtain, as Mr. Churchill so aptly describes it. What would you say to that?"

Tolkach scoffed. "I would say that you're an actor, Albert, always an actor. Look how far you've come already. And on a stage bigger than ever imagined in London or Broadway."

"And still unappreciated," Ranier added.

A bosun's mate from the deck detail appeared at the fantail railing.

"Excuse me, sir...are you Dr. Albert Ranier."

"I am."

"Sir, Admiral Blanchard sent me. You're to return to the officer's wardroom immediately, C Deck. And you are--"

"Edvard Tolkach. I'm sure they'll be wanting to see both of us."

"Yes, sir, if you'll follow me."

Ranier and Tolkach returned to a mostly empty and half-darkened wardroom. Only Blanchard was present, flanked by Bacher and Dr. Cheverly. The trio sat along one table, faces dark with martial frowns and glares as the two physicists took their seats.

"It's a black day for Los Alamos," Bacher intoned. "A very black day. Never in all my years in science have I seen such an egregious pile of sloppy work. Dr. Ranier, this is personally embarrassing for me. I can only hope it is equally so for you. Dr. Cheverly--?"

Cheverly lowered his face to his notes, pushing his pince-nez glasses back up his nose as he did so.

"Unfortunately, I must concur with Dr. Bacher. And with your own calculations, Dr. Ranier. It seems the physics behind your Ranier-Tolkach method of boosting fission yield is something akin to a fairy tale of atomic reactions. As you said this afternoon, there is now no question in my mind that the R-T devices will be duds, as you Yanks like to call them. They are so much useless baggage now."

Blanchard decided to interrupt. "For security reasons, I've ordered all five devices sent back to the States on the Chesapeake. Greenhouse still has three more shots to go and I don't need the headache of babysitting something that's not going to work. There's no sense keeping your devices around here any longer. Sorry, Dr. Ranier."

Ranier was secretly pleased at the decision but he dared not show it.

"When will the devices be leaving?"

Blanchard thought for a moment. "Dr. Bacher, if you can spare enough men and start safing the bombs for re-stowage tonight, I see no reason we can't button them up tomorrow morning and have Chesapeake on her way by high tide tomorrow afternoon. I know John Ward would prefer that."

Ranier did some quick mental calculations. Yes. If Chesapeake departed tomorrow, she should be easily within the timetable and range for a mid-ocean intercept that Paul Craft worked out a month ago. In any case, once Chesapeake departed, matters were out of Ranier's hands anyway.

Bacher looked questioningly at Ranier. "Can you do what the Admiral wants?"

Ranier nodded. "As long as I can get an electrician for the arming and fusing circuits, I can troubleshoot the core and the plug and secure the most critical parts myself. Captain Ward will have to be advised that I need to come aboard."

"At least the things are still aboard Chesapeake," Bacher observed. "That saves us some time. Admiral, I'm sorry this happened. It's bad enough the Navy went to all the trouble you did to modify Chesapeake's deck for transiting atomic bombs. Now, it looks like the whole trip was for nothing."

Blanchard stubbed out a cigarette and sighed heavily. "It wouldn't be Uncle Sam's Navy if we didn't have screwups like this to keep us on our toes. At least, Chesapeake gets an easy ride back home to Frisco."

Bacher addressed both Ranier and Tolkach. "When you two are done with safing the bombs, I want you to ring me up in my cabin."

"It's likely to be quite late, Dr. Bacher."

"I don't care what time it is. I'm thinking of asking Carson Mark to send you both back with Chesapeake. Give you some time to sort out this--" he waved his hands at Cheverly's papers, scattered around the wardroom table "--this mess. I'm afraid Los Alamos will take a black eye in Washington over this business. We have a hard enough time getting the politicians to let us test these things as it is. We can't afford screwups like this."

Ranier tried to be contrite. "Dr. Bacher, it was an honest--"

Bacher held up his hands. "I don't want to discuss it here. You've both got a lot of work to do. The Navy wants to sail tomorrow. Those devices better be ready for sea."

Ranier realized further argument was useless. He and Tolkach left the wardroom to go back to their lab. It was going to be a long night aboard Chesapeake and they needed some tools to do the job. Safing an atom bomb for sea transport meant the core, the plutonium plug, and the electrics, the batteries, the wireways, detonators, even the casing weldments and barometer ports had to be visually inspected, placed in a safe condition and signed-off with the Navy in attendance. They needed a special set of wrenches to gain access to the core. The whole process would probably take four hours or more.

Climbing down a ladder to his D deck lab, Ranier ran into General LaSalle heading topside. The General was cradling a steaming cup of coffee, lost in thought.

Ranier caught LaSalle's eyes with a meaningful look. "Cheer up, General. Our babies are no longer orphans. They'll soon be heading home."

LaSalle acknowledged the notice with a barely perceptible nod and continued climbing the ladder without saying a word.

Saturday, 1-13-51

Tokyo

11:50 p.m.

Masuhiro Tetsuko left the Omisumi building just before midnight. It was snowing lightly but the gusty winds of the afternoon had died off and small piles of snow had started to collect in the gutters and shadowy corners along the Yasukuni Dori.

Tetsuko turned west and headed toward the province of light that outlined the steel skeleton of the newly building Shinjuku Rail Station. In quick succession, he passed a noodle shop, a pachinko hall, a bowling alley and the Fukuoka City Bank building. At a newsstand on the corner, he paused to scan the headlines of Asahi Shimbun, checking behind at the length of the two blocks he had just covered.

Checking for the U.S. Army surveillance tail he knew had to be there.

But he saw nothing. An elderly woman struggling with her plaid furoshiki kerchief swollen with merchandise after an evening at the Shikizawa Department Store a block away. A tokko officer--Tokyo Metropolitan Police--kicking at a snow pile alongside his darkened kiosk. A couple exiting the cinema--Casablanca was in its fifth week there, holding hands and nuzzling in the chill night air.

No obvious sign of a tail. But tonight, of all nights, he wanted to make sure. He crossed the street at the Amaterasu statue--patron goddess of Nippon fondling a clutch of sea nymphs, all cast in bronze and steel--and walked back the same two blocks all the way back to Omisumi, just to be sure.

Still, nothing.

Masuhiro Tetsuko was worried. After the Army major, Lyle Kitchens, had come calling, he had gotten word to Paul Craft, asking for a quick clandestine meeting, the sooner the better, tonight if possible.

Craft, after some initial hesitation, had reluctantly agreed.

Re-tracing his steps along Yasukuni Dori, Tetsuko passed by the spotlit girders of the rail station, through a pedestrian underpass below the rail tracks--he stopped, listening for footsteps but heard none--and emerged into the red neon glare of a credit union sign on the other side. Ahead was Togo Seiji--a small art museum and a crossing street known locally as Go-Go Gairo, or more simply put Street Number Five. A sign in kanji directed pedestrians left, to a small park fronting a city waterworks pumping station.

Tetsuko walked briskly toward the gated entrance to the waterworks. Silhouetted in spotlit snowfall beneath the gate's steel trusswork arch, a black sedan was parked.

Tetsuko walked faster, heading for the car. When he reached it, he opened the rear door without hesitation and climbed inside.

Brigadier General Paul Craft was inside, at the driver's seat. The car was unmarked, but it was a motor pool sedan belonging to the U.S. Army 30th Motor Transport Battalion. Craft was alone.

"You shake the tail?"

Tetsuko was out of breath, fumbling with a cigarette lighter, as he steadied his hands. "I doubled back twice, Craft-san. I didn't see a tail."

Craft gunned the Ford's engine and pulled away from the gate. "You didn't look very hard, did you? They'll be waiting for you when you get back, wondering where you went."

They drove around western Tokyo for the better part of an hour, through Shinjuku and Shibuya wards, before doubling back east almost to Chuo-ko and the wharf district, never really sure if they were being followed by a tail from G-2. At Tetsuko's suggestion, Craft turned north up the brightly-lit Sakurada Dori and worked his way through a maze of cross streets toward the neon glow of the Ginza itself. Soon, they were hung up in a horn-honking, screaming din of cars and pedicabs and pedestrian crowds surging like a rain-swollen river through narrow streets jammed with late evening strollers.

"Harder to keep up with us in these crowds," Tetsuko explained. "Old trick of mine."

Craft nodded gravely, settling in for an agonizing crawl through the congested heart of central Tokyo on a Saturday night.

Tetsuko spent the next few minutes relating the details of Kitchens' visit to Omisumi the day before.

"I'm sure he knows all about the warehouse in Kobe, Craft-san. He was there...they have evidence, pictures. They're tracing some of the purchases made. He's already guessed correctly on many details." Tetsuko sucked hard on his last cigarette, pitched the stub out the window and bummed another one off Craft.  
"Kobe is compromised. You can't bring the bombs there. It's too dangerous."

Craft listened, as much to Tetsuko's tone of voice as his words. It was a worried tone, even faltering. Not like Tetsuko to be so spooked. Craft had done a little digging on the CID officer. Kitchens was a bulldog, from all accounts, slow but persistent, with a scattering of medals and commendations in his personnel file. A bulldog who needed to be tossed a few bones to lead him in another direction...and soon. MP's were lower than staff pukes inside the Dai Ichi, despite MacArthur's eternal fascination with all the trappings of royalty they seemed to confer. It was customary to keep MP's on a short leash inside Far Eastern Command--too much law enforcement tended to get in the way of MacArthur's staff and the Bataan Gang wasn't keen on rules they didn't make. Craft figured his best bet was to find out who was in charge of the leashes.

Craft was still guardedly optimistic that, despite Tetsuko's worries, the essentials of the Kobe arrangements hadn't yet been fully compromised. Still, at this point, it paid to have backup plans.

"Tetsuko-san, are there any other places I could stash five atom bombs for a few days? At least until LaSalle's B-29s can be staged into Mishida?"

Tetsuko stared out at the revelry and crowds. Every other couple seemed to be equipped with a towering ice cream cone, despite the chill and light snow. America's newest gift to Nippon. The industrialist wet his lips.

"I don't know. I'll have to look around. Make some inquiries. Wouldn't it be better just to have the bombs left onboard the Orient Star? Then have the ship deliver them to Mishida?"

"No, too risky. We're not handling soybean bags here, you know. Too many chances to gum something up, give away the game. No--" Craft slammed on the brakes--a pair of drunken U.S. sailors had somehow managed to fall backwards out of a pedicab; somebody's noggin had cracked on the pavement and a crowd of the curious was pouring into the street "--I've got a better idea. It's time for Major Lyle Kitchens to have a little accident," he told Tetsuko. "A fatal one."

They discussed turning the surveillance around and putting a tail on Kitchens himself.

"It'll have to be someone the Army doesn't suspect, someone they wouldn't expect to be involved. Somebody not on G-2's list."

"Or the tokko's list," Tetsuko added. Tokyo Police Special Bureau had long been a little brother to G-2 and the 5th MPs, handling routine fraud and felonies while the Army concerned itself with bigger game. Red spies and infiltrators were the latest concern. "I have acquaintances in the underground, Craft-san. 'Operators' with the Yakuza. I've done business with them before. They can be hired, for a fee, to kill a man."

Craft was wary but willing. Something would have to be done about Kitchens. "I can't have anything to do with this, you know that. I don't want to know anything about it."

"Leave the details to me," Tetsuko said. "I ask only one thing in return."

"Only one...what's the matter, Tetsuko-san? You turning ethical on me in your old age?"

Tetsuko ignored him. "I ask that you keep the Army from bringing charges against me or Omisumi for hiring the Yakuza. This is a business deal. We must treat each other as business partners. I want your assurance on this, Craft-san." He knew perfectly well that what Craft had asked him to do was extremely risky. If he were ever caught associating with the underground, the Army would hang him first, then bring charges later. The Japanese court system was still under Occupation authority, even if Masuhiro Tetsuko did have fingers in everybody's pants.

Craft understood what was being asked. The game had certain rules, after all. Tetsuko also understood Craft could officially make no such promises. They were both flies, caught in the same web.

"I'm sure General MacArthur will look favorably on anything that is done to help the war effort. If Major Lyle Kitchens were to die in the line of duty, that would be unfortunate. Naturally, there would have to be an investigation. But then soldiering is a risky business, isn't it?"

The men discussed final preparations for receiving the bombs. "LaSalle sent me a wire this morning. The Greenhouse task force commander has already decided to ship the later bombs back to the States tomorrow. Surprised everybody, even our men on the scene. They had a review after the first shot. Seems like there's some question about whether the bombs will 'work' as advertised. Ranier's done his job now; the task force thinks the bombs are defective. That puts Gallant Flag only a few days behind schedule." Craft took a deep breath. "Now we just have to grab the bombs and get 'em here." And then the game will really be on, he told himself.

"Then Orient Star must be ready for sea immediately. The submarine too. I must inform Taipei right away. Do you know when the American Navy ship sails from Eniwetok?"

"No, but I sure as hell can find out. Just don't delay your end, okay? The Old Man is worried sick about our position in Korea. The lines are crumbling fast and the Reds are pushing us back everywhere. We may not be able to hold much longer."

Craft circled the Imperial Palace grounds after finally squeezing out of the Ginza's vast throngs and worked his way back cross-town to Shinjuku, to within a few blocks of the Omisumi building.

Tetsuko got out. Craft sped away. The Japanese industrialist began walking through a light dusting of snow toward the welcome glow of street lights along Yasukuni Dori. At the corner, the Marui Toy Store flashed its red and white neon sign at him, a grinning, high-stepping teddy bear sign.

Then he spotted the Army surveillance tail, half a block further down on the opposite side. A black sedan, Ford from the looks of it, black and quiet, parked along the curb. He could barely make out a faint patch of white skin through the side window.

In spite of himself, Tetsuko smiled. Finally spotting the tail he knew was there was somehow comforting, like seeing old friends. He resisted an impulse to wave at them and wondered if they really understood who he had just met with.

For that matter, could Craft himself be in trouble from Kitchens' investigation? MacArthur, even? The Americans were strange and odd gaijin, prone to tearing down their heroes and institutions, instead of venerating them in the Japanese way. Very odd indeed.

Tetsuko hurried on to the Omisumi building, nodding brusquely at the sleepy security guard in his glass cubicle.

Slipping upstairs to his top-floor office, he resolved to get rid of Kitchens once and for all.

Sunday, 1-14-51

Taipei, Formosa

1:20 a.m.

It was pitch black, a cold chilling fog sweeping upriver when the Weilan (once known to the Americans as the Sunfish) finally slipped her moorings at Shao Gun Shipyard's Pier No. 12, and backed slowly out into the foaming black murk of the Tanshui River. Captain Li Gao Chi pulled the pea jacket tighter around his neck as he watched the deck detail make fast the mooring lines and the prepare the boat for cruise.

The trip down the Tanshui to the open waters of the Formosa Strait would take an hour, maybe more, at the legal speed limit of four knots. Li had no intention of observing any legalities on this trip. Money was at stake, a lot of it and the men were like children in a candy store, eager, restless, quarrelsome. They wanted the goodies and Li intended that they would all get their share, and more.

He checked his watch in the fading glare of the pier floodlights. There was no time to waste. Before sunup, the Weilan had to be clear of territorial waters and headed north, out of sight of the suspicious eyes of America's Seventh Fleet, now patrolling the strait to keep the two sides of the Chinese civil war from each other's throats.

They had a rendezvous to make with Tetsuko-san's freighter the Orient Star, five hundred miles east of Tokyo. Li had gone over the exact latitude and longitude with the navigator before shoving off, just to make sure there would be no misunderstanding. The navigator was a kid from the streets of Hong Kong, Xie Fang, capable but a bit dense. Li had pulled this garbage scow of a crew together from all over the Far East, and worked them hard, making them a functioning unit in record time. He was proud of them, even if Tetsuko had misgivings. The Omisumi daimyo didn't know a hen's ass about seamen; Li did.

He was quite sure Xie Fang would get them to the rendezvous in good order.

They had to make the rendezvous by 1600 hours on Monday, the 15th, in order to be able to catch the Chesapeake departing Eniwetok Atoll. Now Tetsuko had sent word the American ship was leaving earlier, perhaps as early as Sunday afternoon. If that were true, Weilan and Orient Star would have quite a distance to make up once they rendezvoused. The geometry of the pursuit didn't look promising, as Chesapeake would most likely take a northerly route toward the Hawaiian Islands. But Li decided he could still catch the freighter if he ran Weilan at maximum speed on the surface. Staying topside was the key. If they had to spend any time running submerged, where the boat's speed dropped off to ten knots at best, the Chesapeake would rapidly pull away and the whole deal would be off.

The whole plan hinged on catching the Chesapeake at a point about eight hundred miles east of the Marshalls. The Pacific was particularly deep there. After the bombs had been transferred and the Chesapeake had been torpedoed, the American salvage crews would never find her at those great depths.

It was essential that the Americans have no real idea what had happened to their precious atomic devices.

Weilan made the end of the river channel without incident. Li held onto the grab bar as the ocean swells made the boat rock like a pig in a pool. Li shouted down to Bilbao:

"Come right to zero-five-five degrees. Ahead full. Trim her for speed, Bilbao."

The grungy Portuguese salt answered back, "Coming right to zero-five-five, aye Captain. Ahead full, aye sir."

Soon the scattered lights of the northern headlands of Formosa dropped astern and the boat settled into a gentle rocking, cranking up to fifteen knots, under a third quarter moon. Bilbao emerged from the conning tower hatch, stepped off the cigarette deck and took up a post alongside Li. His oily black hair flowed freely in the seabreeze.

"Good night for running, eh, Captain? The sea...she smells good tonight, like a Macao whore's cunt, fresh with perfume and life, eh?" He laughed hoarsely, then coughed and spat blood.

Li smiled. "How's the crew doing?"

Bilbao was chewing something vaguely tobacco-ey. "Good spirits, Captain. Very good spirits. Lucian's got his horn out, tooting songs, they're singing along back in the mess. I ordered a round for the watch crew... begging your pardon, sir."

Li shrugged. "It's alright, Bilbao. They're not saints down there...a little juice keeps 'em well-oiled, well running, like the engines."

Bilbao sniffed, "Aye, the engines...that's the worry--"

Li was confident of his boat and his crew. He had personally recruited every single man. He was also confident he would be a rich man once Tetsuko paid him the rest of the money for the mission. Ten thousand yuan was no fortune but it would make a lot of Macao whores happy and give him other comforts he hadn't seen in a very long time. He had only to find the Orient Star and follow her to their target, then after she had liberated the special cargo from the Navy ship, he would have the pleasure of sending an American Navy ship to the bottom once again, with all hands.

Li Gao Chi's real name was Hideki Osato, though he'd been using the nom de plume around Hong Kong and Kowloon and Canton so long the sound of it was odd to his ears. Once he had skippered a first-rank boat in the Imperial Japanese Navy's First Fleet. For Li, the Weilan's mission was especially gratifying; if his luck held, it would be a reprise of some good hunting days in '44 and '45, when he sent several American 'tin cans' to the ocean bottom. That was before the I-95 had been shot out from under him in April '45, off the Ryukus.

The I-95 had been an exceptional boat, with two chrysanthemums bestowed by his Imperial Majesty himself, and ever since then, Li had ached for another chance at the Americans. It was only the sheerest luck that he had wound up in Formosa and managed to escape the Americans at all. He'd been hiding out ever since, posing as a Chinese national, knocking around junks and freighters and shipyards along the South China Sea, waiting for his chance. Masuhiro Tetsuko had now provided that chance.

Li Gao Chi intended to make maximum use of it.

"Lights on the horizon," Bilbao pointed to a string of lights dipping in and out of view through light sea fog.

"Sonar contacts?"

Bilbao called down to the sonar shack. "Multiple screws, Captain. Blade count's high...big engines. Could be warships. American Navy, even."

Li thought. The more they could run on the surface, the better. Still, it wouldn't do for the American patrols in these waters to catch Weilan on the surface. There could be embarrassing questions...or worse.

"Let's pull the plug," he decided. He and Bilbao dropped through the conning tower opening and dogged the hatch behind them.

"Dive. Dive now," Bilbao commanded as they hit the control room floor. A sharp toot of the diving klaxon sounded throughout the length of the 307-foot boat.

Li went to the periscope well as Lucian, the Filipino diving officer, called out their descent.

"Five degrees down bubble...passing through twenty feet...bow planes fifty per cent...."

"Very well. Lucian, make our depth one hundred feet keel depth."

"One hundred feet, aye, Captain."

Li hugged the periscope. He peered through the rubber eyepieces, trying to make out any shapes on the horizon. The lights bobbed in and out of view--too far away. "Helm, come right to one-zero-five degrees. Engine room, make turns for ten knots. Steady as she goes."

Bilbao gave the orders. Weilan heeled to starboard and began a due east leg of her run north to the rendezvous point. "Fathometer reading," the exec called out.

"Coming up on the two-hundred fathom line."

"Very well." Bilbao glanced at Li. "Captain, Sakishima Shoto should be nearby. The shoals--"

"I know, I know. We'd better steer north. Helm, belay that course change. Maintain course."

"Passing through fifty feet, Captain."

"Very well."

Li was irritated. Maybe they shouldn't have dived. But at this point, it was best to play it safe. To run due east submerged now was dangerous; the shoals of the southern Ryukus made the bottom shallow out and navigation at depth a dicey affair. He didn't want to run aground before they even got nicely underway.

Weilan ran for an hour on her batteries, then Li ordered the boat raised to periscope depth. He let the tube hiss up, then bent to the eyepiece and did a slow sweep of the horizon. A smile creased his weathered face.

"Any contacts, Captain?" Bilbao's breath was right in his face.

"Black as coal up there. Sonar, anything?"

The sonarman wiped a rag over his scope. "Nothing for the last half hour, Captain. No contacts at all."

"Surface the ship," Li ordered. "We'll run on the surface from now on. I want lookouts topside at all times. Fathometer...what's the depth under our keel?"

"Seven hundred fathoms, sir. And going down fast."

"There--see?" Li clapped Bilbao on the shoulder. "We're past the shoals. Deep water all the way."

"Aye, very deep, Captain."

Li was exhausted by the hectic preparations to get underway and with having to tangle with Tetsuko on money and other details.

"I'm going to my quarters to get some shut-eye. Wake me in an hour."

He headed aft through the hatch and squeezed into the tiny compartment, securing the door behind him. Li took off his shoes and crawled into the bunk, intending to rest a short while, then get back to the control room for the maneuvers needed to effect rendezvous with Orient Star. He wanted to look over Xie Fang's calculations anyway, just to be sure. The young navigator was excitable and prone to mistakes.

They couldn't afford any mistakes this time.

In all, Li Gao Chi slept nearly fourteen hours. Bilbao decided not to waken him; the boat was running smoothly and they were on course, only minor adjustments needed after the last star sextant check. The Captain would be busy enough once they had found Orient Star and began foraging to the east for their real target.

It was nearly noon the next day when the sonarman reported contact sounds, "screws in the water, Mr. Bilbao, dead ahead, ten thousand yards, maybe further. Heavy screws, low blade count--"

They were nearing the rendezvous point, an imaginary circle a hundred twenty miles due east of the Bonins, almost at the 150-degree longitude line, and nearly astride the Tropic of Cancer. Seas had been light most of the day, but a strong westerly had stirred up some chop and Weilan was beginning to roll and wallow in the lee of the breakers now smashing into her portside bow.

As a precautionary move, Bilbao ordered a dive and the boat planed down to fifty feet depth. "Wake up the Captain," he commanded, hugging the periscope as he made a quick sweep of the waters. Nothing yet.

"Leveling off at fifty, Mr. Bilbao."

"Very well. Steady as she goes."

Three minutes later, a groggy, sour-looking Li Gao Chi straggled into the control room. He yawned. "I thought asked to be awakened after an hour. What the hell time is it?"

"Time for action, Captain," Bilbao said. "Take a look--" he stepped aside from the periscope. Li moved in, fixed his eyes and whistled.

A black smudge was visible on the horizon, oily smoke trailing from her funnels. "Sonar, what's our distance to the contact?"

"Eight thousand yards, Captain. We're passing astern of her."

I'll fix that, Li thought. "Helm, come left to zero-seven-zero degrees. Engine room, slow to one third. I want to lick her ass before I shake her hands--" He bent back to the periscope. "We'll see if we can work ourselves in a little closer before we try making contact."

Ten minutes of maneuvering brought Weilan directly astern of the contact. She was indeed a heavy freighter, easily twenty-thousand tons, twin funnels pumping thick ropes of oily black diesel smoke skyward. Through the eyepiece of the scope, Li counted several cranes abaft the structures amidships. Tarpaulins had been dogged down over some kind of cargo on her fantail.

Finally, he got a glimpse of her pennants. Red and black, inverted triangles touching at their apexes. "That's our baby, men. Tetsuko's logo. And her name on the forehull--" he handed the scope over to Bilbao. "Take a look."

Bilbao brushed back his greasy black hair and peered in. He grinned. "O-R-I-E-N-T. Orient Star. We did it--"

Li squeezed the navigator's shoulder. "Well done, son. Well done." Xie Fang beamed through crooked teeth.

She was light in the water, making just enough knots to maintain headway. Right on the money, right where Tetsuko had promised she'd be. Li exulted and pulled out a cigar to celebrate. He didn't light up just yet. They still had to make contact.

"Sonar, any other contacts around us?"

"None, Captain."

"Very well. Bilbao, you may surface the ship."

Ten minutes later, high-pressure air roaring into her ballast tanks, Weilan broke free into the bright blue mid-Pacific sunshine in a spray of hissing foam and eased forward, cautiously approaching the freighter from her quarter stern.

As soon as the foredeck cleared the surface, Li was already scrambling up the ladder to the conning tower hatch. He ordered a boatswain's mate topside with him, signaling lantern ready.

They climbed up onto the cigarette deck. Li waited a few more minutes, until they had closed to within a few thousand yards. Then he gave the order. With Weilan's foredeck still awash in the choppy Pacific, the boatswain's mate began hailing the Orient Star.

Monday, 1-15-51

Tokyo

8:00 a.m.

The flight line at Atsugi Field was unusually crowded with aircraft as Lyle Kitchens brought Robert Blount back for his departure to Guam. Row after row of C-54s, C-47s, C-119s, and B-29s crowded every square foot of available ramp space along hangar row.

"Looks like Idlewild Airport the day before Thanksgiving," Blount muttered. He hoisted his bag up and marched toward the departure hut. The FBI agent was returning to Eniwetok that afternoon.

Inside the departure hut, the smell of cigarette smoke and stale coffee was thick. Bags and passengers were scattered around the few worn seats, strewn in the aisles, propped against the corrugated walls of the building.

Kitchens and Blount availed themselves of a USO canteen set up in one corner, shelling out a few coins for scalding hot coffee that tasted like kerosene and a few rock-hard sandwiches. As they munched and slurped, a new C-54 Dakota came taxiing in by the ramp-side window and feathered its twin props. A few minutes later, a stream of de-planing passengers bent forward against a stiff wind and scrambled across the tarmac toward the Arrivals building.

Blount recognized one man, a briefcase in one hand, heavy duffel bag in the other arm.

"Major General Clayton LaSalle," the agent said. "Far Eastern Air Forces 19th Bombardment Group. He was an observer at Eniwetok the other day. Supposedly represents SAC at the tests."

Kitchens sized up the man from a distance. "What's he doing here?"

"He came back from Guam on the same flight as me. I saw him chatting with Ranier a few times on board the Curtiss."

"Really? How interesting."

"In fact, LaSalle sat with Ranier and some of the other eggheads at the post-blast briefing. I got the impression they knew each other."

Kitchens watched the Air Force O-8 disappear into Arrivals. "Even more interesting. Wonder how they met?"

"No telling. But I've got a little voice in the back of my head telling me LaSalle's got fingers in Gallant Flag. Don't ask me to explain. It's just a feeling."

"Feelings can lead to facts," Kitchens said. "Wonder where he's headed?"

"Maybe you ought to keep the good general under surveillance, see who he pals around with."

"Sure...I always put a tail on flag rank officers from other services, as often as I can." Kitchens stubbed out his cigarette and pitched the last half of his bologna sandwich in the trash can. "A little advice for my naïve friend from the Bureau: the Army and the Navy and the Air Force are kind of like different countries. Each has its own kings and dukes and princes. Its own language, customs and laws. Me setting up a tail on a major general in the United States Air Force is about like you putting a man inside Buckingham Palace, to keep tabs on the King's underwear. For your information, I can't just order up a surveillance team into action. It's got to go through channels. And that takes time."

"I hear you," Blount replied. "All the same, if I were you, I'd keep an eye on anyone that spends anytime at all with Ranier. I'm telling you: those two are tight. Maybe you should go to Eniwetok and let me do the surveilling."

"Right. A Bureau man in Nippon. You might as well put the Empire State Building in the middle of the desert. With a big neon sign winking on and off. At least, I have the advantage of having an Army organization here to help me out, run a little interference."

"Sounds like they do a good bit of interfering to me."

"Get out of here." Kitchens shook the agent's hand. "And keep your head on straight out there."

"Later..." Blount heard the one and only call for boarding. He slung his bag over a shoulder and headed out across the windswept tarmac to board the C-54. It would be a rattling twelve-hour trip out to Guam Andersen Field, then a shorter seaplane ride up to the atolls.

After he was gone, Kitchens decided to find out where this mysterious General LaSalle was based. Maybe he could finagle a reason to pay a visit. As an Army CID investigator, he had no real authority even to enter an Air Force base without approval.

But he did have a pretty good track record at talking his way into places he didn't belong.

Kitchens made a phone call back to Gilruth at the CID office in the Dai Ichi's dank basement. Gilruth sounded half-asleep, which was normal. Kitchens could picture the chubby officer buried in case files, his feet propped up on a dented metal desk, toast crumbs flying everywhere.

"Lloyd, do something useful and look up a name for me, will you?"

Gilruth could be heard scrambling in the background. "Sure thing, Major. What's up?"

Kitchens gave him LaSalle's name and rank. "Who does this joker work for? And where's he posted?"

In five minutes, Gilruth had an answer.

"Thirteenth Air Force. Nineteenth Bomb Group. The whole shebang's at Yokota."

Yokota? "Give me directions from Atsugi. It's time I pay this fellow a little visit, unofficially."

Kitchens scribbled down Gilruth's directions. He left the Departure area and found the staff car, giving the directions to Sergeant Cox, his assigned driver.

"No sweat, Major," Cox told him, after studying the directions for a few moments. "We just take Hibayashi toward Tokyo and peel off north at Ikebukuro. Big traffic circle this side of the Marui store."

"How long to get there?"

"Maybe an hour. Depends on traffic in the city. One hour tops."

Kitchens slipped inside and pulled the door shut. At least Cox had kept the heater going. The wind circling around Atsugi was always fierce. "Let's go."

Cox put the Ford in gear and maneuvered them out of the airbase complex, and onto the Hibayashi Highway.

Kitchens lay back in the seat and closed his eyes. God, he was tired, irritable from lack of sleep, from the pressure. Seeing that Air Force general at Atsugi only made things worse. Gallant Flag was an octopus, its tentacles spread out everywhere. Follow one lead and before you knew it, you had a dozen more. Was there anybody in this godforsaken lotusland that wasn't on the take?

He was building a solid case. Methodically, with hard facts from multiple sources, logically tied together...the only way you could build a case. The trouble was Washington. Hardly a day passed when the Chief of Staff didn't cable a request for a progress report, a status report, "where are you now with this lead?"...always offering help, second-guessing, the pressure had to be intense back in the Nation's Capital.

Truman's hands were everywhere too, asking questions, probing, needling and interfering. How the hell could you run a decent investigation when the Brass was always screaming for progress every hour?

They had Tetsuko by the short hairs. Kitchens was sure of that. Tetsuko was the key that could unravel the whole plot, if only Washington would give him the time and the space to apply pressure the right way.

Blount had seen LaSalle buddying up to Albert Ranier at Eniwetok. Kitchens was as certain as he could be that Tetsuko had a contact inside the Dai Ichi. LaSalle? The Air Force general wasn't posted to Far East Command headquarters. Who then?

No, there had to be someone else, a common link between Tetsuko and Ranier and LaSalle. But who?

And what of this submarine the Red Chinese agent had mentioned?

Kitchens' headache deepened. Just when you thought you had the plant up by its roots...another branch showed up, another set of roots.

The thrumming of the car tires had slowly lulled the Army major into a light doze. Sergeant Cox had slowed down to negotiate heavier traffic as they approached the traffic circle at Ikekuburo. Ahead, the gray fortress of the huge Marui Department Store loomed like a castle in the early morning fog.

Suddenly, Cox swerved left--a small black truck had cut directly in front of them.

"Damn crazy--" but the sergeant never got to finish his swearing.

The truck spun sideways at the entrance to the roundabout and stopped, side on to the on-coming traffic. Cox jammed on the brakes to keep from plowing into it.

The Army sedan skidded too, but stopped short of impact. A split second later, two men, masked in black stocking caps and black coveralls scrambled out of the truck bed; they had emerged from beneath a canvas tarpaulin in the back.

Both men advanced across the intervening street, leveled automatic weapons directly at the Ford, and opened fire, even as more traffic swerved crazily around the jam-up.

"Get down!" Cox yelled. The Motor Transport Battalion driver was hit immediately in the head with a stitch of rounds, even as he yelled the warning. Kitchens dropped to the floor boards in a shower of glass and blood and skin. Staccato rounds slammed into the engine and doors, puncturing the radiator. Steam geysered from beneath the hood.

Huddled in a heap in the rear seat footwell, Kitchens heard screeching tires. Another truck, bearing produce and wooden pallets in the back, had skidded to a stop, directly alongside the staff car. Two more gunmen hopped out, also armed with assault rifles. They dropped to a crouch, then began spraying the Ford with rounds from the side.

No one saw the dump truck bearing down on the intersection.

Four hundred yards from the traffic circle, Kisaburo Hidayoshi had seen the 'accident' develop ahead of him at Ikebukuro. He had been ferrying a full load of fill dirt and top soil to a construction site a few blocks east, where the Mitsukoshi Toy Store was busily erecting a new retail wonderland for Tokyo's children. Hidayoshi was late to the job site and he was traveling too fast for conditions, trying to make up some time. He began downshifting as soon as he spied the traffic mess ahead, but at that exact moment, his brakes failed completely, the master cylinder blowing a valve apart just as he had begun to apply maximum pressure to the brake pedal.

The dump truck was a new Mitsubishi Type 80, a two-tonner with beefed-up hydraulics to hoist and manipulate heavier than usual dirt loads.

It weighed slightly over forty thousand pounds fully loaded. At impact, the truck struck Kitchens' sedan at a fraction over twenty-five miles an hour, after a two hundred foot skid along the highway.

Raked by gunfire, Kitchens felt the impact as an explosive shock that instantly rolled the Ford onto its side, even as it imparted a violent, wrenching spin to the car. Kitchens was thrashed and hammered from all sides, as metal crumpled around him. Momentarily blocked from their target, the squad of gunmen scattered and flung themselves to the ground to escape flying debris.

When the physics of the collision had played out fully, the Army sedan was a crumpled heap of metal wreckage rocking unsteadily on its side. The dump truck had remained upright, with fully a third of its front cab staved in, locked in a tangled embrace of steel sheet, rubber strips, glass and leaking fuel.

And somehow, Lyle Kitchens had been thrown completely free of the wreckage.

A great whump! reverberated through the air as the car's fuel tank lit off in an explosion that blew sheets of flame skyward in a red-orange ball of fire.

In the midst of the fiery carnage, the gunmen had emerged from cover and began pumping still more rounds into the wreckage of the staff car, not yet realizing their target had been flung thirty yards away.

Kitchens shook himself out of a stunned daze, checked the blood now flowing freely down his arms from glass fragments, and half-crawled, half-ran behind a screen of boiling black smoke toward the road gutters.

Rounds spanged off the metal wreckage as he dove into thorny underbrush and lay still for a few minutes, heaving in great gulps of air.

Had they seen him? Kitchens wasn't sure. Cox had a sidearm, he knew that much. But Cox was dead, struck in the first moments of the attack, then probably blown to bits when the Ford's fuel tank had lit off. No way he was going back into that inferno.

Kitchens chanced a peek over the asphalt lip of the street. His heart sank.

Two of the gunmen, looking like black slugs with only a narrow slit for their eyes, were steadily advancing through the smoke, glass crunching under their feet.

Quickly, Kitchens backed down the slope and hit the slick, grassy turf running. Shots rang out...they had seen him. The Army major tore through a burrow of bushes, stumbling and crawling, as the gunmen sprayed the ground with rounds. Kitchens felt dirt fly from bullets impacting near his feet. He clawed through the bush, limbs slapping his face, and thrashed wildly, blindly ahead, not caring what direction he was heading.

He could hear the grunts and sharp breaths of his attackers slogging through the undergrowth behind him.

He ran and stumbled, twisted and zigzagged, ducked and tripped, careened and scuttled, through brush and bogs, trash piles and open ground, woody copses and vine-choked thickets, for what seemed like hours. Always, just behind him it seemed he could still hear ragged breathing, short grunts, heavy footfalls and thrashing brush.

And once in awhile, a few more rounds fired ahead, slashing through the tree limbs; Kitchens had to stay in a low crouch, not sure how visible he might be.

Moments later, the brush thinned out and Kitchens stumbled intro a narrow alley, dank with puddles of rainwater and platoons of rats. The rats scattered while Kitchens paused momentarily, scanning all directions. A dead end? He wasn't sure. But he had to move and move fast. He spotted light ahead, a rear stoop or landing surrounded with bamboo screening and garbage cans. He staggered forward, kicking at more rats, and made for the light. He heard voices, ahead or behind he couldn't tell which, and homed blindly on the sound, then lurched through the bamboo screens and fell in a bloody heap onto the landing of the Three Blossoms Ryokan (Inn).

An inn worker stood staring down at Kitchens in horror from the top of the landing. Dressed in a red and white kimono, the woman had been cleaning an armful of tatami mats when Kitchens fell through the bamboo screen. She dropped the mats and fled inside the inn.

Moments later, two more innworkers, both men, appeared. Seeing Kitchens' injuries, they helped him up the steps and into a back housekeeping room of the inn. Kitchens dropped to his knees in exhaustion, while the woman, a cherubic, middle-aged chambermaid, began peeling off his Army field jacket. His ID folder flopped out onto the floor in the process.

The chambermaid retrieved the folder and handed it back to Kitchens, realizing he was American Army. Then, she gently removed his army issue shoes and drew a pale of warm water, to dress the glass cuts on the major's bloody arms.

Kitchens winced at the sting of the water. Glass was still embedded in the wounds. "Sorry--" he managed to croak out. "Army...two men behind...there was a crash...."

Another woman appeared in the laundry room. She was older, solemnly businesslike, the kyugigashira for the inn. She uttered a sharp cry of astonishment at the scene, then recovered her composure and pushed the men aside, kneeling to examine Kitchens herself. Her English was heavily accented, but understandable.

"What happened you---?"

Kitchens forced out a barebones explanation, each word an effort. The chambermaid fetched a cup of steaming tea. Kitchens downed it in several gulps. It seemed to help.

"Who are--?" the headmistress was suddenly interrupted by a commotion outside. One of the men peered out the door to the landing. He stiffened immediately, and hurriedly shut and latched the door.

"--ninja," he hissed. "Pisutoru--" he held up two fingers, indicating both men were armed with guns.

The headmistress wasted no time wondering why two black-clad assailants were stalking a U.S. Army officer through the alleys of Ikekuburo. She stood up abruptly, clapped her hands. At once, the chambermaid and both men helped Kitchens to his feet. He was wobbly. The headmistress looked around frantically, then seemed to have an idea.

"Come--" she motioned to the impromptu litter. "Come...isoide! Quick, quick!" She led them through a series of sliding screens, deeper into the ryokan, to a larger room in the center of the inn, a sort of communal great room, well-furnished with tatami mats, intricate shoji screens and low cherrywood tables full of antique vases. The center of the room was dominated by a large burbling pool of water dressed with mossy stones, a miniature footbridge and clumps of white lilly pads. Paper lanterns surrounded the pool, which was black as tea and well stocked with carp and some kind of bright golden

fish.

The headmistress pointed to the pool, taking Kitchens by the ragged tails of his shredded olive field jacket. "Mizu ni norikomu...climb in water, please--"

The chambermaid tapped Kitchens' other arm, concern on her face. "Kyugi, dangan wa kore no buso saseru ni atatta!"

"Hai, hai!" the headmistress barked impatiently. She felt Kitchens' other arm all along its length. Still oozing blood. "You have more wounds. Bullet from pisutoru?"

Kitchens shook his head. "Just scrapes and scratches, I think."

"I fix. Later." She pantomimed a picture of the major lying down on the pebbly bottom of the pool. "Quick!" She handed him a slice of bamboo one of the men had cut from the decorative stalks surrounding the water. "You breathe--there!"

Kitchens realized the headmistress meant to hide him by submerging him in the pool. He was about to object but more commotion and the sound of bamboo screens being thrashed behind the inn quickly changed his mind.

With help, Kitchens lowered himself into the cold water of the pool; he stuck the bamboo shoot in his mouth and lay back tenderly on the pebble bottom. After his head and body were fully submerged, a stream of bubbles broke at the water's surface. The chambermaid and the headmistress swished water lilly pads around to cover the major's face and neck, hiding the bubbles.

Beneath the cold water, Kitchens closed his eyes and tried to relax. He concentrated on inhaling and exhaling with some kind of regular rhythm: slow and easy, slow and easy, stop shivering.... Something tickled his nose and he squinted open one eye.

It was one of the carp, nosing curiously around his face, whiskers gently brushing his skin.

Great. Just friggin' great.

A minute later, the Yakuza gunmen burst into the inn with furious commotion.

Though Kitchens heard only muffled voices, there was no mistaking the harsh tone of his pursuers. Even through six inches of water and a face full of lilly pads, he could hear furniture being shoved roughly aside, overturned, something heavy falling--it crashed with a splintering sound--perhaps one of the vases, then more furniture being tossed about, all leavened with shouts, curses, harsh strings of guttural Japanese and a few whimpers thrown in. Then came a thud, flesh on flesh, and Kitchens both heard and felt the unmistakable thump of a body falling hard to the wooden floor.

He lay very still, not even daring to breathe, while the ruckus ebbed and flowed around the inn.

Then, for a time, he heard no more and wondered. Should I raise up? He tried and failed again to calm himself, again concentrating on breathing, slow and regular, but his heart wasn't listening, instead it was kicking around inside his chest like a suffocating canary in a cage. And to make matters worse, the damn curious carp came back for another leisurely sniff around his face.

Just when he could stand the strain no longer, someone's face appeared shimmering through the water and the gauzy lilly pads. The bamboo shoot was rudely jerked right out of his mouth.

Kitchens froze for a second, then thrashed up out of the water, ready to fight--

"Okay, now--" whispered the headmistress. The solemn nest of wrinkles around her eyes tightened with concern. "You get up...isoide! Be quick..."

Kitchens climbed out of the pool and shook himself dry. The headmistress had thoughtfully provided a few heated towels. She and the chambermaid assisted in the job of getting him dry. He was shivering. On the other side of the pool, draped over the edge of the footbridge, was one of the men, the younger one. The other man was cleaning up a face that had seemed to have run head-on into a very hard fist. That was the thump he had heard from beneath the water.

Kitchens thanked the ladies of the Three Blossoms Inn.

"Sorry...I was in a car. Got cut off by these pissants. They started shooting--"

The kyugigishara shushed him with a finger to his lip. "You rest. Come...take bath--"

It was tempting, but Kitchens was determined to get after his attackers as soon as he could.

"Thanks, just the same, ma'am, but I need to make a phone call. You have a telephone--" he pantomimed the acting of making a call.

The chambermaid was disappointed there would be no bath but the headmistress gently guided the still-dripping Army officer through more sliding screens to a tiny nook in one corner of the inn. A white phone had been placed in a polished and lacquered table, surrounded by ferns and blossoms, as if it were an object of veneration, or a sumptuous dish about to be served. Kitchens smiled at the fastidiousness of his hosts. After several weeks in country, he still hadn't gotten use to being treated with such courtesy.

Far cry from Brussels and SACEUR, he thought. He picked up the receiver, checked the number of the CID office at the Dai Ichi and waited for the English language operator to come on the line. He gave her his ID number and waited for the patch-through.

After a few rings, Gilruth's sleepy voice came on the line. His mouth was full, probably stuffed with doughnuts.

"CID...Major Gilwoof--"it came out sounding like that.

"Gilly, its Kitchens. Are you alone?"

"Major Kitchens...where the hell are you? Yeah I'm alone...I've been trying to ring the car for the past hour...what the hell's going on?"

Kitchens cleared his throat, nodded politely to the headmistress, who ducked behind a screen. "Gilly, you're never gonna believe this...listen up--" And he spent the next five minutes describing what had just happened on the ride back from Atsugi.

Gilruth was full of nothing but for cryin' out loud's and you gotta be kidding me's, when Kitchens was done.

"You all right? You gonna live...I can ring up med corps in a second, have a doc and some pretty nurses down there in no time."

"Forget it. I'll live. Just cuts and scratches and bruises. And some carp whiskers in my teeth."

"What the--"

"Never mind. Come get me." He described where he was, and gave him the address of the Three Blossoms Inn. "Get a detail from the tokko here too. Tokyo Metro cops will want to secure this place as a crime scene. I'll tell 'em what I can. But they don't need to know anymore than necessary. Gallant Flag's not their case."

"Then what?"

"We go on to Yokota. I got a beef with this LaSalle guy. And it's starting to get personal now."

Gilruth was at the Three Blossoms Inn in less than an hour. A few minutes after he arrived, several squads of detectives and officers from Tokyo Metropolitan Police showed up.

Kitchens identified himself to the tokko and related the basics of what had happened. The Special Bureau detective in charge was named Kurobayoshi. Like all tokko operatives, he wore white gloves, a peculiar Japanese custom that made Kitchens think he was in a hospital. Kurobayoshi probed rather tentatively, respectful of Kitchens' Army background. Informed that the Army was also investigating, Kurobayoshi was the picture of apology and circumspection. From that point on, the detective squad satisfied itself with statements from the headmistress and her inn staff.

Investigative basics out of the way, Kitchens excused himself from the crime scene and grabbed Gilruth, who was still wide-eyed at some of the details.

"Friggin Yakuza goons, that's what it was," he said. They climbed into Gilruth's car and headed away from Ikebukuro, north along the Fukaya Highway, towards sprawling Yokota Air Base, thirty miles north of Tokyo. "Jap underground Mob types. Ruthless bastards, too. Somebody hired them."

Kitchens nodded silently, watching the terraced hillsides with their meticulous rice paddies and stone borders, torii shrines and miniature temples, slide by. "I've only made about three dozen enemies since I got here."

"Ten to one, it's Tetsuko-san. He's got motive, probably has connections to these clowns all over Japan. I'll run your description through Japan National Police, see if they can make an ID on it. Trouble is--"

"Yeah, yeah , I know," Kitchens had to chuckle at Kurobayoshi's complaint. "My descriptions fit half the population of Japan. Jesus--"

The drive to Yokota took an hour. Nestled on the far reaches of the Kanto Plain, the base was tucked in the foothills of a misty range of low hills, the Okutama Mountains. A briskly running stream, the Tama River, coiled through the base complex itself, coming to within three miles of one of the runways.

Far Eastern Air Forces' Bomber Command housed its 13th Air Force at Yokota. Less a headquarters than Atsugi, Yokota hosted dozens of B-29s, B-26s, several fighter squadrons and all the support groups needed to manage a combat air base in wartime.

Air operations against targets in Korea ran day and night off the parallel eight-thousand foot runways at the base of the Okutama hills.

The first obstacle would be the Air Police detail at gate security post number one, the Fukaya Highway entrance. Gilruth pulled up to the guard shack and handed over his and Kitchens' ID folders.

The sergeant of the detail was about to call in an ID check on the shack's phone when Kitchens remembered the authorizing letters he'd gotten from General Marshall, the SecDef. He still had the letters in his jacket and pulled them out. Gilruth passed them over.

Both men then had the pleasure of watching the sergeant's brusque manner do a complete about-face. The letter had been written on Department of Defense stationery, with George Marshall's personally scrawled signature at the bottom.

"Of course, Major...this will be completely satisfactory. Will the Major be needing an escort while on base?"

"That won't be necessary," Kitchens informed him. Not on your life, pal. He knew perfectly well any assigned escort would be little more than a glorified spy anyway. "I'm trying to track down General LaSalle. Clayton LaSalle."

"Sure thing, Major. I'll just check the duty roster...." The sergeant--Gilruth called him 'Smiley' as he seemed to be all teeth now--hustled into his guard shack and made a quick phone call. He nodded, hung up and returned to the gatepost. "The General is on base, sir. Out on the flight line right now. I'm told he's prepping a '29 for a short check ride."

"Swell. Which way?"

Sergeant 'Smiley' gave directions to the ramp servicing Runway 28 Left to Gilruth. The gate arm was swung up and Gilruth sped off toward a long row of hangars.

After making a few inquiries, LaSalle was located alongside one of the B-29 bombers, halfway down the line. A crew chief several aircraft away had referred to it as Aces Wild. Indeed, as Gilruth pulled alongside a pair of jeeps and a fuel truck near the portside wing, Kitchens could make out a winning hand of cards in a pair of greasy 'mechanic's' hands stenciled on the nose of the plane.

A small knot of men were bent over some gear on the tarmac below the nose hatch, sorting out parts.

LaSalle had been preflighting Aces Wild, readying the ship for a quick hop down to Kadena. He wanted to check out approach and takeoff patterns at the newly refurbished Mishida strip. He'd just flown in from Guam and motored over to Yokota from Atsugi, where Robert Blount had first recognized him.

LaSalle turned out to be tall, balding, kind of rangy, with hard blue eyes and a face that seemed somehow disjointed to Kitchens, as if it were made of mismatched pieces that didn't always fit together. Kitchens didn't know the ground crews sometimes called the general 'Scarecrow' behind his back, though the moniker would have made sense had he known it.

He introduced himself and Gilruth. On hearing the connection with Army CID, the 'Scarecrow' scowled with suspicion.

"You have some business here, Major?" LaSalle bent back down to the balky oleo strut he'd been troubleshooting with his crew chief.

Kitchens figured he was about to wander into a field of land mines. Nothing like Army-Air Force rivalry to get a conversation started, especially with a flag rank O-8.

"Just following up a case I'm on, General." He wondered whether he ought to play his hand with Marshall's letter. Next to a plane called Aces Wild, he thought better of it. "I'm checking into some suspected security leaks and threats to Operation Greenhouse, sir. I heard you just came from there."

LaSalle was tinkering hard, hands fidgeting around the landing gear actuator on the cement. "I was only an observer. Detailed for the first shot. That's all you need to know, son."

"Yes, sir. I was wondering if you heard anything unusual around the atoll while you were there."

"Only a big explosion, Major. That was pretty unusual...not everyday you see an atom bomb go off."

"No, sir. Did you get any briefings on Gallant Flag while you were there?"

The words had an electrifying effect on the General, though someone less observant might have missed it. His hands suddenly fumbled a wrench and it clattered to the tarmac. LaSalle's back stiffened, then he hurriedly resumed his inspection.

"May I remind the Major that mission operations are strictly confidential and on a need-to-know basis. You are not cleared to know anything, Major Kitchens."

Now's the time to play my hand, he thought. "This is my clearance, sir." He handed over Marshall's letter to the General, who scanned it with a deepening scowl.

LaSalle angrily shoved the authorizing letter back. "Just what kind of stunt are you trying to play, mister?"

Kitchens had told himself it was perfectly rational for an Army major to accuse an Air Force general of treason. "It's just the case, sir. We have reason to believe that elements of the 13th Air Force are involved in a conspiracy. The Secretary thought you should know."

LaSalle was unsure whether to glare back at the Army officer or return to his maintenance work. He wound up doing both. "Why haven't I heard anything about this through General Stratemeyer's office? And what kind of conspiracy are you talking about anyway?"

"The case is being held pretty closely, sir. I doubt 13th Air Force has all that many details." Kitchens eyed the rest of the ground crew, all helping LaSalle fix a balky bracket inside the strut mechanism. "It's kind of sensitive. Perhaps, if we could talk--"

"I'm busy, son. Say what you have to say right here. Or get the hell out of the way."

Kitchens shuffled around a toolbox, stepped over some spare parts lined up on the tarmac. He was well aware the ground crew was drilling holes in his back with their eyes.

"I could request a formal hearing, sir. If that would be easier. Through proper channels."

Good idea, son. That'd probably take weeks. LaSalle leaned on a wrench to help his crew chief break loose a recalcitrant bolt. Finally, the bolt gave way with a loud crack. "How the hell does an Army officer wind up investigating the Air Force anyway?"

"I've been asking myself the same question, General."

"Don't tell me...you're just following orders."

Kitchens waited a few moments, while a B-29 from Yokota's 92nd Bomb Group ran its big Wright Cyclones up to full takeoff power and raced down the active runway.

"Something like that, sir. If I could just have a moment--"

"Son, use your eyes...I don't have a moment. We're trying to fix a landing gear strut here. There is a war on, you know."

"Yes, sir."

"You got any questions for me, you drop 'em off at Squadron Ops--right over there--"LaSalle waved a greasy hand at a glassed-in office below the control tower. "Colonel Wesley'll be happy to oblige you."

The two men parried with each other for awhile longer, until it was plain that LaSalle was losing patience with this bulldog of a groundpounder.

Kitchens decided he needed more ammo. He decided to tip his hand a little further. "Look, General, the President and General Marshall are fully briefed on this case. They know there's a conspiracy to bring unauthorized weapons into Korea. We know some of the facts, but not all. This investigation will eventually get to the bottom of this thing. And anybody in the way is going to go down in flames, even if they're not directly involved."

LaSalle didn't look up. He concentrated on his wrench. "Colorful way with words, Major. Threatening a flag-rank officer isn't the best career advice either."

Kitchens had chewed over that for days. But it was pointless to retreat now. He'd already stuck his neck out too far; might as well get it chopped off now. Spilling more facts might be bad legal strategy in the civilian world. But sometimes it primed the pump and loosened reluctant tongues.

"General, we know the bombs are supposed to be brought into Japan first, probably Kobe. We just don't know how or when. But it's soon. Operation Greenhouse is involved. We think we know which bombs are going to be diverted too. We know some of those involved are part of SCAP staff. General, I can go through channels or we can talk now. Which is it going to be?"

LaSalle dropped his wrench again. His crew chief handed it back. He stood up. Even Kitchens could see his face had changed.

"Is this some kind of accusation, Major?"

"Certainly not, sir. I'm just investigating leads. Some of my leads point here, to a source here at Yokota. I thought you'd want to know."

"Inside 13th Air Force? Impossible."

"I'm not really at liberty to say, sir." He looked around at the ground crew. "At least, not here."

For a very long moment, Clayton LaSalle squinted hard at Kitchens, a scarecrow with an evil eye, taking full measure of this persistent pissant major. His mouth slowly tightened, a decision in the process of being made and set.

"I don't know anything about this conspiracy theory of yours, mister. Sounds like somebody's overactive imagination to me. Too many comic books around here. If there really is an investigation--now if you'll excuse me, I'm busy preflighting this aircraft." He wiped his hands off on a greasy rag and pitched it into the toolbox. "Major, any further questions will have to be officially authorized and come through the chain of command. You do remember the chain of command, I presume? Personally signed off by Stratemeyer." With that, the general hoisted himself up the ladder into the ground hatch, disappearing into the cockpit of Aces Wild.

Kitchens knew he couldn't follow. End of conversation.

Moments later, the four-bladed props of engines number one and three coughed, turned over and belched blue smoke as they caught and began rotating.

The crew chief angrily waved Kitchens out of the startup area. The Major returned to his staff car and climbed in. Gilruth said nothing. They sped off toward the gate, Kitchens deep in thought.

He knew he had just struck home with General Clayton LaSalle. He had no proof, but he did have hunches. And hunches often cast light into dark corners where little furry things like facts hid, just waiting to be dug out.

No question about it: Clayton LaSalle was up to his hard blue eyeballs in the whole mess.

One more piece of a hell of a confusing puzzle, he told himself. But where exactly did this piece fit in? Kitchens figured the next step would be to sit down with 'Fred' Trofimenko, maybe Jiang too, in some neutral place and compare notes.

So now I go from accusing an Air Force O-8 of conspiracy to aiding and abetting the enemy and consorting with declared Russian and Red Chinese spies.

Kitchens, somewhere you've definitely taken a wrong turn on the career track...

Gilruth was mercifully silent, accelerating out of the base onto the Fukaya Highway, still occasionally glancing over, waiting for Kitchens to unload the details.

"Hey, I'm thinking, pal. Just leave me be for awhile longer."

Gilruth settled in for the long drive back to the Dai Ichi. "No sweat. I didn't know if you were still alive in there or just part of the walking dead."

"Ask me again after my court-martial."

Did they have enough evidence for the higher-ups to move in yet? Did they have enough hard evidence to shut down Greenhouse and clean house in MacArthur's empire?

It was a question with no real answer. In the civilian world, the right answer was no, but military justice was different. In the world of stars and stripes, two and two didn't always add up. Sometimes it equaled five. Sometimes three, depending on who your C/O was. Military justice was a world full of foxholes and land mines and enemies, not the least of which was the system itself. Making the system work was more than half the battle.

Kitchens shook his head at the power, the arrogance of authority and independence SCAP seemed to enjoy in the Far East. Bad enough in peacetime, it bordered on criminal in war.

There really was no firm evidence he knew of directly implicating MacArthur himself. Without that, Kitchens realized, Washington felt powerless to act. The system just seemed to swallow everything thrown at it. Nobody wanted to relieve a sitting field commander in the middle of a war. Especially a legend like MacArthur.

But that was exactly Truman's conundrum. If he didn't act, and soon, atom bombs could be falling on North Korea, or China, or Russia.

On the long ride back downtown, Kitchens grew increasingly uneasy and anxious with foreboding.

"Gilly, this case is starting to slip away from me."

Monday, 1-15-51

Okinawa

1:45 p.m.

Aces Wild shuddered as another wind gust slammed the aircraft sideways, shallowing out her descent toward the lone runway at Mishida Island. Peeking in and out of the swollen clouds and rain squalls, Mishida was little more than a sore thumb in the middle of the ocean--a black, volcanic outcrop of bony ridges with a central plateau cradling a barebones airstrip carved out of the rock. The weather had been dicey all afternoon, rain and strong crosswinds making any landing attempt on the isolated strip a white-knuckle affair.

Clayton LaSalle was in the left-hand seat. He had a firm grip on the yoke as the B-29 bounced and squirmed and shuddered again. LaSalle kept his eyes fixed on the erratic cloud breaks, hoping this time to get a better visual on the runway when they finally bellied out of the bottom of the clouds.

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph...." he muttered to himself.

"Two-fifty," called Dave Layton, the co-pilot LaSalle had borrowed from the 307th Bomb Group.

"Flaps forty--"

Layton cranked the handle a notch further, studying the indicator. "Flaps forty," he confirmed.

"A little more juice, too. I'm shallowing again--" LaSalle could see the runway at last and the threshold was high, two ticks above the 'bar' on his birdcage windscreen.

Layton nudged the four throttle handles on his side forward. Aces Wild surged forward, picking up speed, shaking from nose to tail like a big wet dog.

"Come on, baby---come on up...." LaSalle coaxed the ship back onto its descent path, fighting gusty winds, zeroing out all remaining trim, as he struggled to get a bead on the runway and drive her onto the tarmac. Already, they had made several go-arounds and this approach might well be their last chance. The weather was worsening by the minute.

If Aces Wild couldn't find her way down to the runway this time around, they'd have to call it a day and divert over to Kadena. LaSalle didn't want to do that; too many questions would be asked. Better to slip in and out of Mishida unnoticed, away from curious eyes.

"--one ten--" Layton's voice had risen a notch.

Sheets of rain were lashing the windscreen now but even through the rivulets of water, LaSalle could make out enough of the re-built airstrip to drive the aircraft onto the ground.

"Under one hundred, down ten--"

"Airspeed?"

"One fifty, General." It was almost a question from Layton.

"I'm going to really pile it on, really smoke her in, Dave. I can't hold course any other way."

Layton subconsciously tightened his lap belt. "You're the boss, General. Altitude is now eighty--"

The wet tarmac loomed up awfully quick and Aces Wild bounced hard when her main gear first kissed the concrete, jolting and jitterbugging her way down the runway; LaSalle and Layton both stood on the brakes hard, blowing several tires before they'd bled off enough speed to coast to the far end of the runway. As he pedaled the big aircraft through a sharp left turn, LaSalle saw three more aircraft, including another B-29, lined up wingtip to wingtip along the ramp, before a pair of newly erected hangars. Several knots of people huddled out of the rain in the open doors of the larger hangar, watching anxiously as LaSalle taxied toward the reception committee.

LaSalle and his co-pilot both allowed themselves the luxury of a decent breath of air and a satisfied smile.

"Really gets the blood pumping, doesn't it, Major?"

Layton mopped his forehead. "It does that, sir. Just between you and me, I'd like to see a homing radio beacon added to the field's equipment, before we try that again."

"Amen to that, son. I'll make a note of it."

LaSalle tucked Aces Wild smartly in line with the other aircraft, and feathered her props.

At Mishida's main hangar, LaSalle found Kit Carson from Yokota's 19th Bomb Group already there, with seven other crews, all of whom had hitched a ride over with Carson on his aircraft. Don Chambers was also in attendance, late of the Hellzapoppin'.

Carson grinned at the sweat still beaded up on LaSalle's forehead. He saluted. "Better than Coney Island, huh, General?" There was a scattering of chuckles around the hangar.

LaSalle grinned, saluting back. "No complaints, men. I got my money's worth." He shook hands all around. "The gang's all here?"

"Ready for the deluxe tour of this garden spot, sir. Plus, the mess tent's already set up in the back there--" he indicated a line of tables along one wall, with a big iron kettle already bubbling over at one end. "I believe beef stew's on the menu today."

"At least some of my orders are followed," LaSalle joked. "We'll grab some chow later. Follow me, boys. I'll show you around Mishida."

The tour lasted an hour and ended up back at the main hangar for lunch. Mishida was a barebones airstrip and base, originally hacked out of the rock by the Japanese and briefly occupied by the 3rd Marines in the campaign for Okinawa back in June '45. A year later, it had already been abandoned to the elements. Operation Gallant Flag had given the place new life, with infusions of money, men and materials from Omisumi construction. It was still a crude forward base, not unlike the dusty steel-matted runways and plywood shacks of the K-bases in Korea itself.

For all that, though, Mishida was valuable real estate for Gallant Flag. It was isolated, nearly forgotten, straightforward to refurbish and, most importantly, close to the Chinese mainland and probable targets for the operation's Mark VI weapons.

Lunch and wisecracks done, LaSalle herded his volunteers to a ready room off the hangar floor. He found a wooden packing crate to use as a stage and tacked up some Far Eastern Air Forces tactical maps on the walls around the room.

"Men, I can report that Gallant Flag is on track and on schedule. I asked you to come down here to familiarize yourself with the launch base and learn some of the mission particulars in a more secure environment. That business about a seminar on Red air defenses was just a cover story." LaSalle stepped off the crate and began pacing around the room. "You're all volunteers. You're all top notch pilots and you're here because you want to make a real difference. I'll cut the motivational crap. This is no pep talk. We've got a great chance to change the course of the war, save our buddies' asses and kick the Commies to hell and back. If we're successful, we'll likely alter the balance of power in the Far East for generations. If we fail, our leaders are going to throw us to the wolves. This operation has the full support and blessing of General MacArthur. However, the nature and the high risk of the mission necessitate extremely tight security. I'm sure you're already well aware of that. If we fail, SCAP will disavow any knowledge of the operation. That's to preserve operational flexibility in the future." LaSalle stopped at one of the maps. It was a map of Manchuria, showing G-2's estimate of Red supply and troop concentrations. All of it untouched by bombs...so far. "Atom bombs aren't playtoys. Just having them here in theater is controversial as hell. So keep your traps shut. We fly this mission right and all the critics, the doubters and the Commie-lovers will never be heard from again. The war will be over."

"Hey, General," a voice erupted from the back of the room, "we gonna hit Peking, or not?"

LaSalle smiled at the outburst. "Since you asked, the answer is probably yes. Peking is certainly one of the targets being considered." He located a pointer, and tapped on a map of the mainland. "Also Shenyang, up here in Manchuria...big PLA staging base for Korea. Port Arthur on the coast. Also Tsingtao here on the Yellow Sea. Big PLA fleet base there. Just remember one thing: we're getting five devices. That means five targets. We have to be selective, chose 'em for maximum effect."

"What about our target folders?"

LaSalle came back to his packing crate 'stage.' "I'm getting to that. We're working with the Nationalists in Formosa right now on that. They've got a ground reconnaissance unit ready to be inserted to provide more specific data on targets. I know what you need: altitudes for the bomb run, escape headings, weather data, air defenses, terrain features. Trust me, men, you'll have all that in the next week or so."

Chester "Kit" Carson spoke up. "General, when can we get started? Delivering atom bombs is a whole new ball game. I don't think any of us has any idea of what's involved."

"Good point, Kit. The bombs will be available and in country in less than a week, if all goes well. The Major's right: you all need training on delivering atomic devices, and you're going to get it. You already saw the loading pits dug out back of the hangars. That's for hoisting the bombs up into your bomb bay...the only way to do it, they're so heavy. I've already got two '29's already assigned: Eight-Ball and Hellzapoppin'. They're both good aircraft...you'll all train on them, approach techniques, the post-drop turn, escape techniques, all of it. I've set up an accelerated training schedule. Now that you're all here on Mishida, you're here for the duration. You've got your quarters and your training aircraft. In about ten days, the other three '29's I've requisitioned will be flown into the island."

"Who's going to fly 'em?"

"You are," LaSalle explained. "The requisitioned aircraft are scattered all around the Far East and Japan." He gave them the aircraft tail numbers. "One's over here at Kadena. The second's at Misawa, northern Japan. Paperwork says it's in the shop for engine work. That's a cover story. The last plane's at Guam, Andersen Field. Supporting Operation Greenhouse."

"Five planes, five bombs," Don Chambers muttered from the front row. He just shook his head. "Sure as hell ain't like the old Twentieth Air Force days, is it?"

"No it isn't, Don. But the aircraft movements have already been cleared with Thirteenth Air Force. MacArthur and Stratemeyer signed off on them just the other day." LaSalle knew that wasn't exactly true but the men didn't have to know all the details. "All we have to do is go get them. And getting the rest of the fleet here to Mishida is a top priority, almost as important as getting the bombs here."

"How will the bombs be brought in, General?"

LaSalle rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I'm not at liberty to divulge that just yet. It's very sensitive, very hush-hush. But they'll be here. There are a hell of a lot of dedicated people working on that end. Our job is to be ready to go when they're delivered."

"I'm ready to go now," Carson declared. There was a chorus of assents.

LaSalle ended the briefing. "D-day is currently planned to be January 25, which is a Thursday. That's just ten days from now. We have to be ready to fly and drop by then. If not, the UN lines may collapse completely. I suggest we get some rest today and tonight. Weather permitting, I want crews cycling through our training aircraft like an assembly line tomorrow. Takeoffs and landings, one after another. We'll do that for a few days, familiarize ourselves with winds and weather around here. Then, we'll tackle bomb run procedures and the post-drop turn. We'll use the base here as a bomb target, or rather the mountains to the west of us. By the way, that post-drop turn's a doozey, gentlemen. One hundred and thirty five degree descending turn at full power. It'll knock your socks off."

LaSalle dismissed the men. To a one, they all realized how tight the schedule was. But they were grimly determined and proud to be part of an elite force that could change the course of the war.

None of them knew that it was totally unauthorized and illegal.
CHAPTER 21

Tuesday, January 16, 1951

Aboard the U.S.S. Chesapeake

The Western Pacific

5:35 p.m.

John Ward was nervous, chain-smoking again, and anxiously scanning the sun-drenched western horizon for any ships trailing them. He knew one ship was out there, somewhere. Sonar had reported a continuing contact with what was thought to be a commercial freighter, which had been on a parallel course for the last several hours.

"Almost like she's shadowing us," Sonar had added.

Only John Ward knew how true Sonar's half-joking suspicions really were.

Chesapeake had been at sea for nearly two days now, having weighed anchor at Eniwetok with Sunday afternoon's high tide, bearing east with the five 'duds' of Operation Greenhouse, Albert Ranier's suspect Mark VI devices with the layer-cake core design. The ship had no escort. After some discussions with Admiral Blanchard, it was deemed unnecessary as the ship's return to San Francisco was expected to be routine.

Ward checked his watch for the thousandth time, then flicked a cigarette butt into the sea and lit another Pall Mall. The commercial freighter that Sonar had been following was no ordinary cargo vessel, though only he knew that. Almost certainly, it was the Orient Star, from Masuhiro Tetsuko's Omisumi North Star Line. On seeing the freighter, an ordinary seamen might well have wondered what sort of cargo the two-stacker was carrying. But to ask that was to ask the wrong question.

The real concern was not what Orient Star was carrying now. The question was what would she be carrying tomorrow.

Another time check. It was approaching dusk, just after five o'clock, and the tropics went dark quick at this time of year. In less than two hours, Ward alone knew, the Chesapeake would suffer a boiler room casualty. Her feed piping for number two boiler would suffer a catastrophic flange break and Chesapeake's engines would go offline indefinitely for damage assessment and repairs.

It was in fact no accident. A great deal of planning and mid-watch sabotage had been necessary to ensure that the piping would break at the right time, in the right way, so as to disable the ship's propulsion without causing any real casualties or permanent damage.

The last thing John Ward wanted to do was permanently damage his own Navy career. He was proud to be a part of the secret operation his friend Paul Craft had described, proud to help General MacArthur kick the snot out of the Reds in Korea and show the Communists what Americans were made of. He just didn't want to get anybody hurt in the process or raise too many eyebrows at what was sure to be an interesting inquiry board at Seventh Fleet Pearl Harbor, when it was all over.

What John Ward didn't know was one item of information that might have caused him considerable pause in continuing the 'operation', had he been aware of it.

Chesapeake and Orient Star were in fact not the only vessels transiting the western Pacific that afternoon, a few hundred miles east of Wake Island. Sixty miles behind Tetsuko's freighter, slicing through the seas at fourteen knots, was another ship, the submarine Weilan, formerly known as the Sunfish.

The refurbished Gato-class fleet boat was closing fast on the sound of Chesapeake's twin screws thrashing through the water.

A few minutes after 1950 hours that evening, John Ward was in his stateroom when alarm klaxons sounded throughout the length of the ship. There had been a noticeable tremor in the ship's motion seconds before. Ward shot out of his bunk even before the Officer of the Deck could ring him up. He dashed out of his stateroom and made the bridge in seconds.

"What the hell--?"

Lieutenant Scates, OOD, was yelling into several phones and talkers at once. "Captain...it's the engine room—boiler's blown! Looks like number two, maybe more...."

Ward grabbed a mike and toggled 4MC, the damage control circuit. "Damage control...get a report up here! Engine room casualty...what's going on down there?"

Static burst through the line, then shouts, finally a harried voice could be heard over a shrieking squeal of steam and high-pressure air.

"Boiler number two, Captain...there's a break in the piping...we got steam all over the place...burn casualties..."

Ward swore under his breath. The flange wasn't supposed to give way completely, just unseat enough to vent steam and bring Boiler Number Two below operating pressure.

"Where's Lieutenant Marks?" Marks was the Engineering Officer of the Watch, normally on station at the propulsion plant control board.

"Down below the condenser, sir, helping out with casualties!"

"I want a report...NOW! Tell him to get back to his post!"

"Aye, sir!"

Ward waved at the bridge talker. "All engines, stop. Zero revolutions. Secure the boilers."

The talker replied, "All engines stop, aye, sir. Indicate zero revolutions." The telegraph annunciator didn't move at all for a few moments, then slid around answering the bridge command. The talker added, "Engine room answers all stop. Indicating zero revolutions. Number one and two boilers secured and offline."

"Very well." Ward dashed off the bridge and made his way aft and down three deck levels, scurrying past crewmen heading to and from watch. He came to a ladder that descended into the midst of the engine room. "Down ladder, down ladder!" he yelled, half-sliding down the rungs. "Make a hole, make a hole...." He dropped to the grating at the propulsion plant control station and saw the first burn casualties being littered forward toward sick bay.

Two engine room techs and a machinist mate had been scalded over their face and hands with high pressure steam at a temperature of nearly 220 degrees. Even as medics and other hands bore the stretchers out, Ward could hear the shriek of steam expanding in the compartment aft. The boilers had been secured moments before, but residual steam in the piping continued to flow out of the break. He pushed his way into the boiler room itself, and felt the roasting heat of humid, steam-laden air immediately.

A damage-control party had already hustled into the maze of piping surrounding the boiler and condenser compartments, trying to repair the breech. The whine of escaping steam made communication difficult. Ward hunted down Lieutenant Marks, the EEOW. Marks was overseeing a pipe cutting detail upstream of the break.

Ward yelled in Marks' ear. "HOW LONG?"

Marks' face was red and blistered, slick with sweat. "WE'VE GOT TO ISOLATE THIS SECTION FIRST. PRESSURE'S DROPPING BUT THE STEAM'S STILL FLOWING AT NEARLY THREE HUNDRED PSI. PLUS THE RELIEF VALVE BACK THERE FAILED. I STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT CAUSED THAT!"

Ward nodded. He knew what had caused multiple valve and vent failures. For the last few nights, he had worked for several hours over the course of the mid-watch, he and the ship's engineer Lieutenant Commander Dale, to loosen the valve seats, just enough to keep them from operating properly. When steam pressure built to a certain level, the valve body would jam. The cascading steam would have to go somewhere, and with the feed pipe flange bolts loosened, it was just a matter of time before nature did the rest.

Damn!

Ward swore at himself. There weren't supposed to be any casualties like this. Now he had three first-degree burn cases in sick bay.

He headed out of the boiler room, working his way through on-rushing crewmen laying forward to lend assistance to the damage control parties. He wanted to see for himself just how bad the burn cases were.

Two miles west of Chesapeake's position, the Weilan had slowed its ten-knot approach and cautiously come right, circling forward of the Orient Star for a quick reconnaissance of the Navy auxiliary. Li Gao Chi was at the periscope well, eyes glued to the rubber eyepiece, as the boat maneuvered warily off Chesapeake's starboard quarter, keeping station at ten thousand yards. Li grinned at the sight, then ordered Bilbao, the exec, to bring her smartly around for a side-on firing solution, a spread of torpedoes directly abeam of Chesapeake's amidships funnels and superstructure.

Li didn't know the name of the Chesapeake's captain but whoever he was, he had done his job perfectly.

"She's dead in the water, friend. Dead as a whale...nothing coming out of her funnels at all. I have to compliment that captain. He's got guts."

"But no brains, eh Captain?" Bilbao laughed, coughing and took a look for himself when Li moved aside. "Beautiful. Perfect setup. Captain, Lucian's got a good solution. Track angle right on the beam at 90 degrees. No gyro angle. She's sitting there like a wounded duck, waiting for us to finish her off."

"I know, Bilbao. I know." Li frowned, impatiently checked the boats' clock. "But now we have to wait. They've got to get our little babies topside, so we can see them. And Orient Star's got to close, get within winching distance."

Bilbao spat a wad of something gross onto Weilan's control room deck. "My fingers itch for this one."

"Mine, too," Li said softly. "For five years, to have an American Navy ship in my sights..." he sighed heavily. "Revenge will be all the sweeter when it happens."

Commander John Ward was almost physically sick when he saw how bad the burn cases really were. The ship's surgeon already had them wrapped in cold wet towels, and orderlies were slathering ointments and salves on one man as saline solutions were readied for injection. He helped gently turn the worst of the cases, a machinist's mate named Ridley, getting the poor soul ready for a salt bath to try and replace some of the fluids he was losing. Two of the men were moaning quietly. Ridley's face was red and losing pallor. He was rapidly going into shock.

Ward left the sick bay crew and headed up toward the bridge. He knew what he had to do now but his heart just wasn't in it. The plan he had worked out with Craft called for him to radio in a distress call to Seventh Fleet, then disable the ship's HF band radio circuits. At that point, standard operating procedure for Chesapeake's atom bomb delivery mission was clear: remove the devices from their cradles down in Wonderland and rig the flotation collars around each bomb, then winch them topside and secure them to the foredeck, in a small paddock between the capstans. According to SOP, this would enable the devices to survive the ultimate casualty of any ship, unanticipated sinking, as the bomb casings in their flotation 'girdles' would then ride on the surface of the ocean, even as Chesapeake plummeted to the bottom of the Pacific. All hypothetical, Ward realized, in an antiseptic, fleet staff planning-kind of way, but procedure all the same. Writ as law.

The plain truth was stark: the ship and all hands were expendable. If worse came to worse, their loss was seen as easier to replace than five Mark VI implosion-fission atom bombs.

SOP dictated the move simply as a precaution in the event of certain power plant, maneuvering, communications and other severe casualties, including direct attack by armed warships or aircraft. That such attack was part of the overall plan was unknown to Ward. His agreement called only for a command decision after the radios were knocked out: to make use of the commercial freighter that had been tailing them, transfer the bombs, purely as a precaution, and await rescue from the Seventh Fleet. That was the part of the plan that gave Ward the greatest headache. Craft had insisted that the Board of Inquiry would never have the chance to question this decision, that the whole inquiry would be squashed at the highest levels. MacArthur would talk with CINCPAC and make it so. Ward was making a command decision at considerable variance with SOP. The standing orders of the fleet were quite explicit: Don't give up atom bombs to strange ships. Offload the weapons and let them float, then attend to the ship as conditions dictated.

Ward was going to intentionally violate this protocol and then trust his career, his freedom, perhaps his life to the promises of Brigadier General Paul Craft, U.S. Army. For a Navy man to do that was almost more that Ward could bear. He'd given a solemn promise to Craft and that was worth something. But deep inside, Ward figured he had never really expected the operation to pan out. Too complicated, too jerry-rigged, too much the odor of low-level staff pie-in-the-sky dreams toadying favor with the Old Man. Ward knew how that worked.

So when Orient Star appeared on their sonar scopes two days ago, Ward had been jolted back to the reality of the promises he had made to Craft. The operation really was going forward. Just as the general had promised, a freighter had begun shadowing them a day's sailing east of the Bonins. That was when Ward realized he had better make his decision: renege once and for all on his agreement with Craft and give up the satisfaction of helping kick Communist ass in a very personal way. Or get down to the boiler room on the mid-watch and do a little 'inspecting' of the feed piping, so that when the commercial freighter broadcast its coded alert message, the casualty would be ready to implement.

He had wrestled with that decision almost constantly ever since.

Ward barged into the radio room. "Get a message to Pearl, seaman. Send this: 'boiler room casualty in Number Two boiler. Engine plant offline. We are dead in the water with severe burn cases in sick bay...'" he paused, remembering the wording he had worked out in the still hours of the night, lying in his bunk, trying to figure out what Seventh Fleet's reaction would be--"'transferring food stores topside to prevent spoilage (that was Fleet code for getting the bombs ready), waiting for assistance...Chesapeake sends..."

The radioman was scribbling Ward's words down hurriedly. He looked up, puzzled. Ward didn't have time to explain.

"Send it now, HF Band. And when you're done, lay aft to the engine room. All hands are needed. I'll get Lieutenant Scates in here."

"Aye, sir, sending message now." The radioman turned back to his set and set the tone for transmission, HF Band, a frequency of thirty megacycles. He keyed the mike a few times, then began broadcasting. "Kaneohe Station, Chesapeake...Kaneohe Station, Chesapeake...standby for emergency transmission--"

Ward didn't wait around. As soon as the radio room was clear, he'd be back to cut out the 30-megacycle circuit and disable the rest of the ship's voice R/T systems. For the time being, he had to get back to the bridge and advise Wonderland to get their babies ready for a little trip.

The operation lasted several hours. Winching five eight-thousand pound atom bombs and all their safety gear, shielding, black boxes and support equipment up through four deck levels of the hull of a ship undergoing a boiler room/engine room casualty was not for the faint of heart. The hardest part of the operation was having to convince the ship's officers and the Marine detachment guarding Wonderland that SOP was being invoked and re-locating the bombs topside was necessary.

"It's a precaution," Ward explained time and again. "Suppose the boilers go and we breach the hull. Suppose more piping goes and we start taking on water. How long do you think it'll take for Wonderland to be flooded? It's all been thought out. The bombs have flotation rigs. Anything happens to the ship, they'll bob around out there like corks and all the Navy has to do is come and get them."

"What about the crew, Captain?" That was Scates, who'd been OOD when Boiler Number Two ruptured a line.

Ward did his best 'orders are orders' shrug. "My hands are tied, gentlemen. The crew's expendable. The bombs aren't. It's just a precautionary move anyway."

Lieutenant Petty was the engineering officer. His face was still red from spending the last hour helping shunt steam around and capping off the fractured pipe. "Begging the Captain's pardon, but all hands are working the engine room casualty. Can we really spare enough men for a rigging detail to do this? We're not in any danger of sinking."

"I know that, Mr. Petty, but we're not transporting egg crates here either. For national security reasons, the bombs have to be made safe. Now, let's get to it."

The discussion cut off, a rigging party was detailed to make the bombs ready and the logistics shipping hatches dogged open and secured, to clear a path for the winch to maneuver the first bomb topside. It was a ticklish operation. By the time the final device was hoisted up onto the deck and swung over the foredeck to be lashed down and 'girdled,' three hours had passed. It was approaching 0000 hours, midnight local time.

No response from the Seventh Fleet communications center at Kaneohe Station had been received. Nor would there be. John Ward had seen to that small detail when he had sent the radioman aft to help out with the boiler room. The wiring he had removed from the HF band sets would not be missed for quite some time.

Bilbao slammed the periscope handles shut. "That's it! Down scope! Chigi, go wake up the Captain." The quartermaster scurried aft through a hatch. Bilbao snatched up the mike and rang up the torpedo room.

"Torpedo room, conn. Make tubes one and two ready in all respects. Open outer doors."

"Torpedo room, aye, sir. Making tubes one and two ready in all respects. Opening outer doors."

"Very well." Bilbao keyed the mike. "Engine room, makes turns for eight knots. Helm, steady as she goes. This will be a submerged shot, full spread...set our depth at thirty five feet--"

Li Gao Chi appeared in the control room, nodding approvingly at Bilbao's commands.

The Portuguese master sailor backed away from the periscope. "All bombs are topside, Captain. The last was just secured. Our babies are waiting."

Li Gao Chi took the scope and snapped out the handles. "Has Orient Star been advised to start closing?"

"She has."

"Raise the aerial," Li commanded. "Another message to the Star: 'stand off at least five thousand yards. Move in after fish have bitten'--send it now!"

"Aye, Captain." Bilbao gave the order. In minutes, Orient Star had ceased her approach, and was standing to several miles astern of the Navy ship. Sonar reported the news to the Conn.

"Very well," Li said. He checked one last time with Macomb, the torpedo officer. "Angle on the bow?"

Macomb had a ready answer. "Fifteen degrees, Captain."

Li rubbed a bit of stubble on his chin. The shots would be perfect, like crossing the T from ancient days of naval yore. Weilan was roughly abeam of Chesapeake's amidships section. The only question now was whether the Navy ship could offload her special cargo in time. To Li Gao Chi, that was of small concern. The real triumph would be sending an American ship to the bottom, just like the glory days of '41 and '42.

"Torpedo tubes are ready?"

"Tubes one and two ready in all respects, Captain," Bilbao reported. The weapons board showed green lights at the bow of the boat.

"Very well. Range to target?

Bilbao polled the sonarman. "Two thousand yards, sir. Closing."

"Rudder amidships. Engine room, slow to one-third."

"Aye, sir." Bilbao passed the command on to the helm and engine room.

A few more seconds, only a few.... Li caught the expectant smile on Bilbao's face out of the corner of his eye. "Not long now, tomodachi. We've worked hard for this moment...let's enjoy it."

Bilbao grimaced, as if every second's delay was a pain. "I'd give up all the whores in Macao to press the fire button, Captain."

Li decided to take another look topside, make a final bearing check. "Up scope!" The metal tube hissed up and Li snapped the handles down. "Mark this bearing...zero...two...five degrees...that won't be necessary, Bilbao. With what Tetsuko-san's paying us, you can buy a thousand more whores. Maybe two thousand. Live like a dog in the gutter...down scope!" Li closed the handles even as the tube hissed back down into its well. "Myself, I just want to savor this moment."

"Not too long, Captain."

No, not too long...."Range to target?"

"One thousand yards."

"Fire one!"

Bilbao punched the button on the weapons board. Tube one discharged its weapon in a hiss of compressed air. Weilan rolled slightly to starboard as trim tanks compensated for the weight loss.

"One away!"

"Fire two!"

Bilbao pressed the next button on the firing panel.

"Two away!"

"Both weapons running, sir," called out the torpedo officer. "Hot and normal. Depth ten feet."

It was virtually a point blank shot at a stationary target. A classroom exercise. Li checked his watch, counting down the seconds. "Let's hope she doesn't go under too fast...give me the count...."

Bilbao called out the times to impact, both fish. "Ten seconds--"

Li stared down at the floor grating, re-living anxious moments of a long-range snap shot he'd gotten off once north of the Bonins, not far from this very spot. Late '42, an American oiler. Hit three times, she blew like a volcano and pasted low night-time storm clouds with a fiery pyre of flame like Hell's own hand reaching into the sky.

"--five seconds...four...three...two...one...."

Right at the calculated time, a dull explosion was heard, reverberating through the waters.

A cheer erupted in the control room.

"Direct hit, Captain!" Bilbao clenched a fist, then hugged Li Gao Chi tightly. They slapped each other on the back. Just then, fish number two slammed into Chesapeake's forehull...another terrific explosion, this one louder, ringing through the ocean like a gong of death. More cheers, handshakes, backslaps.

"Direct hit, again! Sounds like the forehull..." the sonarman listened intently, more explosions rending the waves. "Yep, that one's a boiler that just went...I hear the steam hissing...."

"Keep listening," Li told him. "Up scope. Slow to three knots and come right to zero nine zero degrees. I want to steer clear of any debris in the water."

"Coming right to zero nine zero degrees, aye, sir. Slowing to three knots."

Li peered through the eyepiece. Through the chop of the waves, he could see a smear of black oily smoke, issuing skyward dead ahead, then another ball of flame burst over the ship's deck and pieces of the superstructure flew everywhere.

The two torpedoes launched by Weilan had both struck home. Fish number one had breached the aft hull of Chesapeake just at the engine room below the water line, flooding the boiler room and engine room spaces in a few minutes. Fish number two had impacted the ship's forehull, just forward of the main stack, crushing in bulkheads in the vicinity of Wonderland, which was now thankfully empty of its contents. The five Mark VI atom bombs had already been hoisted topside and secured in their girdles, along with the plutonium core inserts, themselves encapsulated in buoyant containers. The entire operation had been completed and the rigging detail stood down for only a few minutes before the first torpedo impact.

Within minutes of the second impact, seawater breached more bulkheads in the forehull and flooding increased. The transport heeled hard to starboard and began settling bow down in the water. Straightaway, Chesapeake began a serious list to starboard.

Commander John Ward was momentarily stunned. He'd been on the bridge, overseeing the work of the rigging detail, making sure all fittings were lashed down securely, when the torpedoes hit. After ascertaining damage reports, he knew full well the ship was doomed. Just as he had outlined to the officers three hours before in the wardroom, the procedure was clear-cut.

He ordered the girdles and core capsules winched overboard and dropped into the sea.

Then, with mounting fury at the betrayal, he got on the ship's 1MC and announced, "All hands, prepare to abandon ship! All hands, prepare to abandon ship! Deck detail, execute special cargo recovery! Away the containers! All hands, prepare to abandon ship!"

He slammed the mike down in its cradle. Goddamn Paul Craft...what the hell was going on? Nobody said anything about this....

Then, he shot out of the bridge and flew down ladders to make his way to the forecastle, where the last of the girdles was swinging crazily under a winch about to come loose at its mount.

The ship's exec, Lieutenant Commander Egan, was running the deck detail. With the list of the ship, and fires and muffled explosions below, the crew was having a hard time getting the last eight-thousand pound atom bomb in its buoyant girdle clear of the gunwales. Ward ordered a bit of counterflooding to momentarily settle the ship more evenly in the water, even though he knew the procedure would increase the rate of sink.

"What about the core capsules?" he shouted in Egan's ear. Both men straddled a windlass hoist that had crashed to the deck, twisted metal, in the ship's violent thrashings.

The exec cupped a hand to Ward's ear. "All capsules away, sir! They're out there somewhere, bobbing around!"

"I'm having Comm hail that freighter now...try to get her in closer...maybe she can pick up the bombs--"

"The men too!--"Egan shouted back. He pointed to the starboard railing, now heeled over to within thirty feet of the water. Crewmen were dropping and diving off the catwalks and rails into the black foaming water by the dozens.

Chesapeake was sinking fast. Multiple fires belowdecks cast a flickering orange glow out onto the dark Pacific, illuminating scores of bobbing and thrashing heads, as crewmen continued abandoning ship, swimming and clawing for their lives. Whoever had pumped two fish into her had done a professional job. That made Ward even more furious at the attack, wondering what the hell had gone wrong. Craft never said anything about torpedoes...or was it a Red submarine that had caught them?

Ward hurried the deck crew along. Chesapeake only had a few more minutes...already she was heading down by the bow and foam and spray from the suction of her stoved forehull was roiling the waters, making footing treacherous for the deck hands. At last, the winch was swung out enough and the bomb released. It splashed into the ocean and sank for fifteen seconds, until the buoyancy of its girdle pushed the weapon back to the surface.

Be nice to have the same consideration for my men, Ward thought sourly.

He high-tailed it back up to the bridge, now heeled over so far that standing was difficult, to see about that commercial freighter.

The radio room was a shambles. The radioman was frantically trying to splice wires to get the HF Band to work, at the same time trying to steady himself as Chesapeake rolled further and further to starboard, shaking like a wounded animal with each bulkhead collapse below.

"It's no good, Captain!" the radioman yelled. A bloody gash had nearly closed his right eye. "The resistors and connectors are shot to hell! And the crystal's damaged too!"

He looked up frustrated, about to cry. "We're hailing that freighter but she's taking her damn sweet time closing!"

"Maybe she's picking up survivors," Ward said. "Try the wireless...we got to get a message to Pearl!"

But the wireless was shot too, damaged with flying debris in the initial explosions of the second fish.

At that moment, Chesapeake shuddered violently underneath them, knocking both men to the deck. At twenty-eight thousand tons, the Navy auxiliary was a medium-sized transport for dry and bulk cargo and stores, part of the Seventh Fleet's at-sea replenishment service, now detailed to logistical support of the atom bomb tests of Operation Greenhouse. Despite her tonnage, she was steadily heeling over, losing way, losing her struggle with the forces dragging her below the waves.

The shudder had been caused by the collapse of multiple bulkheads amidships, a collapse so violent that the outer frames of the ship had rent and torn apart, allowing thousands of tons of seawater to flood into the interior of the ship.

So violent had the shudder been, that the occupants of the bridge and radio room, including Ward and the radioman, had been thrown against the interior bulkhead separating the compartments just as the force of inrushing seawater had pulled the compartments apart at the frame members. The captain of the Chesapeake and the radioman of the watch had been pulled down into a collapsing maelstrom of thrashing steel beams and plates, tossed about like toys by the force of the Pacific waters crashing into the innards of the ship.

Mercifully, both men died instantly.

Thirty five hundred yards away, Li Gao Chi watched the death struggle of the Navy transport through Weilan's periscope eyepiece. It was a satisfying sight and he and Bilbao had taken turns exulting at the carnage, the pyres of flames, the cries of the survivors in the oily waters, the steady submerging of the auxiliary below the black Pacific. The sight brought back memories of the good hunting days of '41 and '42, before the American Navy had swollen to gargantuan size and stood astride the Pacific Ocean like a barbaric colossus, able to crush her enemies by sheer weight of numbers alone.

It was a pleasurable sight indeed. Li ordered rounds of brandy and liquor be broken out of his stateroom cabinet and served to all hands. Then he ordered the Weilan to come about.

"Lucian," he said, "plot a course back to Taipei. Lao Gun Shipworks. Our job here is done."

"What about the survivors?" Bilbao asked.

Li sniffed. "What about them?"

Her mission finished, Li spent the next several hours inspecting the ship, congratulating the crew, shaking hands, slapping backs, exchanging bawdy jokes and laughter. He was proud of this crew. They were gutter trash to some, street urchins, criminals, pirates, the discarded and cast out of coastal China. But he, Li Gao Chi, had collected them all and forged them into a working submarine crew.

Now in the ultimate test of their one and only mission, they had performed magnificently.

Li relished anticipating what he would do with his portion of Tetsuko's big payoff, when they arrived back at Taipei. With Chesapeake gone and the special cargo soon to be loaded aboard Orient Star, the Americans had 'lost' five atom bombs at sea, a terrible, unexplainable accident that had left the wreckage strewn about the deepest submarine canyons of the Pacific's Minami Abyssal Range. It would be months, perhaps years, before the cause of the accident could be determined, if ever.

As to the disposition of Chesapeake's special cargo, only Li and the officers of his patched-together crew would know the truth. For all intents and purposes, as the Navy Board of Inquiry would write in the months to come, the special cargo was scattered among the cold, black lifeless canyons of the abyssal range, fifteen thousand feet down, written off as a total loss in an inexplicable accident at sea that would be talked about for years to come.

Only Masuhiro Tetsuko would know the real story.

"Engine room, make turns for ten knots," Li ordered. "Come left to two three five degrees. Bilbao, make your depth fifty feet. We'll run at depth for two hours, then surface and recharge our batteries."

Bilbao made Li's commands so, then settled against the diving control panel, watching the bubble indicator tick off the feet as the planesman shallowed out their dive at the commanded depth. He was well satisfied, a little buzzy from the Captain's brandy, and hoping he could get some shut-eye in the next few hours. The Captain seemed intent on staying in the control room. With a faint smile splitting his greasy beard, Bilbao closed his eyes and relaxed, standing up, braced against a frame, while Weilan hummed on battery power through the cold waters of the north Pacific.

Miles astern of the submarine, Orient Star had finally closed as near as she dared, heaving to in the midst of a debris field, littered in the wan January moonlight and the glare of her own deck spotlights with beams and steel sheet, trash, crates, crumpled lockers, pieces of paper and cloth, bodies, burning oil patches, and five atom bombs floating like harpooned right whales, their core capsules bobbing nearby.

Ignoring frantic cries for help from injured men in the water nearby, the freighter eased forward at two knots, barely making way, while a crew of men on her foredeck operated a ten-ton winch and hoist crane, plucking the night's treasures from a choppy Pacific.

Oblivious to the hiss of the waves, now swirling over the graveyard of the recently sunk Navy ship, and the scraping and scratching of debris against her hull, Orient Star's crew methodically went about their task. One by one, each core capsule of plutonium was located and pulled from the sea, then secured in a lead-lined container on the deck. Similarly, each girdled bomb was made fast to the winch and lifted carefully from the water, then swung over onto its own cradle on deck, where the girdle was made fast, and leaded tarpaulins drawn over the device.

The entire operation was over in less than two hours.

The captain of the Orient Star made a call down to the deck crew. Had anyone heard any more cries coming from the darkness, any more survivors pitifully floating amid all the trash and debris in the guttering smoke and on-coming fog?

The master of the deck detail told the captain they had heard no more sounds of survivors for the last hour.

Very well, the captain had replied. He ordered the winch secured and the deck detail to return to its normal shipboard duties. The ship came about, plowing through bloated bodies and flotsam and wreckage from the death of a sister ship, then set course for Kobe docks.

The captain was pensive, sitting in his command seat, on the bridge as Orient Star began picking up speed, heading west toward their first waypoint a hundred miles from the Bonins. Astern of them, the first lavender tendrils of an oceanic sunrise painted the horizon, though the beauty of the scene was lost on the captain.

Best to stay with the night, he told himself, composing in his mind, the first phrases of another haiku, his third so far this voyage. He was greatly disturbed by what had happened at latitude 158 degrees east, longitude 28 degrees north. Anytime a ship went down, the captain believed, the spirits of the ocean were disturbed, so many souls were there to placate. Best hide the hands that committed the crime in the shadows of a dark Pacific night.

They were bearing special cargo back to Kobe, the devil's own tools, some of the crewmen had muttered, though the captain had said nothing about the nature of the spherical devices recovered from the water. Somehow, word got around anyway.

The captain had never really believed in the devil of the Christian lands anyway. Just the same, he found it expedient to douse the reading lamp over his writing platform and complete the haiku in his head, in the dark, staring out the windscreen at the sea.

Darkness somehow seemed more comforting this particular evening.

Thursday, 1-18-51

Kobe, Japan

11:50 p.m.

The dockmaster's office at Kobe's Meriken Pier was only a few hundred feet from the water's edge. Attached to the office was a concrete block tool shed, darkened now but not empty. Inside the shed, Brigadier General Paul Craft peered through the dingy glass of the shed's single window, watching as the last of the Mark VI atom bombs was swung off the Orient Star's aft deck and gingerly lowered to a waiting flatbed truck.

The operation took only a few minutes. Tetsuko's well-paid private crew of dockhands was well practiced, having already unloaded and secured the other four devices. The last two hours had been a tense, anxious time; Tetsuko had spent a small fortune making sure the usual crew at Meriken was well taken care of this evening, ensconced in bars and comfort houses throughout the port district. Even the Customs House and harbormaster's quarters were empty though the red brick buildings were still lit up, so as not to indicate anything out of the ordinary.

Incredible, thought Paul Craft, as the stevedores secured the last bomb, removed its flotation girdle and dogged the tarpaulin down to its padeyes on the side of the truck. Twenty-five dock hands and riggers at work in the chill dark predawn hours and every single one of them on Tetsuko-san's payroll. The man was a real work of art. Craft was thankful for that.

So far, at least, this end of the operation had proceeded without a hitch.

The door to the darkened shed eased open. It was Tetsuko.

The Japanese industrialist slipped inside and Craft pulled the door shut. The lights remained off.

"Craft-san, the special cargo is fully loaded. Our akanbo are ready to take their first steps."

Craft lit a cigarette. The tip flared red in the dark. "'Little babies' is right, Tetsuko-san. These babies need tender loving care." He watched the dockhands checking straps and lashings on all six trucks...one each for the each device and a sixth for the plutonium inserts, still in their waterproof core capsules. Several unmarked cars full of yakuza strongarms would ride shotgun on the convoy. The trip to the warehouse and securing the 'little babies' would take another hour, though Harima-Cho was only a few blocks away.

"I confess that I am uneasy," Tetsuko admitted.

Craft sniffed. "You should be. It's not everyday you handle an eighty-kiloton implosion-type fission warhead...let alone five of them."

"No, Craft-san, that is not exactly what I meant to say." Tetsuko fumbled words for a moment. It wasn't like him to ever be at a loss for something to say. "There are spies all around us. I feel it. And your Army investigator--"

"Kitchens?"

Tetsuko nodded but Craft couldn't see it in the dark. "I worry, perhaps too much. We have been fortunate this far. Tomorrow--" he shrugged, again unseen.

Craft was more determined. Just seeing the bombs at last in their hands made Gallant Flag something more than just a paper exercise. "Don't worry your conniving little head about it. I can take care of Kitchens. He's still Army. He still has to obey orders."

Tetsuko was apologetic. "I failed in my duty to eliminate the Major. I am sorry for this...a serious failure on my part. I am ashamed that my kyonin failed in their responsibilities. They will be punished. Please accept my apologies--"

Craft waved it off. "It's just as well. Killing Army officers tends to attract attention. There's a better way...through proper channels. Kitchens is here by order of the Chief of Staff. But while he's here, he's still part of Far Eastern Command. That means he follows orders, just like me. I can make a few suggestions to General Wright's office and send the major off on all kinds of wild hair chases. I'm sure there must be something that needs investigating up in Hokkaido. That should keep the nosy bastard out of our hair for a few days."

"Then the 'Little Babies' can be moved," Tetsuko said. "Mishida will be ready."

"No, I don't want the babies at Mishida until LaSalle tells me the aircraft are there to receive them. They're safer here for now. And when we do move, we'll go at night, just like this."

"An expensive move," Tetsuko said. "Special kyonin for the dock work need special...considerations, you understand?"

"Don't get cheap on me now, Tetsuko-san. The Army's given you a helluva lot of business over the last few months. You can thank me for that. Concessions, exclusive markets, monopolies enough to make a Rockefeller jealous. You just do your part and you'll get everything coming to you. You stiff-arm me now and I'll make damn good and sure G2 knows every little detail of how you've bribed half of SCAP. That ought to be good for about twenty years, if they don't hang you as a war profiteer first."

"Of course," Tetsuko hastily put in, "I am business partners with you and General LaSalle. Very good business partners. And my friends. I value this friendship."

"I'll bet you do...seeing as how I'm the only one keeping you out of the brig. Hell, Omisumi's got a ten-year head start on these new television doo-dads as it is."

"You'll be coming to the warehouse, then? To inspect our children?"

"No," Craft said, "not tonight. This Daddy's due back at SCAP for a

briefing at 0800 hours tomorrow morning. I've got me a red-eye back to Atsugi, sitting on the runway now, if the scumbags haven't left already. I'd better scram...the Old Man gets pissed when staff is late." Craft put a firm hand on Tetsuko's shoulders. "Just get these things into the warehouse safely and snugged down. Then sit tight...and keep your ship handy. When LaSalle gives me the word, I'll tell you when to move."

Craft slipped unseen out of the shed and drove himself back to Ginjo Field just outside Kobe. A single C-46 sat in the glare of temporary floodlights at the end of the grass ramp, twin Wright Cyclones already turning over. Craft was half an hour late and he didn't have rank enough to hold a 'hot dog' run like this forever. He'd already stuffed the Air Transport Service crew's hands with enough cash and Japanese contraband to send them all up for ten years.

After a few wave-offs for ground fog at Atsugi, Hot Dog Helen bumped down for a hard landing and Kitchens was down the stairs and running before the props had stopped turning. He made the Dai Ichi's marble-columned entrance just a few minutes before eight. Forsaking the rickety elevator, he took the stairs three at a time and entered the secure sixth floor warroom just as General of the Army Douglas MacArthur was calling the briefing to order.

The Dai Ichi warroom had always been MacArthur's greatest stage. Craft eased into a folding chair along the wall, below one of several tacked-up maps of the Korean battlefront. Every briefing was a command performance--a grand MacArthur soliloquy--before an adoring audience. They were all there: Hickey, the Chief of Staff. Whitney. "Pinky" Wright. Almond, fresh and dapper as a banker from the near slaughter of his X Corps at the Chosin Reservoir. Colonel Laurence Bunker, the Old Man's secretary. Kades, the deputy Chief.

Craft studied the Old Man as he warmed to his morning's subject.

"Phase Line D is threatened," the Supreme Commander intoned gravely, "and if we do not hold fast there, history will never forgive us--" He circled to a map directly over Craft's head, rapping the sheet with a pointer. "Second Division is falling back at Suwon, here--" he tapped the map along the west coast of Korea, "--and the ROKs are being routed here in the east." Craft watched the General's mouth quiver, each setback on the battlefield a personal affront. Then, his lips stopped quivering and set themselves in a hard line. "Only here, at Wonju, have we made a firm stand. Wonju--" he repeated the word reverently for emphasis, rolling it around his tongue, "--is the fulcrum of the entire front." His face hardened into granite. "Wonju must be held, whatever the cost!"

Over the last few months, Craft had become a discerning critic of the Old Man's performances. He had seen enough of them. The grave voice was still there, wavering with just the right catch of emotion. The hair was always slicked back, well-combed, probably dyed black, Craft realized, as the General was over seventy years of age. He thought he detected a perceptible thickening at the waist; MacArthur wore his khaki trousers high on his hips, like a farmer's waders, and Craft could see an evident tightening at the belt line.

Most obvious, though, were the eyes: hard, brown buttons in a grim, leathery province of flesh. The eyes were like Wonju...where the General's face seemed most determined to make a final stand against the enemy of time.

MacArthur the performer was still well able to seize any stage and dominate it through histrionic gesture and force of personality. Craft always felt Douglas MacArthur never spoke directly to any mortal human being. The Supreme Commander issued edicts and commands and other verbal thunderbolts as though expounding before a larger, unseen audience--call them the Sages of History, posterity, even God Himself...there were as many opinions as there were listeners. You always knew MacArthur's words weren't meant for you alone. Craft wasn't the first staffer to feel privileged in the very aura of the Savior of Bataan.

MacArthur's voice rose and fell like an oceanic tide. Unquestionably, the situation along Phase Line D south of Seoul and the Han River was grim, even desperate. There had been some slowing of the Red advance around the town of Wonju, as Ridgeway had thrown reinforcements from I and IX Corps into the fray, stiffening their stand with airstrikes and massive artillery barrages when the weather permitted.

Douglas MacArthur was gravely concerned. He completed his perambulations of the warroom and stood with hands folded behind his back at the head of the table, scowling through the walls at unseen enemies.

"I must confess," he thundered, "that in all my years of military service, never have I see such courage under fire, such staunch determination to stand firm in the face of a murderous enemy, never flinching from their sacred duty." The Supreme Commander's voice then dropped to a hoarse whisper. "Such steadfast courage can not be in vain. Gentlemen, we must not let the defenders of Wonju down. Korea, indeed the entire Free World, depends on us!"

With that, the briefing was concluded. MacArthur sat down, hung his head, bent over the table with arms outstretched embracing a tactical map of the IX Corps sector, spent and drained after another bravura performance. The rest of the Bataan Gang swarmed around their hero, giving support and encouragement. MacArthur glared down at the map, alone in the agony of a great leader burdened with vast responsibilities.

When the circle of admirers had begun to dissipate, Craft presented himself, requesting a private audience with the General. MacArthur looked up, seeming to stare right through him but at length, a barely perceptible nod granted assent to his request.

"Be in my office in ten minutes." The Supreme Commander departed the warroom.

MacArthur's office was spare, sparsely furnished with simple wooden furniture and a few filing cabinets--a desk, several chairs, a lamp table in the corner. An oil portrait of Harry Truman filled one wall away from the window blinds that gave onto a view of the Imperial Palace grounds, the portrait flanked by flag standards bearing Old Glory and some Army pennants.

MacArthur reclined pensively behind his desk, itself devoid of all distractions save for a black telephone, a writing tablet, an IN/OUT box and an ashtray. His corncob pipe lay cold, untouched beside the ashtray.

"I hope you've brought good news, General Craft. We could use some around here this morning." The Supreme Commander steepled his fingers on his desk.

"I have, sir." Craft pulled out a map of the Far East and unfolded it before MacArthur's skeptical gaze. "The special operation you approved last month has now reached a critical stage."

MacArthur was intrigued. "Explain."

Craft described how the diverted atom bombs from Operation Greenhouse had just been unloaded and stored away at a secret location in Kobe. Gallant Flag now had its weapons and they were in Japan, under guard. He briefly recounted how the devices would be transferred to a specially prepared base at Mishida, Okinawa, in a few days.

"An abandoned Army Air Forces base," Craft explained. "Not even on the charts anymore. It was used in the Okinawa campaign, then forgotten when Kadena was built up. Now, it's a fully functioning airstrip again, refurbished by a Japanese contractor we've hired."

"When will you be ready?"

Craft wet his lips. "By 25 January, sir. At the latest. Gallant Flag will be ready to launch by that date."

"Good." MacArthur was clearly pleased at the news. "That's the best thing I've heard in days, General." The Supreme Commander settled back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling, folding his arms across his chest. He groped for his pipe, planted it firmly between clenched teeth. Then he closed his eyes.

"It's time to contact the Red Chinese commander," he said, to himself, more than to Craft. "Surely, he sees the military situation correctly. Gallant Flag changes the game completely, turns the game right around." MacArthur was already composing a message in his mind's eye, savoring each word as it came to him. "Clearly, the Chinese must surrender now. Either that or face obliteration." Already, the gist of the communiqué was forming in his mind.

In doing this, and a day later, broadcasting by radio the ultimatum directly to the Commander, Chinese Communist Forces, Douglas MacArthur was violating strict U.S. foreign policy guidelines, conducting his own foreign relations without authorization from Washington. He was also disobeying a direct order from the President of the United States to refrain from public commentary on the course of the war.

These constraints did not greatly concern the Supreme Commander, Allied Powers. Abruptly, he dismissed Craft and set to work composing the radio ultimatum that would turn the course of the war.

For his part, Craft decided to go visit Clayton LaSalle at Atsugi and make sure arrangements for receiving the little babies from Greenhouse at their Mishida base were well underway.

Thursday, 1-18-51

The White House

8:15 a.m.

Harry Truman's face was red with fury. His forehead shined with perspiration--the steam radiator in the Cabinet Room was clanking at full throttle--and a small vein above his left eye throbbed red and blue, a warning sign of outbursts yet to come. Even the President's rimless glasses had partially fogged over. The Truman mouth was a thin, tight line.

George Marshall had never seen the President of the United States so teeth-clenching angry, in all the six years he had known the man.

"Gentlemen, your President should be taken out back of this house and strung up by his fingers," Truman seethed. He had just read and re-read the SecDef's report on the loss of the Chesapeake. "If I'd have followed my gut instincts and put a stop to those atomic tests, we wouldn't be in such a damn mess." Truman glowered around the mahogany table at his assembled service chiefs. "What are we doing about this?"

Marshall shot a look at Admiral Forrest Sherman, Chief of Naval Operations. Your time on the burner, pal. The hero of the U.S.S. Wasp at Guadalcanal shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He read from a dispatch, not looking up.

"CINCPAC has already dispatched a search and recovery force to the last reported position of the Chesapeake, Mr. President. Two destroyers, a DDE, a frigate, several auxiliaries and two submarines, with our new bottom-sounding sonar. They should be on-station in about twenty hours."

Truman glared back at the CNO, burning holes in the man's white-haired skull. "Any chance we'll be able to locate something?"

"Mr. President, ships don't go down without leaving some kind of trace. Oil slicks, debris, that sort of thing. We've got her last known position--the Secretary will indicate lat and long coordinates--" he waited for Marshall to point out the stretch of Pacific on a map, marked to show the location--" and we're getting our best sounding gear out there. We'll find her."

"And the bombs...what about the bombs?"

"Five in all, sir." Marshall consulted his own sheaf of dispatch notes. He'd been awakened in his quarters at Ft. Myers at four o'clock in the morning by the Navy's duty officer at the Pentagon with the news. "The bombs aboard the Chesapeake were the very same ones added to the Greenhouse test at the last minute. You remember the big fight about that? Apparently, a design or manufacturing problem was discovered with them a week ago at the test site. That's why they were being shipped back to the States."

Bradley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was glum. "Now they're at the bottom of the Pacific."

But Truman wasn't so sure.

"Mr. President," Sherman went on, "Seventh Fleet and CINCPAC are already working up a search and recovery plan. The entire recovery area's been divided up into sectors. The destroyers, Murphy and Ralston, will conduct visual and sonar sweeps by sector, commencing immediately upon arrival. Each sector is a hundred mile radius segment of a big circle. CINCPAC estimates each tin can will be able to complete one radial leg and return in about four hours. Plus, we're diverting an escort carrier--it's the Essex, in transit to Pearl from Korean duty--to the vicinity for air support of search operations. We want to get to any survivors as fast as we can."

Marshall added, "Commander Ward had explicit instructions on how to handle those bombs. The basic procedure in any casualty--correct me if I'm wrong, Admiral--is to save the bombs before saving the ship."

"That's right," Sherman said. Dealing with facts, pointedly ignoring Truman's angry glare, the CNO was more comfortable. The seat at the Cabinet table was becoming steadily harder by the moment. "The warhead casings and the lead 'buckets' containing the plutonium plugs and detonators are designed to float if the ship goes down."

Marshall added a few more details on search operations. Then, he said, "Sonar will help. The only problem is there are a hell of a lot of underwater canyons in this Minami Tori Shima abyssal range. Sonar readings are going to be tricky."

"How deep is the ocean there, General?"

"Fifteen thousand feet, on average, from what the Navy tells me. Some of the canyons are deeper than that."

Truman took off his glasses and wiped them down with a handkerchief. His eyes were small and red, mole's eyes. "Any chance the warheads could have been removed before the ship sank? Could MacArthur or someone on his staff have possession of these things? Or the Russians, for God's sake?"

Marshall and Sherman exchanged glances. "We can't completely discount that, Mr. President, but it seems unlikely."

"From the reports I've seen out of Kaneohe Point," Sherman added, "only a few hours passed between Chesapeake's first report of a boiler room casualty and her last status report. And none of the reports say anything about the ship taking on water, hull damage, that sort of thing."

"Whatever happened," Marshall surmised, "happened awfully fast. The first eyes we had on the scene came from a PBY out of Wake, just before dawn. Lighting was very poor--some fog in the area--but the crew reported small debris and what they thought was an oil slick. But no ship."

"And no survivors," Truman added, shaking his head.

"No, sir," said Sherman. "We are attempting to sound the ocean bottom now--we've got gear aboard the Ralston for that. But those canyons George mentioned are making it hard...echoes and false returns all over the place--" he shook his head. "I don't know if we'll ever find her."

Truman was livid. "I want a report on search results every four hours, until something definite is found. I've got to know exactly what happened to that ship." He tapped a pen on the tablet before him, glared up at the portrait of Washington over the mantel, then his face brightened with an idea. "I ought to meet MacArthur again, just like we met last October at Wake. Lay down the law on unauthorized activities. I want to get right in the General's face and let him have it: no widening of the war to other theaters without specific written approval from me. At the very least, I should send a telegram to His Highness with strict policy guidelines. Bill--" he turned to Admiral William Leahy, his White House military aide, "draw up a letter this morning. I want to wire it today, by noon if we can. I can't let this dog have any more leash."

"Right away, Mr. President."

As usual, Harry Truman was blunt and direct. "Those five atom bombs can only be in one of two possible places: at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean or already in someone's hands. I intend to find out which. If I find Mr. Brass Hat has them, I'm relieving the son of a bitch of his command immediately, politics be damned." The President was visibly irritated with himself for agreeing to let Gallant Flag proceed. "I don't give a hoot in holler about politics or getting more evidence before I move against the man. The President is the Commander in Chief. Orders are to be obeyed. If he disobeys my orders again, he's out of a job." Truman shook his head. "Now we're paying the price for all that caution. I only hope to God it's not too late. Men, pray with me. Pray those bombs are at the bottom of the ocean. If they're not, if MacArthur has 'em or worse, the Reds, we've got big trouble."

The meeting adjourned. George Marshall left the West Wing by the Executive Avenue door, conferring with Sherman just outside the office, as they strolled to their cars along the street.

Both men were gravely concerned, filled with a sense of foreboding for what the future would bring.

"I told Bill Leahy I wanted to see that telegram before he shows it to the President," Marshall was saying. "The wording's got to be just right."

Sherman nodded morosely. "It'd be better if Stalin had the bombs, to my way of thinking. That's just espionage. If MacArthur has 'em, he may just ignore the telegram, President or not. It wouldn't be the first time. George, what in the name of God are we going to do if it is MacArthur, or one of his men?"

Marshall didn't reply. He simply stared darkly back at the CNO, then turned and went right to his staff car. Climbing in, he told himself the best thing would be for SCAP to simply resign.

He also knew it was the least likely outcome of all.

Thursday, 1-18-51

Near Anjiin, Manchuria, Peoples Republic of China

1:30 a.m.

Lou Skiles hunkered down against a fierce gust of wind, flinging sleet and snow across the bleak meadow they had been slogging through. Skiles burrowed into the lee of a frozen, rotted-out tree trunk. The blizzard had been roaring all night. He'd been pulling Benecky along in a makeshift cart confiscated from the mama-san and her children at the mud hut they had broken into outside Anjiin. A few bamboo poles, knotted cloth strips and hacked-off pieces of door planking made up a sled of sorts, which gave Skiles better traction on the icy, rutted dirt path he had been following the last few hours.

Skiles pulled the cart from the front, coolie-style, with some homemade 'reins' of tree vine and cloth strip. Benecky was out of it again, probably from the pain of his aching leg stump, delirious, frost-bitten and purple, babbling on about fixing up an old Ford in his Dad's garage. Both men were padded and bundled up with stolen wraps from the peasant family; from a distance, they might have passed for local Tungu horsemen, plodding diligently across the rolling hills, through wind-blasted tree stumps and snow fields.

So far this night, by Skiles' reckoning, they had made maybe ten miles.

Skiles leaned backwards against the weight of Benecky and the cart as they crested a slight rise through some scraggly brush and half-slid down an icy decline. At the bottom, they came to a rail line and stopped alongside the raised track bed, seeking a windbreak from the blinding sleet, and some rest.

They said little, content simply to stop. Both men were too tired and frozen to talk anyway. Skiles dragged out a battered canteen and slurped a little garlic soup. It was pungent, lukewarm but tasty. He shared a few drops with Benecky too, opening the corporal's mouth to jam the spout between his teeth, what was left of them. Both men munched and gummed hard potatoes and salted jerky, stuff they had borrowed from the terrified mama-san and her kids.

Skiles said nothing, listening to the roar of the wind across the snow-blasted grassland, imagining voices, whispers, laughs even, until he realized half of it was just Benecky muttering nonsense and crap about anything that came to mind. Every few minutes, both the wind and Benecky would quiet down, and that was when Skiles thought he heard a train coming. It was hard to be sure. He climbed up onto the track bed and put his ears as close as he dared to the frozen metal rails. It was hard to tell.

But half an hour later, through a distant stand of skeletal fir branches burdened with snow, he saw the glimmer of a headlamp as the train rounded a gentle turn.

The train was heading in the same direction they were--south, or at least Skiles hoped it was south.

"Come on, Socrates...shut up, will you? Let's get you under some cover...don't want no Reds to find us out here--" he grunted, hauling the cart along the tracks until he found a shallow declivity below some bushes. He wheeled Benecky into the depression, broke off some branches and tried to cover them with snow and foliage as best he could.

The train passed by, chugging slowly, a few minutes later.

Skiles peeped through the brush. Black coal smoke and a few red sparks drifted across the snow, stinging his eyes. He was puzzled by the red and gold insignia on the doors--he realized after a time, that it was a military train, perhaps bearing cargo or troops somewhere. It was a mixed train--several box cars, followed by passenger cars, then more box cars, apparently bearing troops and supplies, but away from the Yalu River valley, away from the North Korean border.

That puzzled Skiles. Could the UN have made a counterattack? Maybe driven the cocksuckers back north again? Skiles raised up a little more, curious, hoping to catch a glimpse inside one of the cars.

Watching the train chug southward through the snowy night, gave Sergeant Lou Skiles an idea. As soon as the train had passed out of view, he swished snow and branches off the cart and bent down to Benecky's ice-crusted face. Frozen snot clods had added some character to the corporal's black mustache. His eyes were slits draped with miniature icicles.

"Benecky...you prick! Snap out of it!"

The corporal's head lolled around like a drunk man, bobbing unsteadily in the cart.

"Eat...shit...asshole...."

"Hey, Benecky--" Skiles fed him some more garlic soup. The canteen was down to a few drops. "--listen up...I got an idea--"

Benecky practically ate the spout off the canteen. He gnawed at the threads, lapped them with his tongue, gagged and coughed for more. Skiles gave him a piece of potato instead.

"Fuck--"

"Look, jerkwad, we gotta go back to Anjiin. Back to the town." He broke off some potato for himself; it tasted like muddy sand.

Benecky seemed to be coming out of his daze. "Are you friggin' crazy?"

"No, man, it's the only way."

"You're nuts."

"No, I'm not. Listen...it makes sense. Look, we need transport. We're gonna die out here if we stay another night. Plus we need weapons." He knew the wooden stakes he had fashioned from the fire pokers in the mama-san's hut wouldn't stop a Boy Scout for nothing.

"No shit, Sarge. Well, I gotta hand it to you. There's bound to be lots of weapons in Anjiin...it's a friggin' troop embarkation point, for crying out loud."

"Yeah, yeah, so we gotta watch our backs. You're a Marine, aren't you?" Skiles tasted more potato with his tongue, then spat it out. The tree bark tasted better. "We get us some weapons, see, and then maybe we get us a vehicle. Like a truck or something. So we can go where we want to."

"Sure, Sarge...we'll just drive back to Inchon. Have a picnic with the boys."

"Shut the fuck up... listen, it'll work, I'm telling you. If we can't go south into Korea, then we go southwest, into Manchuria. The coast, man...the coast."

Benecky squinted up at his sergeant through the swirling snow. "Sarge, you're a great guy and all. Hell, you got us both this far. What say we just call it a night...dig us a hole, you know? Climb in right here and call off the game. Punt. Leave the field--"

Skiles was already hoisting up the 'reins' of the cart. Grunting and swearing, he dragged Benecky and the cart out of the hollow and turned him around, facing back up the slope they had just slid down.

"Santa's little helper needs to shut his friggin' yap--" Skiles muttered under his breath. "We're going back to Anjiin. Get us some guns. Then a truck. Christ, maybe I'll knock off some gook general too, and steal his uniform. Strut around in those cotton pajamas like Mao."

He dragged the cart back to the top of the rise, plowing deep ruts in the snow drifts, and slogged back toward town, the very same path they had spent the last night and a half traversing to escape their captors.

Dawn was approaching when the two Marines entered the outskirts of Anjiin. Skiles had followed the rail line all the way back to town. On a windswept hill overlooking an expanse of slate-roofed houses, he paused to rest and reconnoiter the area.

This part of Anjiin was a crazy quilt of narrow lanes, warrens, cul-de-sacs, paths and dirt streets. Houses of straw, mud and brick were jammed together in no apparent grid or pattern. Coal smoke issued from hundreds of heating fires; soot and ash mixed with the snow flurries to form a gray porridge-like film, coating everything.

Skiles soon noticed a larger complex of buildings in a central square, maybe a mile distant. The largest was a columned and turreted gothic monstrosity. The turrets were upswept at the edges, miniature dragon's heads at each corner. Green slate shone through the snow streaks and a large clock face dominated one tower.

Skiles then saw through the ice fog and coal soot the black webs of converging rail tracks--it was Anjiin's central rail station, right in the middle of the town. Another building across the square was ringed with trucks and soldiers. Cream brick streaked black with ash, Skiles wondered if it might be an armory. That could be useful, he figured.

The germ of an idea began to form in his mind.

Skiles lifted up the reins, after laying out his plan to Benecky, and eased the cart/sled backward down the hill, dropping into some icy ruts at the bottom. The path into town bent through a few dilapidated hovels, before disappearing into the maze of Anjiin's residential quarter.

After a few tense moments trudging through the snow and scattered straw piles, the two Marines came to a small quadrangle of huts. In the center of the open ground, a roaring fire had been made from straw, kindling, and brush, a huge charpit surrounding the flames. Soldiers in mustard-colored cotton jackets patrolled the grounds, some bearing long poles with tea kettles and rice bowls at the end, and Skiles saw stacks of weapons spotted neatly in piles around the space: carbines, burp guns, Maxims.

The quadrangle was a bivouac point for several platoons of Chicoms.

Skiles wheeled Benecky, still in the cart, to the edge of the square and parked him just out of sight, down a narrow alley.

"Okay, Stan...do your thing. And make it good!"

"Where will you be?"

Skiles ducked behind a brickpile in the deep shadow of a doorway. "Right here...you take the first one. I'll nab the next one."

"What if more than two show up?"

"Clobber 'em, dickhead! And don't make a lot of racket doing it...."

Swell, Benecky thought. He situated himself in the cart, a small switchblade he'd lifted off a dead Marine back at Charlie Barracks in his left hand. He stashed several sharpened wooden stakes under the pile of cloth and rags at his feet, in easy reach. Then, clearing his throat, he began to moan, an agonizing wailing moan, ramping up the volume until he was sure the commotion had been noticed.

Two soldiers eventually heard Benecky's racket. They left their tea kettles and iron rice bowls where they had been squatting beside the charpit and sauntered over to the alley. Both had slung their carbines over their shoulders.

Warily, they eased down the darkened alley, sliding through deep early-morning shadows, eventually spotting Benecky in his cart. Curious, they shuffled closer. One bent down to grope through the Marine's bloody rags.

Benecky's lunge was swift and sure. He brought his arm around in a flashing arc and plunged the switchblade into the back of the soldier's neck. The soldier staggered under the blow momentarily, his face contorted in a questioning scowl of pain, then collapsed to one knee.

At the same moment, Skiles shot out from the brickpile and fell upon the second soldier, slashing him across the neck and shoulders. As Benecky wrestled the first soldier to the ground, ramming the heel of his hand into the bridge of the gook's nose, Skiles slipped a length of cord around his target's neck and swiftly garrotted the man. The Chicom gurgled, clawing at his throat, hands windmilling in the air, but Skiles was tenacious and he finally died with no further resistance. Skiles eased his body to the ground, then stood up breathing hard, heart pounding. Benecky finished off his opponent with a stake shoved into his mouth. Blood geysered from the Chicom's lips as he collapsed in a heap.

The furious struggle was over in thirty seconds. Skiles crouched over the fallen Chicoms, listening carefully for any sign the skirmish had alerted others. Blood was roaring in his ears and his hands were shaking but they had done the job quickly enough with a minimum of ruckus. The snapping of flames in the firepit had somehow covered the sounds of the struggle.

"Come on!" he dragged his foe by the arms deeper into the shadows of the hut and began peeling off the gook's jacket and trousers, patting him down for anything useful. A fur cap with a single red star insignia fit his head with a little stretching and finagling. Skiles pulled the ear flaps down, then dashed back out to drag the other Chicom out of sight.

Benecky lumbered out of the cart and hopped over on his good leg to help out.

"You get the ammo!" Skiles hissed, "while I pull this cocksucker's uniform off. Get the canteen and rations too."

Benecky rifled through the dead gook's kit, eventually lifting a couple of magazines for the carbine, a small canteen and some hard rice balls. Skiles managed to pull off his Chicom's padded cotton jacket and trousers and switch them with his own rags. When he was done, he helped Benecky do the same.

"Sarge," Benecky muttered, "you look about as Chinese as a chopstick."

"Shut up. Put on your cap. Get those shoes too!"

"I only need one, Sarge."

Skiles was already slamming a new magazine into his burp gun. The Type 50 had a 35-round clip, firing Soviet 7.62-millimeter ammunition. "Yeah, buddy, I know. I know. Just grab the other shoe, will you? You never know when you might need it."

They both heard the low rumble of diesel engines nearby and looked back up the alley. One after another, a long column of troop trucks--Russian GaZ two-tonners--passed by the edge of the building.

"What the hell's going on?" Benecky wondered. Skiles told the corporal to stay put and lie low. Then he crept up to the end of the alley to check out the noise.

Anjiin's central rail station was in the process of disgorging thousands of Red Chinese troops. The truck--Skiles counted at least thirty of them--had pulled into the square in a long line, ready to embark several dozen soldiers at a time, at least a platoon apiece.

Must be headed for the border, he surmised. Gook's drop 'em off at the Yalu, probably at night and they just sneak across on foot and disappear into the mountains. That's how they surprised us, the bastards--that's how they got so many troops in right under G-2's nose.

Each truck had only one driver. Skiles watched the operation for several minutes. One by one, the trucks were rolling by a mustering field just outside the rail station's columned entrance. Formations of Chicoms were lined up in echelon, peeling off platoon by platoon, boarding the trucks as they came up, assembly-line style. Fully loaded, each truck then circled the square and disappeared in a cloud of black smoke, speeding out of Anjiin down the very same icy road they had used coming into the city. Altogether a simple operation on the face of it: pull up, load up, move out, pull up another truck.

The end of the truck column was just passing by the alley when Skiles went back to Benecky.

"Corporal, get your gear! We're saddling up."

"We going for a ride, Sarge? I love going for rides!" Benecky hobbled to his feet.

"Stuff it, jarhead. And keep quiet, will ya? We're going to catch us a gook taxi and get the hell out of here--"

They staggered and stumbled their way up to the end of the alley. The last truck was twenty feet past them, now idling, belching acrid fumes, enveloped in a haze of ice fog, coal soot and diesel smog.

Perfect cover, Skiles realized. They paused at the alley entrance a moment, then on Skiles' count of three, hopped and scrambled and lurched toward the rear of the truck. They made the rear deck in good order and Skiles hoisted the corporal up and in through the open canvas flap, then tumbled in after him.

They lay there in the dark, breathing heavily for a few moments, weapons cocked and ready for what seemed like eternity. The truck lurched and stopped, lurched and stopped, several times as the driver advanced toward the load-up platform.

Incredibly, no one had seen them.

Skiles told Benecky what he had in mind. It all depended on split-second timing. When the right moment came, they had to pounce like cats.

"If we screw up," Skiles muttered, "we'll be full of gook lead faster than you can say Parsippany."

Benecky looked the sergeant in the face. "Whatever happens, Sarge, I just want you to know one thing."

"Yeah? What's that?"

Benecky's face cracked into a grin. "You still owe me for that crap game I won back at Pendleton."

Skiles patted him on the cheek. "Dream on, prick. I can still beat the snot out of you any day of the week. Come on."

By the time they were in position, the truck had moved up to within two stops of the loading platform. There was no way into the cab from the cargo area. But there was an open access hatch at the front of the bed, just behind the cab on the driver's side. Skiles had watched Chicom troops boarding the trucks from the rear step and from the side access hatches.

To reach the driver, Skiles was going to have to step through the canvas flap, swing right to the running board, jerk the door open and yank the driver out of his seat, all in one motion and preferably while the truck was moving.

Then, as he climbed into the cab, Benecky would do likewise on the opposite side, taking a few moments to let loose a volley of carbine fire to keep heads down around the loading platform. With any luck, Skiles could slam the truck into gear, pull out of formation and speed out of the square before ten thousand Chicom infantrymen recovered their senses, unslung their weapons and peppered them with rounds.

Any delays or foul-ups, Skiles told himself, and their harebrained, cockamamie scheme would leave the gooks with two dead Marines to wipe up, both leaking blood from ten thousand bullet wounds. They would be hamburger meat before they took three steps.

"Get ready!" Skiles hissed. He slightly parted the canvas tarpaulin and did a quick visual reconnoiter of the troop layout. Jesus, the whole place is crawling with Reds. It'd be easier if we just marched to friggin' Peking. Speed and surprise were their best weapons. That and extraordinary good luck. Skiles made a quick sign of the cross over his face and took a deep breath.

Across the back of the truck, Benecky's trigger finger started itching like crazy.

Skiles held up three fingers...a quiet countdown.

Three...two...one...GO!

The five feet from bed to cab was the longest five feet Ray Skiles had ever tried to cover.

The truck was still in motion when the Marine sergeant--once known as Bravo Two Eight to a long ago-vanished rifle squad--slammed up against the cab door. He twisted it open and lunged for the Chicom driver in one motion--painfully aware his back was now fully exposed to about two hundred startled Chicom troops.

The driver had a wide-eyed look of terror, a pig's face, when Skiles' bearded face popped up. Skiles yanked Pig-face by the left arm and twisted hard, then pulled as hard as he could. Pig-face clung to the wheel for a few seconds, hanging on for balance...but Skiles reached in and wrestled the gook free and out with an arm around his thick neck.

Pig-face careened headfirst out the door and nearly knocked Skiles off the running board as the truck's momentum shifted. Skiles clung to the wheel, falling forward across the seat as Pig-face tumbled past him and fell heavily to the asphalt. The truck was in motion, already in a sharp left turn and the front wheels clipped the gook on one arm, crushing it instantly. Pig-face twitched and flopped like a squirrel, screaming at the top of his lungs.

Skiles grabbed the bottom of the steering wheel. Then he heard machine gun fire, heavy weapons opening up, ripping the air all around him.

Benecky hosed down a wide swath of the square with his carbine, ejecting one clip, then slamming home another. He squeezed into the cab, keeping his head down, as return fire plinked off the cab door, then shattered windows in an explosion of glass.

"Go, man! GO!"

Skiles sat up and took the wheel, gunning the big GaZ diesel. The truck's tires spun in the gravel, sending them sideways before straightening out. Skiles crouched behind the wheel, peering over the rim to locate the street they had taken coming into town. Burp gun rounds hammered the doors and windows; Skiles could hear the canvas tarp behind him ripping as bullets thumped into the truck bed.

"Give me your gun--!" Benecky shouted. Skiles nudged he weapon across the seat and the corporal replaced the clip with a fresh one, the last one they had. Benecky took a peek over the jagged glass remnants of the window.

The return fire had died off, replaced by another threat: several trucks loaded with gook infantry were pulling out of line, falling in behind them, tires spinning in ice and coal dust.

"Uh-oh, Sarge...we got company--step on it!"

Skiles pressed the pedal to the floor, slamming through half a dozen forward gears. "I'm stepping...I'm stepping, already--" The truck careened and fishtailed, then picked up speed. It roared through a pile of stacked wood, clipped the side of a row of mud huts, before finally barreling out of the square.

Benecky poked the Chicom burp gun out the window and squeezed off a few bursts at their pursuers. Several rounds struck the first truck behind them; instantly killing the driver. The GaZ caromed off another truck in the line, then plowed through a row of carts, before spinning out of control. The truck rolled onto its side, scattering Chicom soldiers, its momentum carrying it even further. It smashed into the front of a bazaar of vendor stalls and produce stands. The traditional Chinese jee-sh market was in the process of opening up that morning. Baskets of soybeans and rice and early morning shoppers flew in all directions.

Skiles sat up straighter behind the wheel and swerved around lines of peasants and carts streaming into Anjiin for the day's work. Beyond the stream of people, the road narrowed to a bumpy, rutted, pot-holed macadam ribbon, icy in places, passing through rolling hills and terraced rice paddies now blanketed with snow.

"What's happening back there?" Skiles asked. He geared down and slowed to negotiate a large ditch; the road had washed out in a low gully and the truck bounced hard over the depression.

"Still got company," Benecky told him. "They dropped back a ways...got caught up in the crowds, looks like. Don't slow down. Let's put some distance between us."

"Don't worry...I plan to do just that." Skiles eyed the gray leaden skies...gun-metal gray skies. Sleet was beginning to fall, crackling on the windshield--what was left of it--and the cab roof, stinging their eyes as it blew into the cab. Skiles pulled his fur cap down tighter to keep his eyes protected. "I just wish to hell I knew which way we were going. If I could just see the sun--"

"Any place is fine with me," Benecky muttered. He burrowed inside his own quilted jacket. The fur inside smelled like horsepiss. The wearer he'd killed back in the alley must have lived in a barnyard. "Any place but Anjiin."

"Amen to that, pal. I want to head south--somehow. You see any signs?"

"No. Do you read Chinese?"

"No."

"Then what the hell good would it do if you did see a sign?"

Both men laughed nervously.

The countryside grew flatter as Skiles drove on. Sleet and snowdrifts swirled in miniature cyclones across the road. Low hills and folds sloped away in all directions, darkened with clumps of bare ash and larch trees and stone hedges marking off barren terraces and fields. A bleak and wintry Manchurian landscape opened up before them.

"Feels good, doesn't it?--" Benecky sighed. He sank back in the seat. "Just to be moving. Even my stump stopped aching."

"I wonder how much gas we got?"

"Forget the gas. No Standard stations around here, that's for sure."

"Damn, and I was looking forward to getting more green stamps."

"I'm hungry, Sarge. I wonder if there's anything to eat in the back."

"Check it out. And see if we still got company on our tail, will you?"

Benecky half saluted, then turned to peer back out the window. A rooster tail of snow curled over the near horizon. The pursuing truck was a half mile behind.

"Bastards are still there, Sarge. Maybe half a mile back."

Skiles scanned the horizon ahead. "Nowhere to hide. I guess we just go until somebody runs out of gas."

Benecky had started to slide out the cab door to the side access hatch. Standing on his good leg on the running board, he clung to the frame to keep from being thrown off into the rutted culverts lining the road. Benecky pushed the flap covering aside and was about to step through when he ran right into a face and froze.

A pair of Chicom soldiers--alive and well and sporting assault rifles--materialized out of the darkness. One of them squeezed off a shot, the round just grazing Benecky's ear.

The corporal scrambled backward as fast as he could, back into the cab, kicking and clawing for a grip as the truck swung along a curve.

Jesus! "Sarge...shit! Sarge...we got gooks!" He slammed the door shut and began positioning his burp gun to return fire. Even as he checked his last clip, in the side mirror, he saw two fur-capped heads emerge.

One after the other, the gooks cautiously eased themselves out onto the running board and began making their way forward to the cab.

Friday, 1-19-51

Tokyo

11:00 a.m.

"Damn it!" Lyle Kitchens slammed a fist down on the desk, knocking papers and stacks of case files everywhere. He glared at Robert Blount, holding up his thumb and index finger in a gesture of frustration. "I'm this far from cracking this baby wide open. Every time I get close, the case spins off in a new direction."

Blount was sympathetic. "You get the feeling everybody in this building is part of the conspiracy and we're the only ones who aren't in on the secret. What kind of place is this, anyway?"

Kitchens read over the Navy dispatches about the Chesapeake sinking for the twentieth time. "In the land of elephants, the mouse has to watch his step all the time. Especially when the elephants all have stars on their shoulderboards."

Robert Blount had heard about Chesapeake upon returning to the seaplane anchorage at Parry Island, at the south end of the Eniwetok atoll. Straight away, he'd hopped on a return flight back to Atsugi, hitching a ride into Tokyo with a SCAP Civil Affairs staffer. He found Kitchens and Gilruth glum and dispirited amid piles of case notes scattered around the dented and scuffed metal desks and hard wooden chairs of the CID basement office.

Both men were nursing cups of coffee, and serious grudges against the straitjacket that Army culture and regulations put on investigators of crimes. Kitchens filled Blount in on the known details.

Blount was grim, sobered by the loss of nearly twelve hundred crewmen. "I made some friends on that ship, Major. Look at me: the only Bureau man for ten thousand miles. I had to make friends to keep from being stampeded by all the other investigators on that ship." He smiled at a thought. "Got me a real New York hoagie sandwich once, talking one night to a mess cook...turned out the guy was a P.S. 25 school dropout from Queens, Navy lifer. Boy--" Blount could still taste the onions--" that was some kind of special night for my stomach. After a week of regulation Navy chow--which is a hell of a lot better than what Hoover feeds us, let me tell you that--Jesus, I had heartburn for two days. It was worth every minute of it."

The three of them reviewed what they had on Gallant Flag. Kitchens had made up his mind on one detail.

"Somehow, some way, those special bombs were removed before Chesapeake went down. It's just too convenient."

"Proof?"

Kitchens tapped the side of his head. "Cop instinct. Not admissible in court, mind you. Or even in a courts-martial hearing, for that matter, military justice being what it is. But I got a strong feeling, pal: five will get you ten those bombs will turn up at the Kobe warehouse. That's where we need to be now."

Blount wasn't so sure. "I don't know, Major. I want to meet with Billings' informant again. Osawa whathisname? Squeeze the little guy harder. He knows stuff. Stuff he's not telling us."

"Be my guest."

So they called up the American Embassy and asked Bret Billings to try and make contact with Osawa again. After a few hours, Billings had called back: They were in luck. Osawa was in town and would meet them at a noodle shop in the Ginza. Two hours.

"And we thought the little guy was at the bottom of Tokyo Bay," Blount muttered. "Fat chance." It had been a long two hours.

Lucky Star Noodle Shop was a typical Japanese canteen, a glass-fronted space not much bigger than an American closet, fronting busy Chuo Dori. Lucky Star was all vinyl and linoleum, though spotlessly clean and graced with decorative lanterns, fake shoji screens and bonsai pots in an effort to brighten up the place. With a beer hall and a pachinko parlor for neighbors, the proprietors had to work hard to keep up appearances.

Osawa was already there, tucked away in a back booth, nervous, chain-smoking, a disobedient lock of black hair over his left eye. Normally quite dapper in formal black suits and ties, the man was a rumpled pile of jitters when the Americans showed up. He flinched when Billings lit into him about missing contacts, not meeting the Agency man's eyes.

Osawa scrambled to his feet, making obligatory bows vigorously in all directions, right in the aisle.

"Sit, Hiro," Billings commanded him. He'd run a lot of agents and operatives over the years, but his own dog didn't grovel like this. "You're making me nervous."

They all ordered biru and bowls of shiritake noodles.

Lyle Kitchens wasted no time. He told the fidgeting staff aide about Chesapeake.

"Twelve hundred men were lost, pal. But I doubt the bombs went down with them. I got a strong cop instinct that's telling me Tetsuko-san's got them now. Kobe's next...right? The warehouse? Let's look at scenarios, okay?"

Osawa didn't look up at the Major the whole time was he talking. Instead, he picked through his noodles like a scolded schoolboy. Kitchens bore in.

"One: somehow Tetsuko gets the bombs to the warehouse. Two: he's got to ship 'em out again. To whom? And when and where? You've got to give me something more...names, places, times. You've seen stuff, haven't you? Heard stuff. What's the plan? Tetsuko sure isn't going to pawn off five atom bombs to the highest bidder."

Osawa shuddered. He rubbed his hands incessantly. "Before the war, there was a police agency...it was called Tokko. Tokubetsu Koto Keisatsu. Special Higher Police. They did surveillance on everyone, especially gaijin. Tokko knew special ways to investigate crimes, ways that gaijin would never think of. They were Japanese. They think like Japanese." Osawa finally looked up, blinking hard. "You want to catch Tetsuko-san? You are gaijin...American. Americans don't think like Tetsuko-san. Until you do, Americans won't catch Tetsuko-san. You don't do investigation properly, not like Tokko."

Kitchens was growing more impatient with this evasive prick of a Japanese. "Look, mister, when twelve hundred American sailors die and some Jap tycoon's involved, I know how to investigate it. Let's try this one more time: what's Tetsuko's plan? After the bombs arrive at Kobe--what's next?"

Osawa looked down, bowing slightly over his noodles. "Major Kitchens...your bombs will not be taken to Kobe at all. The warehouse is now...oh, what is the English word? Otori."

"Decoy?" Billings blurted out.

Kitchens squinted oddly at Osawa. "You mean to say--"

Billings' cigarette nearly fell out of his mouth. "The warehouse--"

"All that equipment inside--" Kitchens finished his sentence.

Osawa looked down at his noodles. "I think that Tetsuko-san has changed his plans somehow."

Kitchens' face went from surprise to anger in an instant. "So where are they taking the bombs now? What's changed?"

Osawa shook his head, claiming not to know. "It is all very sudden. Very secret. Tetsuko-san--" Osawa shrugged. "--seems to have lost confidence in me. He travels...makes his own arrangements. I don't know--sometimes for several days--where he is. Where he goes." He seemed ashamed and embarrassed at this loss of confidence.

Kitchens was furious. "Look at me, pal." Reluctantly, Osawa's head came up. "You're going to be arrested and prosecuted as an accomplice right now, if I don't see some cooperation. Where is Tetsuko-san right now?"

Osawa was visibly shaking. "He has not been at the Omisumi office for several days."

"Maybe he's in Kobe," Blount suggested.

"I will find out where Tetsuko-san is, Major," Osawa promised.

Kitchens barely heard him; his mind was racing ahead. "If those bombs are still at sea, we'll never find them."

"If they're not going to Kobe--"

"Maybe they're going to the aircraft," Kitchens surmised. "But where's that? Where are the aircraft? Where are they going to launch from?"

Blount was sketching ideas out on a napkin. "Look, we need to focus on the mission itself. Five bombs missing. If they're not at the bottom of the sea, that's got to equal five missions, doesn't it? Five targets. They've got to fly from some base in or near Japan, don't they?"

Nobody disagreed.

"B-29's are the only aircraft that can carry atom bombs. And there are only so many places that Superforts fly from in east Asia." Kitchens related his encounter with Clayton LaSalle on the flight line at Yokota. "Ten to one, this guys up to his elbows in Gallant Flag. I got nothing but 'chain of command' stuffed down my throat."

"Elbows, my ass. I'd say the general's thick as axle grease with this thing. LaSalle was on hand at Eniwetok for the Greenhouse Dog shot."

Kitchens shook his head. "My jurisdiction's fuzzy when it comes to investigating Air Force two-stars. And we don't have time to go chasing up and down the chain of command. Unless we get something concrete on the guy, he's untouchable. No, Tetsuko's the one to squeeze. He's a Jap, under Occupation law, so we got the right to lean hard on him, even rough him up if we have to. Nobody'll question it."

"Unless he's got high-altitude friends in the Dai Ichi."

The men discussed other possibilities. Kitchens ticked off known air bases. "Yokota and Atsugi seem out to me; too busy, too well secured."

"What about Misawa? Andersen?" Billings asked.

"Andersen's on Guam. Too far away for an atomic mission, I would think. We can check the distance. And Misawa's a fighter base the last time I checked. That should be checked too." Kitchens theorized. "It's got to be an outlying base. Or bases. Within B-29 cruising range, carrying an atom bomb, which is a damn heavy load. That makes the most sense to me."

"Do the aircraft come back to the same base?" Blount asked. "Do they ditch somewhere? How the hell do they get back?"

"Or do they?" Billings said.

"Trouble is: there are scores of bases. We don't have time to check all of them."

"And when do they launch?"

Kitchens realized he'd probably have to get back with Lightning Joe Collins in Washington for a clarification of his authority. He needed friends in the Air Force. Friends outside the Far Eastern Air Forces chain of command. He glared back at Osawa. "I was counting on being able to intercept the bombs at Kobe. Tetsuko's a step ahead of me now but we're still in the race. We need more information...and you're going to get it for us, pal. You've got the access, you know Tetsuko. You're my pipeline into Gallant Flag, whether you like it or not. You find Tetsuko-san real fast or I'm taking you to Mishikawa for a close-up look at their new luxury suites, eight-by-ten foot concrete luxury suites. Got it?"

Osawa nodded glumly.

Kitchens wasn't through. "Find out where those bombs are to be taken. I want to know where the bombers are flying from too."

"This will take some time, Major. Tetsuko-san does not come to Omisumi lately. I must find him."

"You've got two days. If I don't hear anything from you by Monday, you're a collaborator in this conspiracy and I'm coming after you."

Osawa nodded, got up bowing profusely, then left the noodle shop. He scurried out onto the Chuo Dori, worried sick and nervous, buttoned up his coat and started walking.

Finding Tetsuko-san wouldn't be all that hard. But getting the facts the American Army Major wanted was another matter. Hiro Osawa could see no honorable way out of the dilemma.

No ronin could serve two masters well. In just such a dilemma, clearly, there was only one course of action open, one honorable path for the dedicated manservant to follow.

He walked briskly along the street, hurtling through the crowds. He wondered just how long would it take for a man to bleed to death.

Friday, 1-19-51

Near Dairen, People's Republic of China

5:00 a.m.

A cold, chilling fog had settled in across the landing zone, which was actually only a few yards of muddy, pebble-strewn beach. Group Sergeant Wie Xie Shan ordered the rubber assault boat dragged off the beach immediately and up beyond the surf line into some brambles and buried. All traces of their footwork were quickly swept away with foliage and the unit's gear gathered up. Wei ordered the special reconnaissance squad of the Heilungchun to move out, north by northeast. Away from the remote stretch of east Chinese coastline.

Sergeant Wie said a hurried and silent prayer to his honorable ancestors, as the seven men headed out. At last, he thought. Our beloved jong-gou. The mainland. May we never leave her sacred shores again.

Mission Leader Group Sergeant Wie knew well the importance of the mission. General Shih himself had briefed them not three days ago, in the Chan Hills of Formosa, at the base at An-ping. The seven-highly trained soldiers of the Dragon's Tail were all volunteers, the best of the best. They were a special squad on a target scouting mission for the Americans.

There was a rumor around the regiment that the Americans wanted to expand the fight in Korea, to take some pressure off the UN forces bogged down there and force Mao and his Red bandits to fight a two-front war. Wie didn't know how much stock to put in such stories. Dragon's Tail always had good stories going. Still, it was good tactics, if it was true.

In any case, they had a mission and a deadline. In three days, they had to travel two hundred miles north, all the way to Shenyang in the middle of Manchuria, taking notes and gathering intelligence on targets of opportunity. Rumor had it the Americans were readying a campaign of aerial bombing against the mainland, to stop the People's Liberation Army from reinforcing its Korean garrison. If there were any truth to the rumors, Wie was only too happy to help them find good targets.

Nothing would please the sergeant more than to see Communist bandits die by the thousands.

Wie led the squad through snowy rice paddies and terraced hillsides and out into the rolling open countryside of the Liaonung Peninsula. From his tactical map, Wie reckoned Anshan to be about a hundred and fifty miles north. That would be their first objective. They would stay in the countryside and away from the towns and villages, now just scattered lights and curls of smoke in the light flurries drifting down. At least, the damnable Siberian wind had died off. Manchurian winters were an ordeal; only once before, as a child, had Wie traveled to see a distant branch of the family near Shenyang. The stinging polar blizzards blasting the Manchurian landscape that winter had left deep and lasting impressions on young Wie Xie Shan.

For two days, Wie led his men north through the wintry terrain, keeping to the woods, to narrow dirt roads and goat paths. They reconnoitered the southern half of the peninsula in good order, marking what few military targets there were--mostly a troop train, an occasional Russian T-34 tank, isolated outposts of the People's Militia.

In the early morning hours of the second day, the special reconnaissance squad of the Heilungchun came to the outskirts of a small town. The map identified the town as Pikou. Wie watched from concealment in a stand of woodlands astride the main road as carts and peasants trudged through the snow to market in the freezing pre-dawn twilight. Pikou was a small unremarkable place, set in a small valley. Columns of black smoke twisted in the wind--hundreds of cooking fires lit to heat up hundreds of bowls of rice and mutton.

Wei scanned the length of the narrow dirt lane that wound its way down into the valley. A few minutes later, Corporal Jian, lying prone a few feet away, spotted a foot patrol of the People's Militia, trudging in a column down the lane. Jian hand signaled to Wie an idea. Wie readily agreed with the thought.

Disguise and camouflage had long been the specialties of the Heilungchun. Years of fighting the Communists had taught them how to blend in. Besides, it was always great sport to kill Red bandits, anytime and anywhere you could.

Wie waited until the column was almost upon them. He chopped the air with hand, signaling attack! The special reconnaissance squad burst out of the brush and quickly set upon the militia column.

The close-quarters assault was brief but deadly. In less than two minutes--they had practiced similar assaults at An-ping a hundred times--the column of People's militiamen lay dead in the snow...strangled, bayoneted, garrotted, and smashed. Their padded quilt jackets would serve nicely as disguise for the squad.

Wie ordered his squad to switch uniforms quickly. After that had been done, the dead militiamen were dragged off into the brush and partially covered with snow and loose branches. Wie formed up the squad into an ersatz column and continued the militiamen's march into Pikou.

He was pleased to note that his own stolen uniform bore the insignia of a major in the People's Liberation Army. That kind of authority could be very useful in the days ahead. There was even a slightly dented pentagonal Mao Tse-tung Badge, awarded for exemplary service in combat. Most impressive.

Wie decided he would try to live up to the exalted standards of the uniform's previous owner and kill an extra few Communists.

The column soon reached the center of Pikou. The narrow lane opened out into a market plaza of stalls and carts, horses and goats. Army trucks were lined up alongside the market. Soldiers had dismounted and were intently combing through the stalls, bargaining for eggs, sickly-looking cabbage, and cakes of goat cheese.

Wie decided now was the time to test his new-found authority.

He marched up to a small squad of soldiers detailed to guard the trucks.

"You there! What unit is this?" Wie barked out the question in his most formal, official Mandarin.

"Sixty-sixth Field Army, comrade Major!"

Wie made a show of inspecting the soldiers, casting a stern eye on their slovenly dress and bearing.

"You two are a poor excuse for soldiers. What do you think this is... a pig farm? Stand up straight! Eyes ahead! Right shoulder...arms!"

The men scrambled to follow orders. Wie made a complete circuit around the detail, checking out the truck cab nearby as he did so. The engine was running, its big Russian GaZ diesel belching acrid black smoke.

"I am commandeering this truck for my men!" Wie shouted. "We are on a special mission! Stand aside!"

"Comrade Major...if you would--"

"Stand aside, soldier, or I'll have you removed from duty and shot right out there in the middle of the square!"

The soldier flinched. His lips were wet and feminine. They started to quiver. Reluctantly, he stepped side.

Wie hurried his troops into the truck, before any senior officers showed up to question them. He and Jian sat up front in the cab, studying the tactical map. Jian suggested they try to make the Anshan-Shenyang highway.

"Shenyang is important, Sergeant. It's a troop train railhead. Supplies too. Weapons and ammunition head south from there...the Americans have tracked the flow right through Anjiin, into Korea."

"Then, Shenyang it is, Corporal." He dropped the big two-tonner into gear and they lumbered out of Pikou along the narrow dirt lane, hunting for the highway that would take them north.

The drive up to Shenyang took about eight hours. They rolled along the potholed macadam at a moderate speed, dodging carts and trucks and columns of peasant farmers herding cows and pigs along the road. The land was white with clumps of snow drifts in the fields but nearer the towns, the snow turned sooty and gray from coal smoke, which hung like a gritty fog in the air. Bare limestone hills from the Qian Shan range cloaked in patches of white marched north with them, sentries of rock over cold frozen valleys of exposed fir and larch trees. Here and there, clusters of thatched roof and mud block homes huddled in a pall of soot and ice fog.

It was late at night and dark when Wei downshifted and slowed to negotiate heavy cart and truck traffic heading into Shenyang. The city was mostly dark, more seen than felt, as a thickening of people and buildings. Ahead, a red light topping a stone obelisk identified the city's central square, a gift from the Soviet Union. The massive column supported a replica of a T-34 tank, a monument to Red Army victories in the summer of 1945, as the hated Japanese Kwantung Army had been finally driven out.

Wei spied a crowd gathering around a drab crenellated sandstone building with ornate columns in front. The lettering on the pediment read Tschurin Department Store. Shell and bullet holes pocked the façade of the store but bright lights were on inside. Directly in front of the entrance, a newly cast bronze sculpture commemorated Red victories in the fight for Shenyang.

Wei pulled over and hailed a knot of farmers, coaxing their pigs and goats through the square. After a brief exchange, he got directions to the central railyard. The obelisk they had seen towered over the porticoed entrance to the rail station. The ride deeper into the city took about five minutes, through growing clots of Shenyangese surging toward the square and the store.

In the square, they discovered an intelligence prize of the highest rank. The rail station and its adjoining track yards and public square turned out to be a huge, bustling supply and embarkation point for the People's Liberation Army's Northern Territorial Force. Thousands of troops had been billeted in a grid of tent settlements, right in the square. Even late at night, by the light of scores of lanterns and torches, trains were offloading pallets of ammo crates, weapons, clothing and food for the "coolie" supply train that ran south from Shenyang to Anjiin and into Korea.

Sergeant Wei realized he and the special reconnaissance squad of the Heilungchun had hit paydirt. Furiously, they started making lists, notes and sketches of all they could see, counting trains, estimating troop strength. Wei slowly drove the truck around the perimeter of the tent city, methodically orbiting the square before fanning out from the center of the city to check on air defense emplacements.

Here, surely, must be a key target for the Americans.

After spending much of the night driving around Shenyang collecting intelligence, Wei drove the truck east past endless lines of coolie porters bearing trunks and A-frame packs of supplies toward a city called Fushun. As he negotiated the narrow road, they passed mile after mile of coolies and pack carts, tens of thousands, all bearing weapons, ammunition, and food for Marshal Peng's field armies in Korea.

Wei muttered under his breath. "The beast is alive tonight, Jian."

"Another offensive, you think?"

"Probably. Mao's got the taste of blood now. He's full of himself. He chased Chiang to Formosa. Now's he's chasing Americans."

"They won't collapse like we did."

"As long as they're not betrayed like we were."

"At least they have bombs."

"And lots of targets for them."

Wei was unaware that all of their circuits through Shenyang had attracted attention. Military Police Commissar Feng Lao Chi had wondered for some time about the curious troop truck that never seemed to stop and load or unload troops. Odd that such a vehicle bearing volunteers for Marshal Peng would constantly circle the square in such a manner. Suspicious, he had decided to follow the circling truck in a staff car.

When the truck then turned east toward Fushun and the frontlines, Feng became even more alarmed. No question about it: capitalist stooges and spies were everywhere, trying to turn the Revolution around and take China away from her people again. Feng used the radio in the car to call ahead to the Internal Security Bureau office in Fushun.

He wanted to have plenty of help when time came to apprehend these slackers.

Saturday, 1-20-51

Near Tokyo

8:30 a.m.

Hiro Osawa had found nothing more especially incriminating at Tetsuko's offices at the Omisumi building, so he decided that a bolder, more direct approach was needed. He woke up very early Saturday morning, ate a quick breakfast of rice, raw egg, bean-paste soup, fish and green tea, then drove west along the Kanto Highway to Saitama Prefecture, west of the great conurbation of Tokyo itself, to Tetsuko's mountaintop home at Motoyama Hill.

It was very early in the morning, still dark, when Osawa, who had a key to the house, was screened through the great iron gates by Omisumi security and drove up the winding gravel road to the great house on the hill. He knew that if Tetsuko's security men caught him, he could be killed, despite his position with the company.

But Hiro Osawa was increasingly desperate, having been threatened with arrest by the Americans if he didn't find out what Tetsuko was going to do with the bombs. He had to produce hard evidence by Monday morning, or else.

Hiro Osawa had worked for Masuhiro Tetsuko for over four years now, ever since Tetsuko had returned to Tokyo and began building up the Omisumi keiretsu from scraps of companies after the Surrender. Nowadays, he had many duties, but when he was asked his position, Osawa always replied, "I am special assistant to Tetsuko-san for corporate affairs." In truth, he had many duties: valet, chauffeur, file clerk, appointment setter, telephone caller. Osawa allowed that his primary duty lay in handling arrangements for Tetsuko's physical movements: especially transportation and security. In this, he worked closely with Masai Torijima, chief of Omisumi security and as pure a yakuza thug as ever there was. Osawa both detested and feared Torijima. The ape would as easily slit a man's throat as buy him a cup of sake, often at the same time.

Osawa parked the car and made his way along a meandering gravel path, through rock gardens and a series of small ponds to the main entrance of the great hirajiro. Once a nobleman's castle, Motoyama Hill sat like a great stone bird on a low hill overlooking a ravine to the south, full of dwarf pine and a few scenic waterfalls and to the east, gave onto a timeless valley of rice fields and irrigation canals, now cloaked in early morning fog. The main house had been built in the 16th century, and added to every century after that, so that by now, the layers had been built up like a child's sand castle, somewhat helter skelter. Swooping winged roofs of glazed tile covered straight white walls of stone. Each façade was fronted with assorted gables and turrets and galleys, so that the overall effect was that of a busy architectural jigsaw puzzle, perched on massive stone and brick parapets that capped the hill like so many bird's claws.

In truth, Hiro Osawa had many opinions about Tetsuko-san. In the same thought, he imagined the industrialist to be an arrogant fool and a strutting peacock who took too many risks and deserved whatever happened to him. At the same time, he admired Tetsuko's courage and willingness to take new risks, qualities not in great supply among traditional Japanese jitsugyoka. Until the Americans came and conquered five years ago, businessmen had long been looked upon as crude, tasteless mongrels grubbing about for mere money. But men like Tetsuko, in a fishpond where the Americans had the biggest bite, had begun to change things.

Osawa admitted thinking Tetsuko had always wanted to swim with the biggest fish in the pond. He had made a religion of trying to out-American the Americans. To Osawa, in his more reflective moments, this seemed demeaning to all that was sacred and honorable in Japanese society. Of course, who now could know what was best for Japan? Before the War, the Imperial Army had been in charge. Now it was the Americans. Each had different views of what was best for Japan. One had to adapt as best one could.

And Osawa's view? Hiro was both comfortable yet mildly uneasy with the thought. Japan could only bow and get along. He viewed his relations with Tetsuko as somehow emblematic of Japan's own relationship with America. Little brother to big brother. Servant to master.

"It is always best," Hiro would say to his wife of twenty-two years, Shinriko Suzumi, "to go along and get along, as the gaijin would say. And wait until we are stronger."

He knew Tetsuko-san thought he was doing just that. But in the end, by involving himself with the wrong Americans, perhaps Tetsuko-san would give up the very things that made him Japanese.

It was all very confusing, Osawa thought. How was it that a great and industrious people like the Americans could give birth to such a daimyo as General Makassar, yet at the same time, send men to Japan to work against that same daimyo and plot his downfall. Was it a case of the 'Forty-seven ronin' all over again?

Osawa could not pretend to understand such things.

Inside the house at Motoyama Hill, Osawa nodded perfunctorily to the household staff. They were used to seeing the assistant padding around Tetsuko's estate, running errands and attending to Tetsuko-san's personal business. He took the stairs up five flights to an upper-floor aerie, where Tetsuko's office suite was located. Outside the sliding doors, two security men glowered at Osawa. After some grunted discussions, the guards opened the door and let Osawa in.

He poked around through the suite for half an hour, finding little. Tetsuko himself was not at home. That didn't surprise Osawa; most likely, the industrialist was in Kobe. Osawa was careful to avoid the appearance of searching too diligently through Tetsuko's personal effects and papers. He didn't want to arouse any more suspicion than necessary.

Then he remembered: there was another building outside the main house. It was a small outbuilding, a single floored, gabled wood and stone stable at the foot of Motoyama Hill, on the back slope, where the estate overlooked ancient rice fields and terraced gardens. Once, the stable had housed horses for the great daimyo Bunruku, from whose descendants Tetsuko had purchased the place. Two years ago, Tetsuko-san had refurbished the stable as a sort of working office and private study.

Osawa had almost forgotten about the place. He seldom made the trek down the long, winding gravel footpath to that part of the estate. In fact, he hadn't had occasion to visit the stable-cum-study in over a year.

There was a chance he could find something that would satisfy the Americans there.

Osawa left the office and made a great show of talking with enough houseservants and staff to convince them he was returning to Tokyo. Then, when he thought the time right, he slipped out of a ground floor exit and disappeared onto the gravel path, hurrying down the hill. Twice, he nearly slipped on slick, moss-covered stones and was grateful for the light fog creeping up from the damp rice fields below.

He made the stable in ten minutes, pausing before a miniature Shinto shrine at the gated door, just long enough to find the right keys. In less than a minute, he was inside.

Earthy smells still lingered in the study, though the renovation had been finished two years ago. Straw, horse droppings, feed bags and a general musty odor dominated the dank corners and cold stone floors of the place. Osawa found Tetsuko-san's private study and went in, firing up gas lanterns mounted on the walls. He found himself subconsciously holding his breath, as he rifled through desk drawers and file cabinets, hurrying himself along, lest Motoyama's yakuza become curious and come looking for him.

Nearly an hour later, Osawa had become discouraged. He was just about to head back up to the house, when a small folder caught his eye. It was buried in the back of a cabinet, stuffed behind some ceramic dragons and other bric-a-brac. It caught Osawa's eye because the folder was so obviously out of place. Osawa prided himself on keeping Tetsuko-san's papers in perfect logical order. The industrialist was fanatical about order.

He pulled the folder out and rifled through the papers. All were hand scribbled. It was Tetsuko's writing; few could read the script and Osawa himself often had trouble. Tetsuko would never achieve top rank in calligraphy school, that much was certain. Osawa scanned the writing, puzzling scattered words.

His heart began to beat faster.

Here at last, it seemed, were handscribbled notes about this thing the Americans called Gallant Flag. A strange custom, American military names. Osawa had long been a student of Japanese history, and knew things about the martial nomenclature of ancient Nihon. But American names and places defeated him. He could not make any rational sense out of the phraseology 'gallant flag.'

Now oblivious to time, Osawa scanned quickly, picking up words here and there. There were references to some place in Okinawa--Mishida, it was called. Osawa gathered it was an isolated island, a bare scrap of an island somewhere in the Ryukyus. And there were references to an airfield, a runway...work done by Omisumi, it seemed. Osawa made a mental note to check some of the purchase order numbers back at headquarters. Odd bills and inventory lists. Scraps of work orders--nothing official, all of handwritten in Tetsuko's brusque style. Osawa's eyebrows raised at mention of reclamation work at Mishida.

This was all new to him. Nothing mentioned of Kobe here. It seemed to be true--what Major Kitchens and the Americans were saying. Osawa knew Tetsuko would never bring his stolen bombs into the home islands. Too much evidence had leaked out about the warehouse by now.

But this Mishida had been kept secret, even from Osawa. Tetsuko had seemingly handled the entire matter himself, delegating nothing to Osawa at all. Hiro wondered for a moment. Was that important? Did it mean Tetsuko-san had lost faith in his principal assistant? Did it mean Tetsuko-san was suspicious of Osawa...that he knew somehow of Osawa's meeting with Billings and the other Americans? Had he lost face before Masuhiro Tetsuko...perhaps, some business done improperly, loose ends not tidied up, some errand not completed to his satisfaction. No, it wasn't possible. In fact, it was incomprehensible...Tetsuko-san had confided everything to Osawa over the years. There was no more highly favored and trusted assistant, no more needed ashisutanto in all of Omisumi...was there?

Osawa shook his head, not sure what to think. After reading and re-reading through the papers, Osawa realized that this was very likely what he had been looking for. Perhaps, this--this Mishida--was the point of origin for the Gallant Flag mission. The papers even made fleeting mention of large crates of 'special materials'. Materials coming from Kobe.

Saddened at Tetsuko's loss of confidence in him, yet pleased at his discovery, Osawa momentarily forgot about the Omisumi guards patrolling the grounds of the estate. Before he realized it, a door to the study burst open, an outside door Osawa hadn't seen before--perhaps he had forgotten about it--and two guards peered in. Right away, they spotted Osawa.

"Suru no yo womeru! Stay where you here! Identify yourself!"

Both guards raised sidearms...American Army Colt .45 revolvers...and aimed them at Osawa.

Osawa paused in horror only a second, before turning about, clutching the folder to his chest and plunging through the study door he had entered an hour before. Behind him, shots boomed out, splintering the wood panels of the study, shattering figurines along wall shelves. Osawa dove out into the corridor and fled into the garden. More shots. Several rounds thunked into tree trunks behind him. He slipped in the gravel, then plunged into the woods alongside the path, intending to lose his pursuers in the foliage.

Unwittingly, he began angling through the woods up a slight grade, heading up the hill back toward the main house. Behind him, brush and branches and grunts and curses sounded; heavy feet clawed at gravel and tore at limbs.

The chase went on for ten minutes, up and up along a blind spiral course, crossing and re-crossing the gravel path. At times, Osawa, nearly out of breath, was sure he had managed to elude the guards. He stopped twice, hearing nothing for a few minutes, then faintly, the breaking of tree limbs and crunching of feet on gravel, rocks sliding down the hill. Osawa did not realize that the guards had been joined by several more from the house and that they were intentionally driving him further up the hill, and south, toward a steep precipice at the very edge of the estate. Almost too late, Osawa realized the tactic and found himself nearly falling over the edge of a cliff.

He stood doubled over, heaving in great gulps of air, on a rock escarpment at the highest point of Motoyama Hill, overlooking through thickening fog, the ravine and the waterfalls--he could hear the water cascading down a five hundred foot drop even now--and the narrow gorge at the bottom. It was one of the most splendid and scenic views to be had from the great estate, one immortalized in haiku by no less than the medieval daimyo Bunruku himself, once master of Motoyama.

Confronted on one side by a small army of armed yakuza closing in through the woods and on the other side by a five hundred foot sheer rock cliff and drop-off into a ravine and a small stream, Osawa realized he had to make a decision.

He was sure he had the knowledge that Major Kitchens wanted. But how to get it to the American Army investigator?

Osawa prayed silently and quickly to his honorable ancestors. Then he removed the papers from the folder and folded them several times. Removing his shoe, he stuffed the folded pages inside his socks and shoved them down to the base of his feet. He put his shoe back on.

The guards were very close now. Loud grunts issued from the woods. He could hear the clicks of magazines being changed very clearly. Many feet thudded on the ground. Two men, perhaps three or four, were coming.

"Tomaru! Suru no yo womeru!" The first guard burst out of the woods and quickly halted himself on the front slope of the rocky ledge of the cliff. He dropped into a crouch, inching his way forward, weapon raised, aimed, stalking his prey--

Osawa's heart beat madly in his chest. But his ancestors would surely understand. To lose honor and face before one's master was worse even than death.

Hiro Osawa turned to face the cliff edge...held his breath....

...and leaped into space, five hundred feet above the gorge.

Saturday, 1-20-51

Kobe, Japan

10:15 p.m.

Masuhiro Tetsuko stood on the side of the wharf at Pier 12, Kobe Harbor, and savored the aroma of the last Panatela cigar in his possession. He hoped Paul Craft would be bringing him another box of the delectable Cuban smokes; it was a vice he had picked up from the Americans several years ago. Cuban cigars, he had found, made an efficient and well-appreciated form of exchange. Havana brands were well prized in every city hall and union shop and Army post throughout Japan. It was amazing what a few freshly rolled cigars could do, when slapped into the right hands at the right time.

Meriken Pier and the Kaigan-dori road above the docks were well lit tonight. Tetsuko was pleased with himself, as he watched five trucks systematically unload their heavy crated cargoes, each of which was winched aboard a small, ten-thousand ton freighter moored at the pier. The freighter belonged to Omisumi's coastal shipping line. English and Japanese kanji script on her bow proclaimed her name in the pier floodlights: Shigematsu.

Shigematsu had already passed all her customs and port inspections earlier in the evening. Tetsuko had made sure the ship's manifest, which listed 'special construction materials', was properly signed and sealed. No questions would be asked once that was done. There would be no paper trail to follow, other than the officially documented one.

The port inspectors at the modern Customs House on Hanshin Road had been most appreciative of their new packs of Panatelas.

Shigematsu's manifest did not detail the fact that each crate ostensibly containing construction materials in fact held a single eight-thousand pound American atom bomb. The freighter was due to clear the harbor's outer marker buoys at just after midnight, for a short overnight run down to the commercial docks at Okinawa City. The trip would take six, maybe seven hours, at the freighter's top speed of sixteen knots. It was vital that Shigematsu reach her destination before sunup. Shift change for the dock crews at Okinawa City came promptly at eight o'clock local time. And the day shift stevedores were not on Omisumi's payroll.

Tetsuko was nervous, puffing on his cigar. He was waiting impatiently for Brigadier General Paul Craft to return from Tokyo. He was proud of the little ruse he had thought up, though he didn't know how long the deception would hold up. It might be enough to throw off the Army investigators for a few days. Perhaps that would be all that was necessary. Tetsuko wasn't so sure about the others stalking Gallant Flag, the Red Chinese agents and the Soviet spies he was sure he had seen. In any case, a few days would be all that was needed, so Craft had told him. A few days...and the balance of power in the Far East would be irrevocably changed.

It was a simple ruse, though Craft had been initially skeptical. There never had been any intention of storing the Greenhouse devices at the Kobe warehouse. It was simply a front. For the two days since the devices had been unloaded from Orient Star, they had simply stayed under cover on the trucks. The convoy had made a trip to the warehouse on Harima Cho, stopped for an hour, then returned to Meriken Pier. They had been parked in a well-guarded container compound, along with crates of machine parts and bags of soybeans ever since, waiting for Shigematsu to arrive for the transfer down to Okinawa.

The last of the warheads had just been winched aboard and secured when an unmarked U.S. Army sedan pulled up to the dock fence. A uniformed officer got out and stood watching the operation for a few minutes. Presently, he spotted Tetsuko standing along the wharf's edge, enveloped in cigar smoke.

Paul Craft came down, his face grim, slit eyes narrowed against a stiff salt air gust coming off the harbor. Craft had rat's eyes, Tetsuko had long thought. His black frame glasses gave him an owl's face.

Craft jammed his hands into his olive drab field jacket and lowered the brim of his cap. He told Tetsuko about the intruder spotted that morning at Motoyama Hill. He'd seen the wire from Japan National Police at the Dai Ichi.

"Your guys chased him all over the place. He was seen searching through boxes of papers in that stable you converted. What the hell have you got in those cabinets anyway?"

Tetsuko was guarded. "Personal matters, Craft-san. Only personal matters."

"Yeah, I'm sure. Records of all the bribes you've made is more like it. Nothing on the operation, I hope."

Tetsuko shrugged. "Nothing of importance."

"For both our sakes, I hope so." Craft lit up a cigarette, shielding it from the wind, and sucked hard on it for a moment. "We can't afford to take any more chances. Now that the 'presents' are here--we've got to get 'em down to Mishida. Deliver the goods so Santa Claus can make his rounds."

Tetsuko was mentally tabulating the contents of his files in the Motoyama stable office. "And what of this intruder?"

"Funny thing," Craft explained. "I read the police report...SCAP Government section gets a daily sheet on violent crimes from Tokyo. The fellow turned out to be one of your own assistants. Name of Hiro Osawa. That name sounded familiar--have I met him before?"

Tetsuko said nothing.

"Anyway, his body was positively ID'ed by the police. Looks like your guards chased him up to a cliff and he either jumped or was pushed off. Knowing your guards, I can guess which. He was dead at the scene."

Tetsuko showed no outward emotion at the news. He wasn't surprised. He had long suspected Osawa of being an informant. For weeks, he had been sure Osawa's handlers were Russians--all the signs were there. Now, it seemed he had guessed wrong. Osawa had been in contact with someone inside the American Army. Probably Kitchens. How else could you explain an unexplainable trip to Motoyama Hill? Osawa hadn't had any reason to visit the estate in over a year.

"It's bad, no matter what they find," Craft was saying. He drew his field jacket tighter against the stiffening offshore winds. There was sleet, or snow, swirling in the dock floodlights. "The prefectural police will investigate for sure. Maybe even the National Police. A death like this gets attention, even inside the Dai Ichi."

"Do not worry about Saitama Prefectural Police, Craft-san. I have friends there. Very good friends. The investigation will reveal nothing."

"It's Tokyo that worries me. If Osawa's working for anyone inside SCAP, who the hell is it? Kitchens? Whitney? The CIA? I don't want Tokyo or the Army poking around asking questions now. It's just not good. It gives Kitchens something else to come snooping for. And if he can connect you with a murder, he's got all the license he needs to haul you in right now. They won't use kid gloves next time either. Don't give them any more reason to come after you. Keep that busy little nose of yours squeaky clean, for once, before it lands you in jail. I can't protect you if they hang a murder charge on you."

The two men watched as last minute tie-down preparations were completed on Shigematsu's foredeck.

"Craft-san, I am very glad your special presents are leaving tonight. The last few days, here in Kobe, have been--" he shook his head, unable to find the right English word.

"Me too. The sooner we get these babies to LaSalle, the better I'll feel."

"At least Mishida is now ready for them. Omisumi has finished all work. All contracted work."

Craft smiled. Tetsuko was a work of art. "And now it's time to pay up, is that what you're trying to tell me? Don't sweat...you'll get what we agreed on. Christ, you're like a bulldog, Tetsuko. Once you get your teeth into someone, you never let go. Whatever happened to that wonderful Japanese custom of deference?"

Tetsuko stared straight ahead. "Perhaps, it is the bushido. Code of our samurai warriors. Samurai value patience highly. Also persistence. In any case, what is and is not Japanese has changed, has it not? America has seen to that."

The men discussed the advisability of continuing to try to arrange an 'accident' for Lyle Kitchens.

"I don't like it," Craft said. "Too risky now. Kitchens is smart, for a cop. Smarter than I realized. He keeps sniffing and scratching and he's already gotten hold of too much information as it is. You can't afford another shakedown. Lie low. Keep your paws clean. Don't give him anything else. We only have to keep him digging a few more days at most. Then...everything changes. When the bombs drop and Washington sees that the Old Man was right all along, Kitchens' little investigation will be squashed like a cockroach. End of case."

Tetsuko disagreed. "I want to try again, Craft-san. Major Kitchens threatens my business. He damages my interests. He intimidates my associates. Bad for business."

"Give it up. I'm telling you once we see mushroom clouds over Red China, all your troubles will vanish."

Tetsuko nodded, bowing slightly to the American officer, but he made no commitment. Craft didn't ask for one. In the back of his mind, it was vital to Omisumi that Lyle Kitchens be eliminated and soon. Already, the CID officer had managed to dry up some of the most lucrative channels into the Dai Ichi, channels he had nurtured like rice seedlings for years. Such interference could not be allowed to continue.

Tetsuko changed the subject. "There is another matter to consider. Craft-san, we both know the Russians have many agents in Japan. There have been sabotage attempts before. Possibly there will be more. Through my own sources, I believe the identity of the principal agent is now known to us."

"Who is it?"

"There is a man with the Soviet Embassy, a cultural attaché. His name is Trofimenko. My sources say he is not an attaché at all. This is not a surprise to us. Trofimenko is NKVD. My security force has sighted this man around Kobe, more than once. This is another man who must be eliminated."

Craft sighed. "You can't just go around 'eliminating' people. I don't care about bushido or whatever this code is. Too many bodies attract attention. And we don't need any more attention."

"It is the only way....another sabotage attempt may be made—"

Craft wasn't buying it. "The best thing for us now is to get these bombs the hell out of here. Get 'em down to Mishida. They'll be more secure there. I've personally promised the Old Man the bombs will be ready to fly by next Thursday. January 25. The time for diversions is over. There's too much to be done and not much time."

Tetsuko seemed disappointed. To run from the enemy was wrong. It would mean a loss of face. A great dishonor. Americans simply didn't understand how to deal with an enemy. Never, in thousands of years of history, had a true Japanese warrior show weakness to an enemy, or a competitor. Enemies were to be eliminated.

But Paul Craft's thoughts were elsewhere now. He watched as the Shigematsu's crew chief signaled to the dockhands that all tie-downs were done. The bombs were secured aboard the freighter. Already, her engine room was running up her boilers, warming up the engines. Dense smoke poured from her twin funnels. Crewmen hustled along the catwalks, making fast gangways, ladders, hatches and dock lines. Tetsuko stepped aside to confer briefly with the ship's captain, a stout pigface of a man, clutching a sheaf of doctored Customs papers.

Craft still had several duties to perform. He had to concoct a reason to travel over to Guam's Anderson Field, to collect Albert Ranier. Ranier was manifested on a short trip to tour the quickly disappearing ruins of Hiroshima. A fact-finding trip, a courtesy really. Something the Army's Public Information people had thought up for the atomic big shots at Eniwetok. It was a way to show how the Army was supporting the nation's atomic test program, since the Navy got most of the spotlight at the Pacific Proving Grounds. And it was a perfect cover for Paul Craft, for during this trip, it was simple enough to arrange a quick detour for Ranier. A detour to Mishida. There the Czech physicist could visually inspect the Gallant Flag devices and ensure they had made their harrowing trip from the mid-Pacific without problem. After this side trip, Craft would make sure Ranier re-joined the Hiroshima trip so no questions would be asked.

While they were at Mishida, Craft and Ranier would have a little chat with Clayton LaSalle. He wanted to make sure the aircraft were ready, try to impress on the General the need to finish flight planning quickly. The mission had to be ready for MacArthur's approval by the 25th.

After conferring with Shigematsu's captain, Tetsuko told Craft he was going back to Tokyo.

"I can offer you a more comfortable ride, General Craft-san. We can discuss matters."

"It's not a good idea for us to be seen together anymore than necessary. I've got to arrange a flight to Guam anyway. I need some time to think, work up some reason for me to get involved with this publicity tour the Army's set up."

Tetsuko wasn't surprised. "As you wish." Craft left abruptly, climbing back in his staff car. When the Ford had disappeared up the ramp to Hanshin Road, he decided a last inspection of the Shigematsu's paperwork was in order. The industrialist climbed up the main gangway, deep in thought.

Despite warnings from Paul Craft, Tetsuko had reasons for wanting to get rid of Lyle Kitchens once and for all. Important reasons. Business reasons.

In time, perhaps even Craft-san would come to see the value of doing things the Japanese way.

Monday, 1-22-51

Saitama Prefecture, near Tokyo

11:30 a.m.

Major Lyle Kitchens turned up the white sheet and studied the badly battered body of Hiro Osawa for the last time.

"How far do you figure the fall was?"

Inspector Kenichi Abe, Saitama Prefectural Police, wrinkled his nose, as if sniffing the air for an answer that might satisfy the Army investigator. "My men have estimated the height of the cliff at Motoyama Hill at two hundred and ten meters. About six hundred and sixty feet."

"You've made positive ID? This is in fact Hiro Osawa, the one with Omisumi Corporation?"

Abe sniffed again. He reminded Kitchens of a small dog, ever alert for predators. "We have, Major. There is no doubt." He swept his hand along the length of the shrouded corpse. "Hiro Osawa died almost immediately. Multiple skull fractures. A broken neck. Crushed vertebrae in the spine." He averted his eyes from Kitchens. "A most unfortunate accident."

"I doubt if it was an accident."

The Saitama Prefectural Police station was a small brick and stone building in the center of the village of Tachikawa. Across the street, wooden torii gates fronted a small Shinto shrine. Through the windows of the examining room, Kitchens saw a small horse-drawn cart slide by, clopping loudly on the stone path outside the station. The cart was piled to overflowing with hay bales.

Kitchens indicated another table nearby. "Personal effects?"

Abe led him over. "These papers were taken from the kojin. Most unfortunate...."

Lyle Kitchens had heard of Osawa's death while at the CID offices in the Dai Ichi. There was a daily wire from Japan National Police, a run-down on violent crimes throughout Japan, sent automatically to SCAP's Government Section. The circumstances of Osawa's death, as well as the name of the deceased and the location, had attracted Kitchens' attention. It had been Gilruth who'd brought down a flimsy of the wire that morning.

Kitchens knew his position as an investigator with the U.S. Army gave him complete permission to intervene in any crime where U.S. interests might be at stake.

He had driven out to Tachikawa immediately. Robert Blount had come along.

Kitchens picked through the papers and effects for a few moments. "Why are these papers separated from the others?" A small pile had been neatly catalogued and placed on another table nearby.

Abe shook his head. "I am told these papers were found in the kojin's shoes. In his socks, actually. Very curious."

Kitchens took a closer look.

The papers were handwritten, in kanji, a hurried scribbling unlike the normally neat cursive script Kitchens had seen everywhere else around the country. He rifled through the pages, handed a few over to Blount. He showed the top page to Inspector Abe.

"Can you translate this?"

Abe adjusted his glasses and took the page. "My apologies...I am not so good with the English...I will try--" He scanned the page, hmmmed, then took another page, and another, his lips moving silently with the words. "It does not make a lot of sense--just fragments of thoughts....notes and jottings--"

"You must have some idea--"

Abe shrugged. "The notes talk of special materials a lot, special construction materials. Here--" he pointed out a line of characters. "And there is some mention of Okinawa."

"Okinawa?" Blount was curious. "What about Okinawa?"

Abe read on. "Right here--" he ran his finger down a column of characters--"the handwriting is terrible, but it seems to mention a place called Mishida. I gather that's in Okinawa?"

"Maybe." Kitchens wrote down the word in his own notebook. "What else?"

Abe shook his head. "That is where it makes no sense. Perhaps it is a reference. Perhaps an illusion. These words here speak of a 'brave banner, a flag of some type--"

"Bingo," Blount said. "Gallant Flag."

"Read what you can about this place in Okinawa."

Abe flipped through the pages. "Construction materials....special materials....a few words about costs... this part seems to be a ledger...shipping...a ship called Orient Star....special containers...a lot of words about security, right in here--"

"Okinawa." Kitchens looked over at the FBI agent, who was feeling through the pockets of the corpse's jacket and trousers. "And what was that place called--?"

Abe consulted the papers again. "Mishida."

"Must be somewhere in Okinawa," Blount reasoned. "Maybe we're looking in the wrong places."

"Maybe the mission is to be launched from Okinawa," Kitchens theorized. "It might make sense. It's near enough to Korea for a B-29 to make a round trip, near enough to Japan to be well-serviced. But still isolated."

"Airbases?"

"One that I know of...and that's Kadena. Pretty busy place, from what I know. Would you launch a covert mission like Gallant Flag from a place like Kadena?"

"If you could disguise it as something else. Trouble is, how the hell do you disguise atomic bombs?"

"This is important...this is big. My guess is there are some runways around Okinawa that aren't so well known. Maybe that's what Mishida means. We need to do a little digging, find out what facilities might be down there."

Kitchens politely took possession of the handwritten notes from Inspector Abe. The Inspector seemed annoyed. More than once, he had relinquished material evidence in criminal cases to American Army people. Arrogant and pushy, like all gaijin. He glared at both of them.

"You must sign for this evidence. There will be an investigation. A criminal investigation. These papers are evidence."

"There are crimes, pal," said Kitchens, "and there are crimes. Your case is a suspicious death of one man. Mine is a little bigger."

Kitchens and Blount left the police building and returned to Tokyo. Traffic on the Kanto Highway was light. They passed a convoy of Army deuce and a halfs and took a roundabout route through Shibuya into the center of the city.

"If the mission is supposed to launch from Okinawa," Blount was saying, "that narrows down the possibilities. Question is: where are the bombs now? Kobe?"

"I'm not so sure," Kitchens told him. "If you believe the launch site is Okinawa, then it makes sense that the bombs will wind up there at some point. Maybe they're already there. Maybe we should finagle a trip down to Okinawa. Now I'm wondering: when is this thing supposed to launch? Is there more than one mission? And what are the targets?"

"Time's running out," Blount said. "I get it from Hoover everyday...the President's on the warpath about MacArthur's insubordination. He wants to fire the General. Others are holding him back. I don't know what's going to happen."

"I do." Kitchens pulled into the motor pool garage and parked the car. "Now that we've got some hard proof that a U.S. airbase is involved, I've got something to show General Collins. Now I can backtrack and implicate real U.S. military personnel. Maybe even MacArthur himself. I've still got to go through the chain of command. All the way back to Washington through the Army, to Lightning Joe Collins. But first, we've got to find that base. And fast."

The two men returned to the CID offices in the basement. Gilruth handed them a phone message as soon as they came through the door.

"Just took it, ten minutes ago," the Major said. He had doughnut crumbs all over his fingers. "A Mr. Lang, from the Embassy."

Kitchens was instantly alert. "It's a code," he told Blount. "The Red Chinese agent I've been collaborating with, Jiang Chen Li, uses that code name."

Blount still couldn't believe it. "Your superiors know you're in bed with a Communist officer?"

"Around here, no. Washington approved it, so I'm not worried. But if Pinky Wright or Sutherland or any of MacArthur's Bataan Gang knew it, we'd probably have an atomic explosion right here."

Kitchens read the cryptic message several times. "Jiang must have found something. Says here I'm to contact Mr. 'Lang' through an intermediary, right away."

"What kind of intermediary?"

Kitchens looked up, a bit puzzled. "A geisha house. Not too far from here. It's called the Happy Rose Petal."

Ten minutes later, both men were walking out the door, down the Chui Dori, heading for the Happy Rose Petal.
CHAPTER 22

Monday, January 22, 1951

Washington, D.C.

4:15 p.m.

Harry Truman pecked out a few plaintive notes on the piano, wincing at the sounds. Beyond the windows, the columned portico of Mount Vernon glided by, perched on a snowy hillside overlooking the Potomac River. The U.S.S. Sequoia, the Presidential yacht, was underway, heading downriver at a stately seven knots. Outside, sleet crackled against the windows and shutters. Sequoia had just rounded the headland at Gravely Point.

Truman finished off his bourbon and struck a discordant note on the piano again. It was late afternoon, gloomy and chilly on the ice-flecked river. He'd been listening carefully to reports of progress on the Gallant Flag case. The President was tight-lipped and increasingly angry at what he heard.

Hoover, Marshall and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General of the Army Omar Bradley surrounded the President by Sequoia's starboard windows. The wooden-hulled one-hundred footer had been originally built to chase rum runners on the Mississippi River. Herbert Hoover had taken a fancy to the yacht in 1931 and ordered it brought to the Nation's Capital. She was berthed at the Washington Navy Yard.

"Gentlemen," Truman said, "this is becoming an unmitigated catastrophe. You're sure the bombs have been lost at sea?"

Omar Bradley reiterated his news. "With all hands, Mr. President. Whatever happened to Chesapeake, she went down in a hurry. She reported a boiler room casualty at 2105 hours that night. The Navy estimated she sank less than two hours later, from all reports."

Truman shook his head. "I'm not a Navy man but it just doesn't make sense to me. Unless the hull was somehow damaged. And the Navy reports no sign of the bombs?"

"None, sir," Bradley reported. "All evidence points to they're being at the bottom of the Pacific. A terrible tragedy, sir."

Marshall wasn't so sure. "Mr. President, I talked with Collins before coming over to the Navy Yard. He's been in touch with Major Kitchens--the task force investigator from the Army in Tokyo. Kitchens isn't so sure the bombs weren't grabbed before Chesapeake sank...if they were even aboard the ship. We don't know who might have grabbed them. Seems like Kitchens has some evidence the bombs may be in Japan."

Truman's face was red, whether from anger or the bourbon, Marshall couldn't tell. "I ought to be impeached. For dereliction of duty. I'll tell you the truth, fellas: my first inclination is to call up MacArthur right now. An immediate meeting. Doesn't he realize only the President can authorize atomic strikes? Or maybe, I should just recall the son of a bitch. Hell, he's been insubordinate enough." Truman glowered at the nearly empty bottle of bourbon on the piano. The piano was worthless, out of tune. Had been for months. Margaret had been after him to get the damn thing replaced. And the bourbon wasn't much better. Dry as hell. Sour as a whiny stepchild.

Bradley was leery of the President's foul mood. But the prospect of recalling a top commander in the midst of a shooting war was unsettling to him. The CJCS counseled caution.

"Mr. President, the situation in Korea is critical today. We're a long way from turning this thing around. To make that big a change in command now could introduce a lot of confusion and chaos at the highest, decision-making levels." The general clasped his hands behind his back and moved a step closer to the President, intruding a little on Marshall's space. The SecDef resisted silently, then reluctantly yielded deck space. "There are strong military reasons for keeping MacArthur on. You don't lightly break the chain of command when we're in the middle of a war. By all means, continue the investigation. But keep the unity of command intact."

Truman turned and glared at Bradley for a long moment. "General, if anybody else had said that to me, I'd have them cashiered right here and now. Hell, it's MacArthur that's breaking the chain of command...disobeying my direct orders, gallivanting all over Asia like some two-bit potentate. But I see your point." He chewed on his lower lip. "It's against my better judgement but I agree with you. The military situation's so dicey now, I can't in good conscience do anything to weaken our position. Lives are at stake here...not just reputations." He made up his mind and removed his glasses, gently massaging the bridge of his nose. "MacArthur's got to stay...for now. But he's also got to obey orders...like any good soldier. Where are we in the investigation?"

J. Edgar Hoover reviewed the specifics of the case, where Kitchens and Blount had evidence, where the trail of clues was more circumstantial. "Mr. President, five R-T type, Mark VI atom bombs are now missing, presumably sunk in the Pacific. We know that preparations are underway at several locations in Japan for a secret aerial mission, maybe several missions. We know from strong evidence that a Japanese industrialist named Tetsuko is deeply involved as are several high-ranking SCAP staff officers, possibly even operational U.S. Air Force commanders. There is, as yet, no direct evidence that MacArthur himself is involved, or even knows of this conspiracy."

Truman held up a hand. "Wait just a minute. What are the chances a planning effort like this could be underway inside MacArthur's headquarters but he not be aware of it?"

"The prospect of that," conceded Marshall, "is pretty damned remote."

"That's what I thought." The President picked up the bourbon decanter and sniffed at the last drops inside. Outside, the headland of Mount Vernon had dropped astern. Wintry farm country now lined both sides of the Potomac. He studied his own reflection in the stateroom's glass windows, his breath steaming up large swaths of the Virginia countryside. "Now the Russians are on the move too. All across the German frontier...what did the intelligence reports say, George?"

Marshall had scanned them that very morning in his E-Ring office at the Pentagon. "The latest intel from G-2 on the Red Army order of battle in East Germany and around Berlin has two motor rifle divisions and two armored divisions moving under concealment to forward positions over the last few nights. We know some platoons are from the 11th Guards Tank Division...we picked up radio traffic to that effect. They're now within about a day's ride of the Fulda Gap and our own positions along the Regensberg corridor. Probably six hundred tanks in all, mostly T-34's."

"And that's not all," Truman interjected. "Right before lunch, Admiral Leahy handed me this note. It seems we have diplomatic maneuvers going on too." Truman extracted a scribbled piece of paper from his pocket. He quoted from the paper"....strong indications from sources in Estonia and Poland that the Russians will certainly respond in Europe if we try to widen the war in Korea." Truman crumpled the paper and stuffed it back in his pocket. "So you see, gentlemen, we're playing with fire here...atomic fire. And the consequences are incalculable. I'm in a difficult spot here and I can't let this damned plot go on much longer, evidence or not. I don't want to jeopardize the chain of command in the Far East or our position in Korea at all. But I'd rather do that than risk World War III in Europe."

Hoover saw his position slipping. "Mr. President, it's my considered opinion that Blount and Kitchens are closing in on real evidence, especially now that they're engaged in limited cooperation with the Russians and the Red Chinese."

"I doubt the Chinese and the Russians have the same interests we do," Truman observed acidly. "More likely sabotage, or theft of our atomic secrets."

"A few more days, Mr. President, and we'll have everything we need," Hoover pleaded. "Enough evidence to clean house completely." The Director knew it had been his idea to forge a tenuous investigative relationship with the Reds in the first place. Now it was threatening to blow up in his face, if Truman didn't give the case time to develop.

Truman gave it some thought. "Against my better judgement, I'll go along with another week, at the very most. But I want one precaution in place." He turned to Marshall. "Get with Vandenberg and the Air Force people and set up a last resort defense. If MacArthur or someone in his command launches an atomic strike mission, I want our fighters to shoot the sons of bitches down. Shoot them down before they can violate Chinese or Russian airspace and touch off World War III."

The men stared at each other. Bradley swallowed audibly. Marshall was pale, but he quickly promised to get right on it.

Monday, 1-22-51

Tokyo

8:30 p.m.

Lyle Kitchens had never been in a geisha house before. For that matter, neither had Robert Blount. They found the Happy Rose Petal easily enough along a busy stretch of the Chui Dori and cautiously went inside.

Fumei An was up front, at the hostess station, when the two Americans came in. Once a parlor, the room was now decorated with delicate shoji screens and an ornate rosewood writing table. A horsehead lamp cast shadows on a large, leather-bound book on the table. The proprietor of the Happy Rose Petal looked up sweetly at Kitchens and Blount. American GIs were among her best customers.

"I'm looking for someone," Kitchens announced. "A Mr. 'Lang.'" He wore his olive drab field jacket and khaki trousers--official status written all over him.

Fumei An immediately noticed the MP emblem on his shoulders. She blinked. "Our customers enjoy their privacy. You are perhaps wanting today's special? Lilac bath and the Ceremony of the Three Willows...very good price today. Five hundred yen--" she did a quick mental calculation, eyeing Kitchens' officer's insignia--"forty dollar. Very nice...very relaxing--"

Kitchens prowled around the front room, sizing up the delicate woodprints of kabuki scenes on the walls and the miniature fountains splashing water through three levels of dragon's heads. Fumei An followed the Major around with her hands clasped before her face. She was a delicate ivory figurine of a woman, barely five feet tall, with elaborately coiffed black hair and exquisitely tiny yet strong hands.

Kitchens turned a corner around one of the shoji screens and ran headlong into Torijima, one of Fumei An's house guards. The yakuza thug started to push Kitchens back into the front room but thought better of it when he saw the Major's Army uniform. Torijima scowled, then slinked away when Fumei An shooed him off.

"Thanks, but no thanks," the Major said. "Duty first. I'm meeting this Lang fellow. Mind if I check out the premises?" He barged right into a nearby furo, Robert Blount right behind him. Two men were inside the bath, submerged to their necks in hot scented water. They were surrounded by a bevy of four geisha, kneeling along the edges of the pool, luxuriously sponging off the backs and necks of the men.

Jap salarymen, Kitchens figured. They scowled up at the intrusion.

Fumei An scurried after the nosy Americans. It wouldn't do to let these gaijin disturb her regular customers. It just wouldn't do at all. Fumei An took hold of Kitchens' jacket sleeve.

"Please...Major...let me help you--" she smiled a porcelain smile, gently but firmly tugging on his sleeve. "Come--come--this is better...our best furo." She guided him into another bath, this one empty. Blount followed, wide-eyed. Inside the bath, Fumei An clapped her hands loudly. The claps sounded like gun shots, reverberating off the tile floors.

"Daisuko! Sasumi! Miyasi!" In seconds, three kimono-clad geisha appeared. Fumei An fired off a string of orders in Japanese, barking out commands like the best drill instructor. Instantly, the three girls fluttered about the furo like birds, fetching up sponges, oils and perfume bottles. Lilac and lilly petals were scattered over the steaming water. Before he knew what was happening, one of the girls had Kitchens' jacket off.

"Hey! Hey...wait a minute!"

Blount was getting the same treatment, and grinning like a kid at a birthday party. "Forget it, Major. We're hooked--I'm starting to like this place already--"

"We don't have--" but Kitchens didn't finish the sentence. Two of the girls had already expertly dropped his trousers...deftly tugging off his shoes and socks. "I mean...Lang'll be here any minute--"

Fumei An shhhed him with her finger on his lips, then while Kitchens was disrobing, the headmistress and former Comfort Girl First Rank of the Japanese Imperial Kwantung Army plucked out a few plaintive notes on a shamisen harp. Firmly but gently, the two Americans were guided into the steaming, lilac-scented water of the furo.

Blount grinned over at Kitchens. The Major was no longer protesting so much. "Give up, Major. When in Tokyo--"

For the next half hour, Kitchens and Blount were luxuriously bathed and massaged by three 'little willows' from the Happy Rose Petal. Fumei An told them they were guests of the house, courtesy of the Russian Embassy, and a Mr. Lang.

"Mr. Lang say he will be along," the headmistress informed them. "Now it is time for you to enjoy yourselves." The Americans did just that, feeling a bit guilty.

For sensuality and delicate hands, there was no doubt Fumei An was the best of them all. Lyle Kitchens relaxed even deeper in the water and let the proprietress work her magic. For any man, surely, this was as close to heaven as it was possible to get. Kitchens had never been an especially religious man. But after a solid half hour of Fumei An massaging his back, neck, shoulders and head, and her 'dear little willow' accomplice Sasumi in the water with the Army investigator, massaging his groin, his manhood and anything else she could find, Kitchens figured he knew a thing or two about paradise. He closed his eyes and let earthly cares melt away into the water.

Blount glanced over with a blissful look. "This Jiang fellow...and the Russian...you figure we can trust them?"

Kitchens shrugged. "Probably not. But what choice do we have now? I don't know what to believe anymore. Two months ago, I'm stuck in an office at SACEUR in Belgium, pushing papers around trying to stay busy...just killing time until the Army lets me go home. Had me a nice instructor's job already lined up in Philly. At the police academy." Kitchens turned to let Sasumi work a little more of her magic. "Now here I am in Japan, chasing conspiracies around places I never even heard of before, climbing in bed with Communist agents. I don't even pretend to understand it."

Blount agreed. Miyasi had practically climbed onto the FBI agent's back, digging her strong hands into the tight muscles of his back and shoulders.

"Me neither. But things must be getting nasty in Washington. I make my daily reports to the Task Force, just like a good boy. All I ever get back from Hoover is 'give me names...give me names.' I've wired back every scrap of evidence we've turned up, not that it seems to make any difference. Hoover wants arrests. The pressure's intense. But the only real catch we've got is Tetsuko."

"Yeah. We arrest him and the whole operation goes underground in about two minutes. It takes time to develop a case like this. Washington doesn't seem to understand that. And I don't have the authority to just barge right up to the sixth floor of the Dai Ichi and slap the cuffs on Douglas MacArthur." Kitchens closed his eyes. He was tired, dead tired. "I need a few stars on my shoulders to do that. You don't send a major to accuse a five-star general of a crime...not in this Army. If I don't have pretty damn good evidence, I can't just throw accusations upstairs and hope something will stick. Making malicious and false accusations against a senior officer is a court-martial offense."

Blount splashed a bit as Miyasi found another tender spot. He lay his head back against the tile. "I just don't get military justice, Major. You got all the ranks...superior officers and so forth. Codes of conduct. Rules and regulations. An FBI agent can make a case against anyone, if the evidence points that way and he gets an arrest warrant."

Kitchens snorted. "The Army's like another planet. Different rules. I need evidence too. But I can't go throwing accusations around like you guys. If I do something that reduces military effectiveness, eyebrows are raised. Hands are slapped, especially mine. Asses are chewed. Justice isn't pretty and it sure as hell isn't pure. It's conditional. Depends on the situation. In the middle of a war, the situation changes every hour. It's like craps, like rolling the dice." Kitchens sat up, hearing something beyond the wooden screens. "A lot of military justice depends on whose ox is being gored. Privates and generals aren't equal under the law. Personalities count. And in this case--MacArthur might as well be a force of nature, for all the good rules and regs do."

Fumei An had quietly left the furo for a moment, to investigate the same sounds up front that Kitchens had heard. Low voices drifted back. Footsteps clapped on the tile. Then, a face appeared around the edge of a screen. It was Jiang Chen Li. The Red Chinese agent was dressed in a black tunic and slacks, a black skull cap on his head. He took in the scene, eyes narrowed. His face evolved a mixture of contempt and amusement.

Kitchens suddenly felt very exposed. Instantly, he climbed out of the steaming water, pushing Sasumi abruptly aside. He found a silk robe and threw it on. His uniform was on hangers in the corner, neatly draped and hung, along with his .45. A big part of him still regarded Jiang as the enemy. He glared back at the Communist agent.

"You're the one who wanted to meet here. We were just...investigating the place."

Jiang's face was impassive. "I see." He met Fumei An's eyes. The proprietress of the Happy Rose Petal folded and unfolded her hands nervously. "We must talk. In private...."

Fumei An needed no further encouragement. She clapped her hands again. "De te iku kuru!" she ordered the girls out of the bath immediately. "Quick...quick!" Sasumi and Miyasi scampered out. Doi followed. The women dressed and scurried beyond the screens, Fumei An shooing them along with her hands. Seconds later, Sasumi reappeared, snatched up her shamisen harp, and vanished.

Jiang Chen Li pulled off his cap, revealing little more than black stubble on an otherwise bald head. He was gaunt, bony, wiry, a cat on two feet, stalking prey with huge sad eyes. He glowered down at the Americans like a disappointed schoolteacher.

"A capitalist den...." He muttered. Kitchens and Blount were both out of the water now, wrapped in robes, toweling off.

"Then why'd you ask to meet here?"

Jiang shrugged. "The Russian suggested it. Now I see why--a place for animals. Russians are like that."

Every time they met, Kitchens re-developed an intense dislike for this prude of a Communist scum. "So what's up? You got something?"

"I've been in Formosa." Jiang sauntered around the tiny screened space of the furo as he spoke, sampling scented towels, fragrant soaps, jars of perfume and baskets of lilies. His nose wrinkled. "New information has turned up."

"Names? Dates? Places? You got some hard evidence, pal?"

Jiang waggled his hand, an American GI gesture he'd learned fighting with Chennault's forces back in '42, outside Kunming. "Hard enough, as you say."

"What kind of information?"

Jiang came to rest alongside a wooden table loaded with scented towels. He picked up a handful and sniffed. "I've learned that the Kuomintang bandits have a special reconnaissance unit of their own, inside China. On the mainland. Heilungchun, it's called. It means Dragon's Teeth."

Kitchens was nonplussed. "Sounds like good strategy to me. Scout your enemy before you launch an attack."

Jiang bristled. "They are the enemy. All of them are vermin, not worthy of being called Chinese. In any case, this unit scouts targets for the atomic mission. Manchuria and the northeast, so I learned. They've been given the task of locating five targets."

Kitchens was hurriedly climbing into his uniform. "That means there has to be five separate flights."

"Five aircraft," Blount added.

"There is more," Jiang said. "I learned Chiang Kai-shek knows of this mission. He approved it. For helping out, he was given the chance to select one of the targets."

Kitchens hopped on one foot, pulling up his trousers. "And?"

"He chose Peking."

Robert Blount whistled. "Nothing like going for the jugular, is there? That'll open eyes. Who talked with Chiang, I wonder?"

Jiang leveled an even gaze at Blount and Kitchens. "An American Army officer. General Paul Craft."

It was Kitchens' turn to whistle. "Craft...he's one of Wright's boys. SCAP G-3, if I remember the org chart. Plans and Tactics. I think I've seen him around the sixth floor...can't place the face though. Jesus--"

Jiang tested the bath with an experimental finger, finding the water still hot to the touch. "China will defend herself...to the death. If any American planes come into our skies, they will be shot down without delay."

"Now we're looking at five planes," Kitchens said. "I suppose you ought to know what we've learned about the bombs."

"We are allies...are we not? Allies in this investigation."

Kitchens was sour. "You and me will never be allies, pal. Associates, maybe. But never allies. I still can't get comfortable running around with Red spies...funny about that. It's the way I was raised. Reds are enemies...by rights, I should pull out my .45 and fill you full of holes right here and now."

"Why don't you?"

Kitchens jerked his field jacket on and quickly primped himself in a nearby mirror. "Orders. Washington says you and I have to work together, dig out the facts. But I don't have to like it."

Jiang scowled back. He glared with cold hatred at the Army major. "American bombs are killing thousands of my comrades every day. We are slaughtered like dogs. We have the right to defend ourselves. International law...justice--allows us to do what we have to do. American cowboys will never be welcome in Asia. Asia is for Asians."

"Not when they're Communists. Even Asians want to be free."

Jiang scoffed. "Asians don't want American freedoms. Korea is nothing to you. Why do you come here, send your cowboys to die here? Korea is a land of garlic-eaters. Raped by Japan. Koreans want only peace. A chance to build. Have children. Live like humans."

"You mean live like dogs. That's how you Chinese treat--"

Blount intervened. "Boys--boys--don't we have better things to do? Screw the politics. Jiang's a communist spy--so what? I'm a Democrat. We got a job to do here."

Kitchens and Jiang glowered at each other for a moment. "There's evidence the bombs are not in Kobe after all," Kitchens bit off each word reluctantly. "One of Tetsuko's aides was killed the other day. He found some papers in Tetsuko's office, west of Tokyo. They mention an island near Okinawa, an isolated place the Army Air Forces used in '45. That's where we think the strikes will be launched from."

"When?" Jiang asked.

"We don't know when. But it has to be soon, maybe in the next few days."

Blount added, "Washington is really putting the pressure on. We have to make a case now."

"My superiors, too, are anxious," Jiang admitted. He realized he hadn't been in touch with Marshal Peng in several weeks. "These strikes must never be permitted to fly."

"You wouldn't be two-timing us, now would you?" Kitchens asked.

"What does this 'two-time' mean, Major?"

"You know...using us to plan a little operation of your own. A little sabotage...."

"We have the legitimate right to defend ourselves."

"That's why we don't make agreements with Communists. Can't trust 'em."

Blount kept trying to keep the discussion from degenerating into a street fight. "The way I see it, we've got two options. We could just go ahead and arrest Tetsuko now. Suspicion of complicity to murder Hiro Osawa. Japan National Police would just love to have a reason to get their hooks into this guy. We could give them that reason."

"Then what? Squeeze the bastard?"

"Like a sponge. Squeeze for details...location of the bombs, how they're being transported, the launch base, launch times. We drop a murder rap on the guy and maybe he sings like the proverbial nightingale."

"And maybe he doesn't," Kitchens said. "Then what?"

"Go to Okinawa," Jiang said. "Reconnaissance is essential."

"Yeah, so you can sabotage our planes."

"Maybe he's right," Blount said. "Check out Okinawa's airfields. There can't be that many. Maybe your buddy General LaSalle will be there."

Kitchens gave that some thought. "LaSalle's a big bird but the trouble is that he's Air Force. Off limits to me, but I can send any incriminating tidbits back to Washington through the Chief of Staff. I'll bet the Air Force Office of Special Investigations would be interested."

"There's still this General Craft."

"Craft I can deal with. He's Army. I'll see if I can get a few minutes with General Wright. He's Craft's boss. Maybe start a tail--"

Kitchens was suddenly interrupted by another commotion from beyond the wooden screens...shouts, furniture being upended up front. A scream erupted, then something heavy thudded to the floor.

The Army major was unholstering his service .45 when one of the screens was knocked over. It clattered to the tile, revealing two men, hooded men in black coveralls. Both were armed--automatic rifles, Kitchens noticed, in the last seconds before they opened fire.

The intruders methodically sprayed the furo with rounds. Bullets ricocheted off the tile floors, thunking into stacks of towels, into furniture, surrounding screens, hissing into the water itself.

Kitchens dove left, landing hard on his side behind a wicker chest of linens. Jiang dropped behind a screen and extracted his own Tokarev revolver, all in one motion, returning fire immediately. Blount, not as fast as the two officers, fell but caught a stitch of rounds across his chest and abdomen. He twisted awkwardly and pitched into the bath, geysering water everywhere.

Kitchens crabbed along the tile, popping off several rounds of his own, before squeezing through a tiny gap between screens. He found himself in a dead space, surrounded by shoji panels, the backsides. On his knees, he scrambled forward. A shape flashed across the far gap. It was black...one of the intruders. Kitchens squeezed off three rounds--tap...tap...tap--and got lucky. Two of the rounds struck the assailant in the side of his temple. Something heavy crashed to the tile, upending more screens, knocking tatami mats and vases flying. Kitchens got to his feet and eased forward.

The intruder he'd struck was face down in a spreading pool of blood. Blood dribbled along the seams of the tile, a spreading stain of death, finally dripping into a nearby bath. Kitchens crept forward, kicked at the body, satisfied himself the attacker was down, probably dead. The other intruder seemed to have fled.

He heard feet scuffing along the tile behind him and whirled, ready to fire. It was Jiang, crouching forward, Tokarev cocked and ready.

For a long second, the American Army major and the Red Chinese agent stared each other down, weapons aimed and ready. Kitchens could as easily have pumped the rest of his .45 rounds into Jiang's chest as finished tying his shoelaces. Jiang's face twitched like a cat on the prowl. His Tokarev never wavered an inch.

Self defense, Kitchens thought. Shot in all the confusion. I thought he was one of the attackers...terrible mistake. Tragic error. Who would contradict him?

Kitchens swore under his breath and lowered his weapon first. His partner was bleeding to death in the pool. He scowled, holstered the .45 and dashed off to see about Blount.

The FBI agent was already dead. Kitchens saw that when he hoisted the body out legs first and laid him down on the bloody tile.

It was all over in less than a minute.

Jiang came up. He and Kitchens glared at each other again. Kitchens cradled the agent's head. His mouth was a tight line. Kitchens gently closed Blount's eyelids.

"Crap," Kitchens muttered. Soft sobs and moans issued from the front parlor of the Happy Rose Petal. Fifty feet away, through a maze of shoji screens, two geisha also lay dying.

Fumei An was frantic to save her beloved 'little willow' Sasumi, who'd taken rounds in the neck and chest. The girl was propped up on a mound of silk pillows, all of them rapidly blooming red from blood loss. Her breathing was short, ragged, almost a rattling whistle. Beside her, hovering like a confused starling, Miyasi shook her head, wept, fluttered her hands like a helpless child. Fumei An was more resolute, pressing wet rags and towels against Sasumi's wounds. But it was hopeless. Kitchens could see that.

On the telephone behind them, Doi and another 'willow' screamed at the police dispatcher.

Robert Blount's face was tense and concerned, alert even in death. Always on the case, Kitchens thought.

He was sad and angry at the same time. In so many ways, he and Blount were still strangers to each other, thrown together into this oddball case by desperate men in Washington. Yet Kitchens had developed a grudging respect for the agent. Like Kitchens, Blount had to step cautiously in a case full of minefields and traps for the unwary. They were both feeling their way along.

Kitchens finally turned back to Jiang. "We're getting to close to something important. Somebody's nest has been stirred up." But the Red Chinese agent was already slipping out. Kitchens started to get up, but let him go. Jiang stopped beside a battered screen full of bullet holes. More than ever, the Chinese agent looked like a cat, a feral hunter on the prowl.

"I think I can catch up to the other one," he said. "Tracking--" he pointed to his nose, offered a quick smile--"my specialty. I'll find him." And he was suddenly gone.

Kitchens cradled Blount's head, stroking the burr of his still-wet black crewcut. Tetsuko's goons? Kitchens wasn't sure. Maybe higher...perhaps even within SCAP itself.

He began to wonder. Had Masuhiro Tetsuko orchestrated the hit after all? Or was Jiang himself somehow involved....a Red Chinese plot to sabotage Gallant Flag, using Kitchens as a means of getting inside the operation. Maybe he was working with the Russian Trofimenko. It was Jiang, or the Russian, who had suggested the geisha house as a meeting place anyway.

Kitchens finished getting dressed. Suddenly, he felt very alone and isolated, even as a stream of Tokyo prefectural police began filing into the blood-spattered furo.
CHAPTER 23

Tuesday, January 23, 1951

Near Fushun, People's Republic of China

7:30 a.m.

The collision, when it came, was an explosion of glass, metal and tires. Military Police Commissar Feng Lao Chi watched as the two trucks sideswiped each other along the icy rutted lane leading out of Fushun. Both Russian GaZ two-tonners, the impact knocked one truck over on its side. The other spun in the icy mud and lost traction, sliding backwards into a shallow culvert. The truck slid down the embankment and plowed through snow banks and ice-flecked water, coming to rest with its cab pointed skyward. Feng, who had been following one of the trucks ever since his suspicions had been aroused in Anjiin, pulled off the side of the road and sprang out.

Before he had taken five steps, shots rang out.

Three hundred yards ahead, the truck that had overturned spilled a small platoon of infantrymen onto the roadside. The dazed occupants groped for footing, then scattered into the bush, as riflemen from the truck in the culvert opened fire. In seconds, a full-scale fusillade was underway. Commissar Feng took cover behind a tree stump. What the hell was going on up there?

Group Sergeant Wie Xie Shan of the Heilungchun recon unit was asking himself the same thing. He hoisted up his Type 50 carbine and let fly another volley at the unseen enemy. Then he cursed their luck. They had been approaching the city of Fushun, expecting to gather more intelligence on troop strength in this sector, when their commandeered truck had run into another vehicle. Now they were in a hell of a fight, sure to attract attention from the town and its vast garrison. It was a cinch they couldn't let themselves be pinned down for long. The Reds could muster thousands of men in a very short time. To continue their recon mission, Dragon's Tail had to find a way to disappear, to melt into the countryside.

Wie was mulling over an idea when he heard a shout. It was Corporal Jian. The corporal was lying prone, flopped over the edge of a ditch. He gestured at the upended truck cab.

"Sergeant Wie...they've stopped firing!"

Wie listened, over the staccato pop of his own men's weapons. Jian was right. The enemy was either dead, or holding fire. Perhaps an opportunity...

"Cease fire!" he spat out. "Cease fire...Jian, you and Bao...flank the truck...quick, quick! Check it out!"

Jian half saluted and crawled out of the ditch, plowing a snow drift aside. The snow had stopped but an ice fog was settling in over the narrow defile along the Fushun-Anjiin Highway. Twenty yards to his left, across the road, Corporal Bao did the same. Wie watched, his carbine trained on the truck cab, as the two soldiers scurried across the road. They plunged into deep snow on the other side, then Wie saw Bao's head moving cautiously below the road bed, toward the truck cab.

There were shouts. He recognized Bao's guttural voice. A single shot was fired, then silence. On the wind, Wie could hear something strange...was it a moan? Maybe an injured enemy soldier. Cautiously, he rose, then crouching, he scurried along the culvert himself. He slipped on a patch of ice, but regained his balance. At the upended truck, he ran headlong into Jian.

"Comrade Sergeant...Americans! Look...!"

Wie half slid down the culvert bank and had to cling to a torn scrap of canvas from the truck bed. Bao was at the bottom, his weapon trained on three men. One was dead. Wie kicked at the blood-stained jacket and smashed face. Chinese...maybe, Hunan, from the face. He'd been shot through the neck.

The other two men weren't Chinese at all. Jian was right. They were dressed in the mustard yellow quilted winter field jackets of the People's Liberation Army...Northern Territorial Force, to be exact. But their faces....

One of the prisoners moaned, the same agonizing sound Wie had heard from the across the road. It was then that Wie realized the prisoner was crippled. His right leg had been severed just below the kneecap. Only the left foot had the same canvas sneaker issued to the People's Volunteers. Wie bent down to the man, examining his face closely.

From behind him, Ray Skiles said, "Shit....of all the fuckin'...."

Wie motioned Bao to collect the rest of the unit and assemble them around the half-buried truck. "Keep two men up on the road. You too. You see anything coming up from Fushun, let me know." Bao hustled off to obey. Wie squatted down to examine Stan Benecky more closely, then faced Skiles. "You speak English...you are Americans?"

Skiles' face was caked with frozen mud and flecked with blood and snot. He glared back at Wie with cold hatred. "Is that so surprising, comrade?"

Wie realized his own stolen uniform had unnerved the two soldiers. "I am not your enemy, Yanks." Wie indicated the dead Hunanese man beside them. "He is the enemy." Wie stuck out his hand to shake Skiles'. "Group Sergeant Wie Xie Shan, Kuomintang National Army. Special reconnaissance unit."

Warily, Skiles shook his hand. He squinted up at Wie. "Recon, huh?" The American winced and felt gingerly around his mouth. Blood dribbled from a wound...he had lost a few teeth as well. "Shit, I must be dreaming."

"We musta died, Sarge," Benecky croaked. "

It took several minutes, but Wie managed to convince Skiles he was telling the truth. "We landed south of here, Sergeant," Wie told him. "Four days ago. We've been working our way up the Lioanung Peninsula."

Skiles smiled. It was more of a grimace than a smile. "How the hell do I know you're not some gook patrol, sent out to capture the ones that got away? If I know Liu Si-lingh, he'll have half the friggin' Red army out looking for us by now—"

"You and I are fighting the same—" but Wie was interrupted by a commotion from the road. Bao and another commando came sliding down the embankment.

"Sergeant, a foot patrol, from the west. One man."

Wie stood up. "One man...infantry?"

Bao shrugged. "He doesn't act like it, Sergeant. No assault rifle, just a sidearm. I think he is an officer. I don't recognize the uniform."

"Let me see." Wie climbed up the bank for a look.

A hundred yards distant, Police Commissar Feng approached the wreckage site. He saw Sergeant Wie in the ditch and hailed him. "Comrade...are you injured?" Feng hustled into a trot, then stopped abruptly when Wie was quickly surrounded by more commandos. Feng held up his hand, realizing he was outnumbered and outgunned. "I saw the collision...is anybody hurt? Can I help?" Cautiously, he edged forward.

Wie stepped out in front, climbing up onto the roadbed. Leaking fuel from the other truck was already freezing in the subzero wind. "What unit, soldier?"

Feng stopped twenty feet away. He was dressed in an officer's quilted jacket, with dark blue trousers and a single red stripe down the side. His cap bore a larger red star. The star was surrounded by an unusual gold crest.

"Peoples Militia, Special Security Unit 8341," Feng announced. His voice took on a more authoritative tone. "Shenyang district." He indicated the truck that had overturned on the road. "I was following that truck. And you are, comrade—"

Wie stood his ground. "Major Wie...Fortieth Field Army, garrisoned here at Fushun. My men require assistance...."

Feng inched forward. "You have papers for that truck, I assume? Mission orders. This accident will have to be reported."

"I do. I am not required to reveal my orders to the People's Militia. You will assist my men in getting this truck upright and repaired."

Feng scowled. "On the contrary, comrade Major. Unit 8341 takes orders only from Peking. Central Military Commission. What is the nature of your mission here?"

Wie abruptly raised his own carbine and pulled the trigger. The Type 50 spat five rounds, slamming into Feng's chest. The commissar lurched backward, flailing and died in a burst of bright arterial blood before his body hit the road.

Wie motioned his men up onto the road. "Move! Get this truck upright! We're too exposed here."

"What about the Americans?"

Wie thought about that. Nothing in the mission plan said anything about Americans. Had MacArthur inserted his own men onto the mainland? Dragon's Tail was already behind schedule. Still, the Yanks might be useful. Sergeant Wie shouldered his carbine. "Help them up. We'll put them in the back."

With effort, the commandos managed to push the big GaZ truck back over onto its wheels. One of the cab doors was damaged and had to be lashed to the frame with strips of canvas from the back. The engine had lost water, and the fuel tank was holed. But with a little finesse from Ray Skiles and some luck, the engine finally caught and wheezed into life, belching acrid black diesel smoke. It sounded like a train wreck when the gears were engaged. But it was operable.

The rest of Dragon's Tail piled into the back cargo bed, dogging the ripped and shredded fabric over them to cut the wind and cold. Skiles rode shotgun in the cab with Wie.

Wie turned them around cautiously on the road and headed down a steep decline toward the outskirts of Fushun. Easing into the town, Wie drove slowly toward the central square and the rail station, negotiating a stream of vendor carts being pulled along the side of the road by scraggly mules, carefully noting the columns of troops lined up outside the station. A line of trucks was busily disgorging pallets of rifles and mortars. Crates of ammunition were stacked on an open-air platform, ready to be loaded aboard a train.

"Heading for the frontier," Wie remarked.

"Probably Anjiin, or somewhere south of there," Skiles muttered.

"You know this area?"

Skiles snorted. "Yeah, a real tourist spot. A regular Miami Beach." He told Wie the story of how Bravo Company, Second Battalion of the First U.S. Marines had been cut off north of Yudam-ni and surrounded. "The lucky ones died, pal. The rest of us were captured. Marched north, across the Yalu River. The camp was at Anjiin."

Wie was sympathetic. He quickly described Heilungchun's mission. Skiles' eyes grew wide at the news.

"This is on the level? They're really planning an atomic strike against China?"

Wie nodded. "My unit was inserted for target reconnaissance. I've got to make it at least as far north as Shenyang, then get back to my landing site. We've lost time as it is." The sergeant grinned. "We kill Communist bandits every chance we get. A little sabotage too. But reconnaissance is our mission."

"I'll be damned." Skiles sat back, smiling, watching a platoon of gooks being quick-marched across the square. Wie slowed down to let them pass. "No shit, huh? MacArthur's really going to do it?"

Wie shrugged. "I'm told planning is underway even as we speak."

"Hot damn!" Skiles pounded a fist into the seat. "Well, count me in, pal. Me and Benecky, both. Anything we can do to help, just say the word."

Wie accepted the offer. "Americans and Chinese fought the Japanese in the Great War. You helped us rid our country of one enemy. Now help us get rid of another one."

"With pleasure."

From initial reconnaissance, Fushun seemed to offer little of military significance, at least for a major bombing strike. "Anjiin was a forward marshaling and staging point," Wie said. "Fushun seems to be a collection point, probably one of many in this province."

Skiles agreed. "Probably not juicy enough for a big atom bomb. Strike this clodhopper of a town from the list."

"Agreed." Sergeant Wie steered the truck through a narrow warren of streets and back out onto the highway again. "We'll head south. To Anshan. A very big port city, not far from where we landed."

Skiles settled back in his seat. For the first time in many weeks, he began to think he and Benecky might just make it out of this hellhole of a country after all. "You guys came along at a good time. I picked up a few unwanted passengers in Anjiin. Managed to knock one of 'em off the side of my truck as we pulled out. The other one was beginning to make trouble. After you sideswiped me, the joker was knocked out for a few seconds. My partner put about half a dozen rounds in his head, just for good measure."

"That explains the bandit soldier my men found in the wreckage." The leader of Dragon's Tail shifted gears, slowing the big GaZ truck down to negotiate a sharp turn. They were rolling through snowy countryside now--frozen terraces of rice paddies dotted with mud huts, icy outcroppings of bare limestone hills glinting in the wan morning sun. Wie made a left turn onto the Anshan Highway, then weaved through a long column of carts and peasants and donkeys trudging toward town along the side of the road. The carts were piled high with stacks of raw kindling and wood scraps...fuel for somebody's fire.

Wie was curious about his new passenger. "There is a rumor in my unit," he told Skiles. "Maybe you know about it. I heard this at An-ping, the base where the Heilungchun train."

"What kind of rumor?"

"Word at An-ping says the Americans granted my government one target of their own choosing, in exchange for the reconnaissance we give them. Talk is the Generalissimo chose Peking. That's one of our objectives. We head there after Anshan."

Skiles chuckled. "MacArthur doesn't fool around. Go for the throat...just like he did in '42 and '43. Can you believe it? Mushroom clouds over Peking, for crying out loud...I can't wait. Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of gooks, if you'll pardon my French."

At Sergeant Wie's suggestion, they continued south in the stolen truck, eventually turning southwest toward the port city of Anshan. Wie intended to work their way west along a highway/railway corridor called Jinzhou that paralleled the coastline, then turned inland toward Peking and the capital region. With any luck, they would be in the outskirts of the capital by evening tomorrow. Then they would head north to Shenyang.

Unknown to either man, they were not alone on the Anshan Highway.

Several miles behind, just keeping pace with the troop carrier, were two staff cars belonging to Special Security Unit 8341. Military Police Commissar Feng had managed to alert the district office in Shenyang before Wie had dispatched him with several rounds to the chest. The surveillance tail had picked up their target just outside Fushun, and fallen in behind the Russian truck on its ride out of the city.

For now, the tail was content to keep pace with the traitors. Inside the lead staff car, Special Inspector Li Zhao Ji-lin was deep in thought. Already, he had radioed ahead to his comrades in Anshan, organizing a checkpoint at the last road junction before the outer district of the port city. A roadblock was being set up even now, to trap the spies once and for all. Inspector Li wasn't sure exactly who or what he was dealing with here, only that the spies were clearly a ruthless band and well-armed too. Perhaps, they were Formosan spies, from the criminal Kuomintang. Maybe even Americans. That would make an interesting case.

Regardless, he didn't want to take any chances on losing them in the chaos of Anshan itself. Better to snare the rats in the open countryside, where they would have less chance to hide. Li knew what would happen to his neck if the roadblock failed and the spies somehow got away. In his mind's eye, he was already designing the roadblock setup he wanted, mentally placing and arming each man. It had to be perfect. And it had to work. The district commander would have him shot if they failed.

All along the highway, Sergeant Wie and Ray Skiles noted columns of trucks bearing troops and supplies, along with long stretches of coolie trains and horse-drawn carts, all of them heading north away from the port.

"Must be a big offensive coming," Skiles observed. "I saw the same thing in Anjiin. Looks like Mao's cooking up something big."

Wie agreed. "Shenyang's the main railhead in this region. I've already heard it's on the target list."

As they encountered more and more traffic out of Anshan, it seemed that this port city on the Yellow Sea could easily become a target itself for MacArthur's bombers.

"We'll see what the bandits have stashed away around the port," Wie decided, "then turn west toward the capital."

"Oh, we'll have a hot time in old Peking," Skiles muttered to himself, then started humming an old Tommy Dorsey tune. "Once MacArthur's flyboys are done with it, the place will really be hot."

An hour later, Sergeant Wie began slowing the truck down. Skiles had drifted off to a light doze. He awoke with a start.

"What's...what's up...what's going on?"

Wie was grim. "Roadblock. Looks like the Army has set up a checkpoint. They're checking papers."

"We don't have any papers, do we?"

"No." Unwilling to risk running the roadblock at high speed, Wie put the truck into reverse and backtracked to find another road into the city. They quickly ran into the surveillance tail from Unit 8341, blocking the highway a few miles north. For the moment, they were trapped.

Before Wie could wheel the big GaZ around again, a troop transport parked near the roadblock barriers started up and came barreling down the highway toward them. Wie slammed on the brakes and ordered the Dragon's Tail commandos out.

"Into the ditches...Bao and Jian! Zhang...up on the roof! Spread out and stay down! Don't fire until I give the word!"

The troop transport slowed as it came up over a slight rise in the highway. Wie counted down the seconds, waiting for the right moment, just as the People's Militia began dismounting from the truck.

"Fire!"

The first volley from Dragon's Tail had the desired effect--dropping a few militiamen and pinning the rest of them to the ground. The troops scattered along the ridges above the checkerboard of frozen rice paddies. A small force detached and continued edging closer and closer to the truck.

Skiles recognized the assault tactic. So did Wie. He had seen enough of Communist tactics during the long civil war in China. It was a double envelopement..the classic hatchi shiki. An inverted V, just like the gooks had sprung on them at Yudam-ni, the Marine realized.

Already, troops were scurrying and scrambling out along the paddy ridges, trying to outflank them. A bugle sounded from somewhere off in the distance.

Wie got off several more clips from his Type 56 Simonov carbine, spraying rounds across the top of a nearby rise. He dropped two, wounded a third, then waved at Jian and Bao, hunkered down against the side of the truck.

"Spread out! Move out...away--over there and there! Kwai, kwai! Get some fire down on their flanks!" He motioned several more Dragon's Tail to follow. Soon, a furious firefight had erupted off to his left. It was Jian and another man. They were trapped on the rise, exposed to a withering fusillade of small-arms fire. A dull whump reverberated across the icy hollow and dirt and ice geysered in all directions.

Even in close contact, the enemy force had set up a few mortars...probably 82-millimeter, Wie realized. He swore helplessly as more rounds thudded into the rise. The enemy had sighted in well, heedless of his own men now swarming all around their position.

It was over in less than thirty seconds...when a closely spaced double thump blasted the crest off the ridge. Jian and his partner were blown to bits in a red and black ball of flame and smoke.

Skiles and Benecky had hunkered down against the open door of the truck cab, laying down covering fire while Wie's men tried to turn back the flanking attempt. The two Marines could see the hopelessness of the situation.

Skiles rammed home a fresh clip into his burp gun, then rolled to his knees and finished off a squad he had been working on for the last few minutes. Bingo! One more gook for the leeches to chew on.

"I don't like this, Stan!" he shouted over to Benecky. "Too many...friggin' rats are everywhere--!"

Benecky was licking a flesh wound on the back of his firing hand--a hot piece of shrapnel had nicked him and blood covered his fist.

"Keep blasting, Sarge! No way I'm goin' back to any POW camp!" Bloody hand and all, he emptied a clip of his own. Three enemy riflemen rose as one, right into the teeth of Benecky's fire and stormed across the road. They were cut down instantly...but more heads could be seen crawling along the culvert. More gooks...readying another charge.

It was hopeless and the two Marines knew it. One by one, Dragon's Tail snipers were picked off. That was the beauty of the Red tactic. If you didn't spread out, you'd be cut off and pulverized by sheer numbers. If you did spread out to keep from being flanked, you were dogmeat for piecemeal destruction. Hatchi shiki forced you to act, to stand and fight, often when military logic dictated otherwise. Against the countless thousands of Red battalions, that often meant certain annihilation.

After ten minutes, the defenders were down to three men: Sergeant Wie, Ray Skiles and Stan Benecky.

The three of them decided to make a break for it. Two hundred yards south of their position, a small reservoir could be seen. The surface was ice, or so they thought from this distance, though none of them knew how solid the sheet was. The ice might or might not be strong enough to support the truck. They didn't have much choice.

Wie and Benecky lay down a withering curtain of covering fire, emptying every clip they could find, while Skiles got the truck's diesel engine cranked. Then Wie hauled the crippled Marine up into the bed and flattened himself against a rain of shrapnel and dirt from a mortar round that had just whistled by overhead. Skiles steered wildly between more mortar shell bursts, onto the crest of a ridge and spun the wheels, clawing for traction in the icy soil. The GaZ lurched forward, fishtailing for the reservoir.

A rooster tail of mortar rounds gouged up dirt and icy water right behind them.

Halfway to the reservoir, Skiles dodged shell bursts and made a sudden left turn onto another ridge, plowing through a low mud and straw hut that appeared out of nowhere. It had been an abandoned Tungu goatherd's hut, before it was flattened by the truck. Skiles steered them right off the end of the ridge and bumped onto the icy surface of the reservoir. Machine gun rounds spanged off the rear deck and the fuel tank was holed. A small fire erupted at the end of an oil line below the cargo bed.

Skiles spun across the ice, losing traction, then realized they were sinking. He looked helplessly behind them. Columns of gooks were fanning out along the paddy ridges...quilted ants drawn to a carcass. Muzzle flashes spat at them and more rounds clanged off the truck doors.

Slowly, the truck slogged to a halt as the ice gave way and the engine ground down and died in a froth of steaming bubbles. From the back, Benecky and Wie fired back at the onrushing militiamen. The truck began slipping deeper into the frigid water, plowing nose first through the ice.

Sergeant Wie Xie Shan jumped out of the bed and was hit almost immediately. His body spun with the impact and he flopped onto the ice, thrashing about in agony.

Benecky leaped off the truck just as the nose of the cab disappeared under the water. He landed hard on an ice floe and scrambled toward Wie, intending to get the sergeant's carbine and any spare clips.

Skiles was right behind him.

Wie finally stopped thrashing when Benecky's grizzled face floated into view. The Kuomintang veteran croaked out a last wish.

"Peking..." he spat blood, then coughed violently. His upper chest was soft, bloody pulp, red with blood now hissing as it oozed onto the ice. He wheezed again, a rattling wheeze. "Peking...must be...hit.... Peking...is the...." He gasped for breath, gurgling with fluid filling his lungs--"...the head must be chopped off. Bomb Peking..." a great wracking cough and a violent shudder as life began slipping away "...and the bandits...will flee...." With effort, the sergeant lifted himself up enough to grab Benecky's collar. "Give me...my...country....back!" He died in a great gasp of air and frothy blood.

Bullets whizzed by the gathering. Benecky unclenched Wie's stiff fingers from his collar and let the sergeant slip beneath the black icy waters of the reservoir.

"Come on!" Skiles yelled. The forward elements of the militia had already reached the edge of the reservoir. A few brave soldiers were easing their way out onto the ice, step by tentative step.

"Come on, man!" Skiles extended a hand to help Benecky up. The hoisted the corporal onto his good leg and they hobbled around to the front of the truck. Skiles had already ripped out the seat cushions, dragged some cloth covering from the back and fashioned a makeshift raft. He dropped Benecky onto the raft, then hopped on himself and kicked off into the water, dodging a hail of bullets, steering with a piece of window glass he'd smashed out of the cab door.

"No way we're going back to that camp," he swore at Benecky. "Keep your head down, prick! You want some extra eyeholes?"

Benecky said a quick amen and did as he was told.

With some furious paddling and kicking and little luck, Skiles maneuvered them through jagged ice chunks into a stretch of open water. It was readily apparent now that the entire reservoir surface had not frozen over. The roadblock militia had by that time just reached the sinking hulk of the truck and lay down a furious barrage of small-arms fire, throwing up spouts of water and ice all around the raft.

They were lucky and drifted further out. In a few minutes, the raft had floated out of effective firing range. A faint current grabbed the raft and pulled them along.

Unknown to the two Marines, the reservoir served as a flood control and retention lake, eventually emptying into a river called the Hun He. The river was a broad, sluggish waterway that drained much of the western Liaonung peninsula. After winding its way through the marshy lowlands of endless ride paddies, the Hun He finally disappeared altogether in a realm of swampy tidal flats abutting the Liaodong Wan, an arm of the Bohai (Yellow) Sea itself.

The Marines burrowed down into the wads of cloth Skiles had stashed aboard the raft, seeking what shelter there was from the chill sleet of the Manchurian wind. Behind them, gooks scrambled over the nearly submerged truck cab like fleas. Skiles had no idea where they were going or where the prevailing current was taking them.

It was enough for now to be free and alive. For the moment, they seemed to be beyond the reach of their pursuers.

Miraculously, the raft of truck seats lashed together with canvas strips held together and stayed afloat.

Skiles realized he still had a few more rounds left in the clip in his carbine. He felt his pockets--at least three more spare clips left. Best not to waste any ammunition now.

He knew perfectly well he was out of range but somehow he didn't care. Just shooting at gooks made him feel better. He sat up on his knees, wobbly on the raft, and squeezed off a few last rounds at their dwindling pursuit, now clambering all over the truck and along the shoreline.

He didn't hit anything. But it felt good, nonetheless. When he ejected the spent clip, he tossed it into the water.

Then for the first time since that godawful first night at Anjiin's Camp Seven, he recited the Lord's Prayer in full, out loud. Benecky mumbled the words right along with him.

Tuesday, 1-23-51

Vladivostok, U.S.S.R.

11:30 a.m.

Generalissimo Josef Stalin stared pensively out the window of the hilltop mansion at Vladivostok's Zolotoy Rog (Golden Horn) Bay. Traffic was light in the port today; ice and fog had slowed shipping in the harbor to a fraction of normal the last few days. The fog was especially thick this morning. Stalin could barely make out the rocky summit of Primorskiy Hill in the distance. Down below, a winking red star flashed on and off...a radio tower perched on the latticework roof of the Posyetskaya Street rail station. Next to the tower, dimly discernible in the fog, was a billboard. Bold red letters proclaimed: PORT WORKERS AND FISHERMEN: EXCEED ALL PLANNED QUOTAS.

To Josef Stalin, the ice fog seemed appropriate. He had been reading a report from Beria this morning, while waiting for Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese delegation to arrive at the old Irgunskiy mansion at noon. It was an odd report--something Lavrenti Pavlovich had concocted and insisted that he read. It was a report on Harry Truman and an American card game called poker.

Josef Vissarionovich Stalin didn't understand the report at all. Poker was an odd game, though it bore passing resemblance to vlasti, a Georgian diversion he knew from boyhood days on the streets of Frunze. Beria's report said Harry Truman loved to play poker. There were descriptions of straights and royal flushes, threes of a kind and a full house. It wasn't the description of the game that intrigued Stalin though. It was the NKVD analysis of how Harry Truman played the game that caught his eye.

Beria had even handwritten an annotation in the margins of the report, expressly to catch Stalin's eye:

Harry Truman is thought to be one of the best poker players in America. He plays the game with great enthusiasm and style. He likes to play with close aides such as Admiral William Leahy late at night, in the White House kitchen. He drinks bourbon--a whiskey derivative--when he plays. He wins often...and hates to lose.

Beria had double underlined the last sentence.

Stalin had mulled over Beria's report for the last half hour. He was highly suspicious of any man who loved games of chance...especially if he won a lot of them. Such men, with the power of the atom bomb behind them, were a menace to the world.

Stalin's reflections were interrupted by Fodin, his valet, who appeared in the veranda doorway.

"Comrade Marshal, the Chinese delegation is here. Shall I show them in?"

Stalin grunted affirmatively and folded Beria's note into a tunic pocket. He finished off the brandy he had been nursing and rang up Molotov and Beria. Both were downstairs dining on the mansion's first floor. The Patriotic Defender of all the Russias didn't want to have to deal with Mao and his band of pigs alone.

"The animals are here," he told Beria on the phone. "Come up right away, before the manure gets too deep."

Stalin and Mao had agreed several weeks ago to a secret meeting in Vladivostok. The official reason for the conference was simple enough: to discuss the course of the war in Korea, which seemed in recent weeks to have reached some kind of turning point. UN forces had somehow held off the latest massive Chinese onslaught, holding fast in a desperate defense at Wonju. Now, with a new man named Ridgeway in charge, the Americans had finally developed some backbone. They had blunted the offensive and with overwhelming superiority in firepower and complete command of the air, had begun to push the Chinese back north again toward the 38th parallel.

Stalin knew perfectly well why Mao wanted a meeting. The Chinese People Volunteers in Korea desperately needed additional weapons and ammunition to continue their rapidly-stalling Third Offensive. After declaring publicly how quickly he would push the Americans off the Korean peninsula, Mao had a certain quantity of egg on his face. Stalin had discussed the matter with Zhukov, Shtykov, Molotov and others. He intended to be agreeable--it would be suicide for comrades in the Revolution not to help each other--but there was one worrisome factor: this small matter of the atomic plot the Americans called Gallant Flag.

For his part, Stalin wanted to have Molotov and Beria at his right hand. Dealing with the Chinese, he often admitted to Beria, was much like making love to an elk. You wanted to do it very carefully.

Fodin re-appeared, the Chinese delegation right behind him. Mao came up and pumped Stalin's hand vigorously. They hugged in the traditional Russian style. Mao was beaming as he introduced Chou En-lai, an advisor from the Party Central Committee, and Zhu De, one of his top generals.

"Comrade Marshal, good to see you once again." The Great Helmsman accepted a small glass of narzan mineral water laced with a few drops of brandy. He toasted the Russians. "To the Revolution! To victory!"

"Zarya revolutsiya," Stalin responded automatically. Molotov and Beria did the same.

Mao sauntered over to the window and admired the view from atop Primorskiy Hill. "A beautiful vista, my friends. Look there--" he pointed to a misty arm of water off the Zolotoy Rog. "--see how the land and water mix? I have done paintings of just such views. Just beyond that hill is China. Our two nations, our two great peoples, come together in this vista, to create great beauty and power." Stalin smiled, a patronizing smile. Comrade, he told himself, you wouldn't know a vista from a shitheap. He gently steered the Chinese dictator toward a table in the corner. There were maps laid out across the table.

"I've arranged a briefing for us...one of Zhukov's men will lay out the tactical situation around the world. Lavrenti Pavlovich is also here to give us details on the atom bomb case...what we've uncovered, what we're doing to thwart this capitalist plot."

"Ah," Mao wagged a finger at him, "we also have facts. My own agents are on the same case even now, side by side with our Russian colleagues." His face darkened as he swirled the mineral water in the glass. "Are you really so surprised the Americans have supposedly been investigating this case, but the plot goes on? Truman is spineless...I've been saying that for years. He should arrest MacArthur immediately. Or have him shot."

Stalin acknowledged Mao was telling the truth. Both leaders--Stalin thinking of Zhukov, Mao thinking of Marshal Peng--knew that popular generals could be difficult to handle. He waved at Beria. "Tell us your facts."

Beria described the failed sabotage attempt on the Army train in America. "An unfortunate failure," he admitted. "Now we have reason to believe the bombs have been brought secretly into Japan. An American Navy ship was sunk in the Pacific. It was carrying some of the bombs. Apparently, the plotters managed to secure these bombs before the ship went down--we've been monitoring radio traffic from the search and rescue forces ever since--"

"A convenient accident," Mao observed.

"Moreover," Beria went on, "the plotters apparently have already lined up B-29 aircraft and crews for the mission."

Mao scowled at the news. "The Americans are using this plot to squeeze us from both sides. They ask for our help and make a big pretense of cooperating, but behind our backs, the plot continues. Truman's playing a dangerous game here...we shouldn't pay any attention to his words. His actions tell me all I need to know."

Stalin lit up a pipe and stoked the bowl until a rich aroma filled the veranda. "Lavrenti Pavlovich, what about targets? What do we know at this point?"

Beria consulted some notes. "Comrades, actual targets aren't known yet but we can surely list likely military targets the Americans would be interested in, both in Manchuria and the Soviet Union. Even this city, with its port and railyards, could well be a target. I've marked others on this map."

The two dictators perused a topographic chart of the region. Mao tallied up the targets in China. "Ten of ours," he muttered. "Five of yours. China has always been a target for Western aggression. Foreigners have coveted her riches for centuries."

Behind a wreath of pipe smoke, Stalin was grim. His lips twitched with a faint but steadily worsening palsy. Beria kept note everyday of its progress. He tapped Vladivostok on the map with his pipe stem. "If atom bombs fall on Russia, you may be assured we will respond in kind, probably in Europe." He described the details of military deployments that Marshals Konev and Chuykov had just completed along the interGerman border. "Four tank and two motorized rifle divisions are already in place. Elements of our Long-Range Aviation Second Air Army are also staged forward to bases nearby. Chuykov has full control of ten of our 'Belka' atom bombs for his Tu-4 bombers. All are ready to move, on command. We have only to give the word."

Mao, not to be outdone, alluded to recent intelligence from Marshal Peng's agent Jiang Chen Li, now in Japan. "We also have plans if the bombs come. There are already reliable indicators of two important facts: one of the plotters' targets is known to be Peking. And the Nationalist criminals on Formosa are massing large forces at this very moment to open up a new combat front on the mainland, to help the Americans out in Korea. Chiang's nothing but a stooge for MacArthur. Our agent even tells us there's a reconnaissance team inside China, scouting air defenses and targets throughout north China."

Stalin snatched the map from the table and crumpled it into a ball. He threw it against the veranda window. "I've heard enough. Truman will learn a very painful lesson if he persists." He glared at Molotov. "We've got to make firm plans now to stop this mission in Japan, or intercept it before the planes reach our airspace."

Molotov shrugged. "The Americans insist they need and want our cooperation. Even Beria has to admit this cooperation is an intelligence treasure of the first rank."

"Possibly better than ENORMOUS," Beria agreed, thinking of the network the NKVD had run out of Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, during the Great Hitlerist War.

"I don't care," Stalin said. "Truman loves to play games...your own report said so. He loves these games of chance. Perhaps, we should raise the stakes a little, see if Truman still wants to stay in the game. I'm going to order a special unit be created in our air force. A special unit to train immediately for air defense and air intercept of any plotters' aircraft coming from Japan. We know they must come from Japan, in all probability."

"Excellent," Mao agreed. "This unit will defend Chinese airspace too?"

"The entire region. Soviet and Chinese airspace. We'll train your pilots too, comrade. But we'll need more specific information from your agent, Lavrenti Pavlovich."

Beria was already taking notes. "I'll get WINDWARD in for a talk right away."

Stalin was thinking fast, ticking off ideas on his tobacco-stained fingers. "We need to know where the bombers are located. When they will fly. What routes, altitudes, headings, what are the targets? I want more intelligence, and more sabotage assets to be developed. Send them straight to Japan, cover or no. Every directorate. We've got to stop this plot there, before they launch the bombers."

Beria quickly agreed. "I'll see that WINDWARD pressures all his operatives in Japan for more information. He's been a good handler for us."

Stalin paced the veranda, angry at Truman for failing to stop the plots. "Truman wants us to sweat. He wants to intimidate us, just like he tried to do at Potsdam in 1945. He can make a great show of trying to 'stop' this plot but still let it happen, then wash his hands of responsibility later."

"The perfect poker player..." Beria concluded.

Stalin's face darkened as he glared out at foggy, mountainous Vladivostok. "Truman won't get away with this game. If Americans invade Chinese or Soviet airspace with their atom bombs, there will be war."

Tuesday, 1-23-51

Spassk Dalniy East Air Base, Nakhodka, U.S.S.R.

6:45 p.m.

Major Anatoli Leptev glared back at the pilots of Baikal Squadron, scattered around the ready room of the Operations building. The mission was vital to their beloved Rodina and Leptev was determined the squadron would complete the mission successfully.

"Pobyeda!" Leptev shouted at them. His blue eyes blazed fiercely. "Victory forever!"

"Pobyeda," came the automatic reply, the assembled pilots answering back in well-rehearsed unison.

Leptev introduced their visitor. "Comrade Fyodor Maximovich Trofimenko is here to give us more details. State Security has assigned this mission to the Eighth Air Defense Army. General-Colonel Vastutin expects every man to give his utmost for the mission. It's critical. You'll be fighting fascists and American bandits, by the way. Pay attention. Comrade Trofimenko has important details." Leptev retracted his square jaw, glowered over at Trofimenko and stepped off the podium. He took up a position alongside the chalkboard, hands folded behind his back at parade rest.

Trofimenko went to the lectern. Zealots like Leptev made him nervous. He was glad he had been posted abroad the last five years. He couldn't wait to leave their beloved Rodina and return to his usual comforts in Tokyo.

"Comrades, the Major's given you some background on a capitalist plot called Gallant Flag. I'm here to give you the latest intelligence. Obviously, this is sensitive information. None of these details leaves this room. Is that clearly understood?"

There was a scattering of murmured assents and nods.

"Very well. As Major Leptev said, you'll be training for a special mission. This is the target aircraft--"he taped up a blown-up photo of an American B-29 bomber on the chalkboard, covering up Leptev's tactical illustrations. "This is a B-29. You've seen them before. A long-range bomber. The Americans have organized them into 'bombardment groups', the 19th, the 98th, the 307th and others. These bombers conduct long range bombing missions over North Korea. Some have even violated Soviet and Chinese airspace, and we have chased them. They fly from bases in Japan--" here, Leptev helped him tape up a map of the Japanese home islands--"bases like these" Atsugi, Miyazawa, Haneda. Okinawa too, such as Kadena. There may be others." Trofimenko returned to the lectern and pointed out features of the bomber on the photograph.

"The aircraft carries a crew of ten. Two pilots, a navigator, two top gunners front and rear, a tail gunner, two belly gunners front and rear, a bombardier and a radioman. The four engines are Wright Cyclones, capable of 1600-horsepower each. The bomber has a maximum speed of 355 miles per hour, a maximum altitude of 31,500 feet, and a maximum range with normal bombload of 3250 miles. Your job will be to shoot it down."

Trofimenko consulted his notes. "Armament consists of a single 20-millimeter cannon in the tail, and twelve .50-caliber machine guns, four each in the top turrets and two each in the belly turrets, all remotely controlled.

"It can carry twenty thousand pounds, normal bombload." Trofimenko stepped out from behind the lectern and leveled an even gaze at the pilots. "Or one atomic bomb."

There was an uneasy stirring in the ready room while Trofimenko went on, covering current intelligence on aerial tactics, training methods and normal operating procedures of the huge bomber. Much of the information had been pieced together over the last few years from bedside sessions with Fumei An's girls at the Happy Rose Petal. Trofimenko had been compiling dossiers on key American weapons and officers for years. The 'dear little willows' at the geisha house had been some of his best sources.

The NKVD officer went on to describe the weapon itself. Leptev and a thin, nervous Junior Lieutenant helped him set up a film projector. Eight-millimeter film was threaded in and the projector started, with a clattering of gears and wheels. It was newsreel footage from Movietone he had obtained from the Embassy in Tokyo, footage of the Greenhouse Dog shot at Eniwetok.

Trofimenko recited the facts from memory, while the pilots and crew chiefs of Baikal Squadron watched in rapt attention.

"What you are seeing is the detonation of an American Mark VI plutonium, fission-fission, implosion-type atomic bomb. Nominal yield is about eighty kilotons, that is about eighty thousand tons of TNT equivalent force. Weapons of this type have been secretly moved into Japan and are, even now, being readied for use against us and our Chinese comrades. The bombs that will be carried by the Gallant Flag plotters' B-29s are exact copies of this device."

Trofimenko shut off the projector. "This is the threat we face now."

His part of the briefing over, he yielded to Major Leptev, who returned to the lectern, erased the chalkboard and launched into a description of their first practice intercept mission of the evening.

"It's Baikal Squadron's duty and pleasure to defend our Motherland against this threat. The fascists will surely fail if we practice hard and perform courageously." Leptev taped up an aeronautical chart of the maritime provinces, showing Japan and the surrounding region.

"I can now inform you that, as of 1900 hours tonight, a flight of five of our Tu-4 bombers will take off from Petropavlovsky Air Base on Sakhalin Island. This flight will steer a southwesterly heading, directly for Vladivostok. It is our mission tonight to scramble our aircraft and form up over Nakhodka. There, we will each receive ground vector instructions from Radar Control. With these instructions, we will break into intercept formations, and make visual sightings of the Tupolev bombers. You will each maneuver into guns tracking position and trigger special cameras that have been installed in your aircraft. This will prove that such ground-controlled intercepts can work. The Tu-4s will be flying a typical bombing profile used by the Americans over North Korea.

"After this intercept, you will receive instructions on when and how to return to base here."

Leptev stood in front of the chalkboard like a flagpole, hands on hips. "Are there any questions?" When there were none, he clenched both fists. "Very well then. Ready your aircraft for takeoff at 1830 hours. Squadron dismissed! And...pobyeda!"

"Pobyeda," came a chorus of replies.

The pilots gathered up their gear and filed smartly out of the ready room. As they left, Leptev asked Trofimenko if he would like to tag along.

"Spassk Dalniy can be a lonely place in the winter, comrade. Ride with me. I'm flying a MiG trainer, a two-seater. We'll observe and score the exercise from the air."

Trofimenko would have preferred to remain safely on the ground. He still had nightmares of violent aerial acrobatics over New Mexico and Utah. But Leptev was sincere and any hesitation might find its way back to Beria. He agreed to ride along.

Baikal Squadron's sixteen silver MiG-15 aircraft scrambled on the apron at Spassk Dalniy East Air Base and, at Leptev's command, executed paired takeoffs without incident. The sky was cold and mostly overcast over the Zolotoy Rog as the fighter elements formed up in squadron order.

Right away, Leptev and his wingman Reshetnikov, began getting vectoring calls from the ground. From their squadron assembly altitude of 20,000 feet, the Radar Control Center at Nakhodka fired off a rapid stream of turns and altitude changes, wheeling the formation north of Vladivostok, over the frozen expanse of a lake called Ozero Khanka, and well aligned with the dark, fractured fingers of the Lesozavodsk Mountains.

Leptev settled the MiG-15 into position above and astern of the lead elements, turning as they did, mirroring every maneuver Nakhodka Radar sent up to them.

Fyodor Trofimenko found the rear seat of the MiG cramped and cold, but the aircraft responded nimbly to Leptev's deft touch. He knew the single RD-45 jet engine was a direct theft of a British design yet it powered them on five-thousand pounds of thrust with surprising grace. Rigged as an interceptor, the MiG had wreaked havoc down south with American bombers like the B-29. She could make 670 miles per hour in normal cruise, outrunning even the Americans' vaunted Saberjet, and top out at 51,000 feet in a combat climb common to intercept missions.

"The aircraft handles well," Trofimenko radioed up to Leptev. He could see the Major's helmet bobbing with barely contained enthusiasm. He prayed Leptev would take pity on him and avoid any more stomach-churning banks and rolls in the future.

"Better than my brother's Arabian stallion," Leptev's voice crackled back. "The Americans are afraid of MiG Alley down south. They call her "The Silver Devil.' She chews up their bombers like a dog eats raw meat."

The weather over the Komsomolsk-Amur region worsened as the evening wore on. Clouds thickened, making visual sighting nearly impossible, especially at night. Unknown even to Leptev, the Tupolev bombers had also decided to make the game tougher, by employing certain crude jamming and radar countermeasures, tactics that Trofimenko had learned about and sent back from sources in Japan. The Americans had even developed something called 'chaff', a dispensable cloud of aluminum particles that fooled radar waves, interfering with the beam that Nakhodka used to track them.

Time and again, as the hours went by, ground-directed intercept courses turned up empty, the bombers nowhere in sight.

By 1930 hours, after a series of missed turns, staticky voice contact, and one near-collision, Leptev was frustrated, even furious with the lack of results.

"It's one thing after another," he growled. "We are cursed...Baikal Squadron, listen up! Break off this run immediately. Red Wolf One and Two, you drop back. Red Wolf Three and Four, you form up on me. I'll take the vectors and lead this run. Somebody has to take charge here."

But when several fliers from Red Wolf Three called in fuel bingo, Leptev changed his mind abruptly. Angrily, he ordered the entire squadron to break off and return to Spassk Dalniy.

Cold and cramped in the rear seat of the MiG, Fyodor Trofimenko wished hard he were back in Tokyo, back in the steaming, lilac-scented furos of the Happy Rose Petal, anywhere but jammed into a metal tube hurtling through the frozen skies of Siberia. He swallowed hard, hearing on his radio headset the growing frustration of Leptev and Nakhodka Radar sniping at each other, intercept after intercept consistently failing to find any bombers in the sky.

He wondered: how can we ever hope to intercept the Americans if we can't even find our own bombers?

Wednesday, 1-24-51

Tokyo

12:00 Noon

Fyodor Trofimenko returned to Tokyo the next morning, arriving at the Soviet Embassy just before ten. After some discussion with the First Secretary, First Chief Directorate, he got permission to contact Major Kitchens and request another meeting. Trofimenko wanted to meet the American investigator again for one main reason.

He needed help.

It was painfully obvious that the MiGs of Baikal Squadron needed as much assistance as they could get. Trofimenko intended to get them as much intelligence as he could on the capabilities and tactics of the American B-29s. He intended to ask Kitchens for permission to board an actual B-29 bomber, poke around and ask questions of the crew, questions of tactics and techniques. He wanted to ride along on a real bombing mission over Korea. He reasoned that if the Americans were really serious about stopping Gallant Flag and cooperating with the Soviets and the Chinese, they couldn't very well refuse him.

He was mistaken.

Trofimenko arranged to meet the Army investigator at a noodle shop in the Ginza, a place several blocks off the normal lunchtime circuit for officers and SCAP staffers from the Dai Ichi. Lyle Kitchens had found it expedient to avoid being seen with a known Red agent, even if he did have Washington's approval.

Trofimenko found The Happy Clam straight away.

The lunch time crowd was jammed shoulder to shoulder, as the Russian came in. He found Kitchens in the back, wedged into a booth, nursing a bowl of shiritake. They shook hands quickly. Trofimenko scanned the crowd--no obvious signs of a tail--and seated himself.

Lyle Kitchens was worried. The Russian sensed it right away. The Army officer told the Soviet agent that the investigation was slogging through mud.

"Washington's putting a lot of pressure on the case team to make evidence and wrap up the case. I'm getting wires every four hours from the Chief of Staff, asking for progress reports."

The Russian ordered a beer and noodles for himself. "It's the same for me, Major. We seem to be running out of time."

"Tell me about it." Kitchens finished off a cup of sake with a quick toss. "And there's even more wonderful news. Now I've got just four days to make a case. And if the mission launches before that, we've got a whole squadron of fighters dedicated from Japan and Korea, to intercept and shoot down any renegade aircraft. Our own aircraft...can you believe that?"

Trofimenko was quiet. What was there to say? If the Americans were this serious, Gallant Flag was closer to succeeding than anybody realized. He told Kitchens about his trip to Vladivostok--not the details, to be sure. Just mentioning the trip to get him shot if the rezidentura at the Embassy heard about it--but Kitchens had information he desperately needed. Fieldwork was like that. To get something, you had to trade something. Information was the only currency worth anything.

"My own country has the same concerns," he admitted. "The Soviet Union certainly will defend itself if bombers enter our airspace...as they do quite often, by the way. Any intruders will be shot out of the sky."

"It's a hell of a thing...we've got to keep this from blowing up in our faces."

"There is a way you can help me."

"Name it, pal. I'm desperate."

"Get me details on your B-29, Major. Tactics, capabilities, operations. We too are creating a special intercept force."

Kitchens demurred. "I'd like to, Fred. But it wouldn't be received too well. I'm not sure I could really explain to the Air Force why I need B-29 specs. If I told 'em the truth--I'm working a case with a Russian spy--I'd be arrested on the spot." Kitchens ordered another sake from the waiter. "Tell you what: I'll pass your request on to Washington, through the chain of command."

"I appreciate any help, comrade."

Kitchens smiled faintly. He knew what his Army superiors would do with such a request. And who could blame them? The whole case was some kind of cockeyed, funhouse mirror image of reality...Russians helping Americans shoot down Americans trying to bomb the Chinese. It didn't make any sense.

Russians and Americans cooperating to intercept a renegade atom bomb strike force. Just how mortal enemies were supposed to manage this in the midst of a shooting war, he didn't know.

They traded particulars about the case.

"It's got to be Okinawa," Kitchens was saying. "After what we found on Osawa, and what I've managed to shake out of Tetsuko, the launch base has to be Okinawa. I'll lay you odds that if we raid that warehouse in Kobe, we won't find a damn thing. Maybe Osawa was right after all. Kobe was just a diversion."

"A very elaborate diversion, Major." Trofimenko picked at his noodles. "We should put more pressure on Tetsuko. He is the weakest point of this conspiracy. You could take him into custody now. While he is under your control, I could penetrate his estate house."

Kitchens thought the idea had merit. If the Russian would share what he found. He still didn't fully trust Fred. "I could probably get a warrant from the Judge Advocate General's office to arrest the guy. God knows he's violated every Occupation law on the books. I sure wouldn't mind squeezing the Jap for some of his SCAP contacts. Trouble is, some of those contacts may be my superior officers. I'm not sure how it'll work out. I squeeze, he squeals, I get my butt chewed."

"You have authority from Washington, no?"

"On paper. The problem is Washington's ten thousand miles away. Out here, lines of authority aren't so clear cut. Hell, even I'm being tailed now. General Hickey's G-2 goons, most likely."

"Major, we have to stop those planes from flying. The peace of the world depends on it. Once they take off—" Trofimenko shuddered at the possibilities. "What about your Air Force?"

Kitchens shrugged. "I'm sure Clayton LaSalle's in this plot up to his eyeballs. Blount had the goods on him. But I just can't prove it. And I could get myself in one hell of a lot of hot water making unsubstantiated accusations against a serving flag officer in the middle of a shooting war. For anything to stick to that guy, it better be made of glue. My gut tells me LaSalle's probably heading up mission planning...hell, maybe he's even flying one of the planes. But I've got to work through the chain of command, which means the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. That'll take time and time we don't have. Plus the Army and the Air Force aren't exactly on good speaking terms."

"Perhaps I can look into this General LaSalle myself."

"I wouldn't advise it, pal. It's probably outside the scope of our agreement anyway. But that's the official view. My advice—" his eyes met the Russian's—"do what you have to do. We'll worry about niceties later. By the way, where's Jiang lately? He disappeared after the geisha house was hit."

"He told me about the attack." Trofimenko shook his head. He had a lot of very pleasant memories from the Happy Rose Petal. Especially...."I was sorry to hear about your comrade...Mr. Blount."

Kitchens re-arranged noodles in his bowl. "Yeah, well just between you and me, that was a paid hit, pure and simple. We got some leads...we'll nab the trigger men pretty soon. Jiang was going after the scum...that's the last I saw of him. He left the house and just vanished."

"Jiang said he had picked up a trail and he was going to follow it. But he had to contact his handlers here in Tokyo. He needed further instructions."

"Swell. A free-lance detective. Just what I need now. I better let the Army know our Red Chinese partner's on the loose. He hasn't exactly been playing by the rules lately."

"Perhaps he went to Okinawa himself. He spoke of it. He wanted to find the launch base, sabotage the aircraft."

"He wouldn't get far."

Trofimenko disagreed. "Don't be so sure, Major. I've gotten to know Jiang. He could easily pass for Japanese or Okinawan to unsuspecting American eyes."

"This cooperation thing isn't turning out quite like I expected it to. Free-lancing like you and Jiang are prone to do can be dangerous to your health. Especially during a war. Just remember: not everybody around here follows Washington's line."

Trofimenko shrugged. "What else can I do, Major? My country will certainly defend itself. Jiang would say the same. Yes, we cooperate to help you bring your own traitors to justice. But at the same time, we have to be prepared for the worst. Would you not do the same?"

"Probably. Hell, it's like being married to two wives. You can't please either one and you just get in deeper trouble the more you try."

"A unique way of looking at my problem...but I would agree."

Kitchens made up his mind. "I'm visiting the JAG's office right now. General Doyle Hickey be damned. Maybe I can get an arrest warrant for Tetsuko."

"I will want to be in on the interrogation, Major."

"Give me a way to contact you. I don't know whether Hickey or his staff will approve of you being around but it's worth a try. Anyway, there are other avenues to explore."

"What 'other avenues'?"

"The angle Blount was following up. I could hop a flight down to Eniwetok and drop in on Dr. Albert Ranier. Blount left me a few case notes. We got enough evidence on the good doctor to charge him with conspiracy to commit espionage, conspiracy to defraud the government, security violations galore. We could put the doc away for a long time. But Blount didn't think Ranier was in on the mission decisions. Just the bombs themselves."

"Should you not arrest him anyway? He could be made to talk—"

Kitchens shook his head. "That's where we're different, pal. The man's got some rights, even if he's a traitor. Even the Rosenbergs have rights."

"In my country, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are heroes."

"So we'll ship you the ashes after they fry. Anyway—"Kitchens paid off his tab, and got the Russian's as well—"I'm still dickering with the FBI over Ranier. He's the Bureau's baby and we have what you could call a difference of opinion as to how to make the case. Plus Hoover's still got most of Blount's case notes—what he didn't share with me, despite our agreements—and I need to have them. So far, the Bureau's holding their cards close to the vest. It's a power play, Hoover versus General Marshall."

The Russian decided on his own to do a little snooping around the Air Force bases at Atsugi and Yokota. He didn't tell Kitchens that, of course. But the Embassy had long ago penetrated a key base cleaning contractor—the Yorinaga Company had been servicing offices around both bases almost since the Surrender. He wanted Kitchens' help. But in the end, he might not need it.

The men left the Happy Clam and strolled out into early afternoon traffic along the Chui Dori. It was cold and damp, a chill breeze blowing up the street.

Kitchens turned to Trofimenko, after checking for a surveillance tail. Possibly the man by the newsstand—he couldn't quite tell, but there was a way to find out.

"Keep your wits about you, Fred. Sometimes, there's a fine line between investigating a case and espionage. I've got the President's own authority to cooperate with you and Jiang on a limited basis in running this case. But a lot of people on this side of the Pacific don't like it. Watch your step."

The Russian promised to do that. The men shook hands, and departed, going their separate ways. Both had routines they liked to follow, to shake off any tails. It wasn't too many minutes later, that Kitchens crossed the street and took a stroll up the western side of the Hibiya Dori. The vast stone walls of the Imperial Palace loomed across a moat that paralleled the street...the murky brown waters of the Babasakibori, the eastern moat. At an intersection, he paused by a wrought iron railing, ostensibly to adjust a shoe and took a peek behind. The same man was there, the one he had seen the newsstand, now one block away, his head buried in a copy of Asahi Shimbun.

My, my, we're sticking close today, he thought. Normal tradecraft said you stayed back several blocks at least. It was an unmistakable message and Major Lyle Kitchens understood quite clearly what was being conveyed. We know what you're up to and we're going to keep you under our thumbs and we might just smash you like a cockroach any time we want to. All by order of SCAP, he surmised.

Well, join the crowd, Kitchens thought. He walked on to the Dai Ichi, crossing the street, glaring over his shoulder at the tail. You'll have to stand in line if you want my scalp. It was a dangerous game they were playing...and it was getting more dangerous by the hour.

Wednesday, 1-24-51

Okinawa City, Okinawa

5:10 p.m.

Jiang Chen Li spotted the public bath and ducked in through the columned entrance, paying off the attendant quickly. He found a room full of steam, only a few toweled patrons lounging on the wooden benches, and began stripping down. He picked through a small bag he had brought with him, hurriedly pulling on his new clothes...dungarees, sneakers, work shirt and helmet. In ten minutes, he left the furo with a completely different look.

He walked briskly toward a bus stop by the gates of the port complex, fully into his new role as a skilled construction worker ready for hire. He caught a bus into Okinawa City. The town was a garish maze of construction cranes, dirt mounds, bulldozers, cement trucks, half-erected scaffolding and street after street of malt shops, peep shows and hot dog joints. Jiang had been in dozens of Chinese cities just as bad but somehow, when the Americans came, it was worse.

The attack on the Tokyo geisha house preyed on his mind. Who were they? The American major had been the target--he was sure of that. Why? Had Kitchens stirred up a nest of vipers?

He had picked up the trail of one of the assailants just outside the Happy Rose Petal and tracked him into the Ginza, into Shimbashi, but just beyond the Yasukuni Shrine--where a solemn funeral ceremony had been underway--the trail ran cold. Jiang prided himself on his trail sense. City or jungle, it didn't matter. He could track anyone anywhere, sometimes for weeks on end...even Lin Piao had said as much, right before the Communists seized power in Peking.

This time, though, his quarry had eluded him.

Oriental, he told himself. Asian, probably contract yakuza. No western may-guo-ren would have gotten away.

So he had come to Okinawa, after dispatching a runner from the safe house to let Marshal Peng know. The Americans were lost, unable to discipline their own troops. MacArthur was running the show in Japan. Now China was threatened with atomic destruction.

Jiang Chen Li would make sure the conspiracy never got that far.

He rode the bus out of Okinawa City, through volcanic tuffs and pineapple fields and mounds of wartime rubble. Naha was ahead, maybe ten miles of twisting single-lane blacktop. The bus plowed through a rugged valley and Jiang stared solemnly at scores of black cave-like tombs, the traditional hafu. Okinawa was a land steeped in death, covered with as many shrines and tombs as sweet-potato fields and rice paddies.

Just outside Naha, a hastily erected billboard pointed toward a new settlement rising from bare black earth, a small hotel and some apartments. Beyond the construction barriers, a road turned off toward a wire fence and a white gate, with a guardhouse manned by armed soldiers.

KADENA AIR BASE proclaimed a blue sign over the guardhouse. HOME OF THE 307TH BOMB GROUP.

Jiang got off at the base gates. Several structures were under construction outside the base, among them a warehouse. Jiang strolled through temporary fencing, negotiating crowds of day laborers waiting for a job call, and soon struck up a conversation with a carpenter and an electrician, both native Okinawans filling out paperwork for a job clearance on the base.

The Okinawans informed him that all the construction around the base was financed by the Americans, who were rapidly building up their military forces on the island again, to support the war in Korea.

"It's heap good work," said Tatu, the electrician. He had wiry black hair and green tattoos on his biceps. "You do anything, you get hired. Kokuba Gumi is the contractor. Good Japanese company, they are."

"What about pay?"

Tatu shrugged, patted his big belly. "Takusan. Many dollar." He beamed at Jiang. "Every night, I go to Okinawa City. Tokushu fujin." He grinned broadly.

His carpenter friend translated. "'Special women.' "Tatu likes them ample--" he reached over and gave Tatu's belly an affectionate rub of his own.

Jiang calculated the possibilities. The three of them watched as a huge airplane thundered in over the gate and eased its way down to the runway, kissing the tarmac with a puff of smoke. Maybe the bombs were here. Possibly the traitors would fly their planes right from Kadena. The Russian certainly thought so.

"I'm a welder, myself," he told them.

"Ah, so desu ka," said Tatu. "American need good welders. Apply there--" he pointed to a crude wooden shack next to the gate house. A white sign overhead read PERSONNEL.

Jiang walked over. After some preliminaries, he was shown to a trailer inside the base gate. There, he was interviewed by a team of Japanese and American officials. The American was tall, ruddy from sunburn and blond. He had a Texas accent; Jiang could barely understand him. The Japanese man called him Lamar-san.

The interview was short and brusque. Where are you from? What is your past work history? Do you have a visa? Have you been arrested? Jiang freely admitted he was Chinese, a Formosan refugee who had come to Okinawa for work. He passed the interview and Lamar-san took him on a short Jeep ride deeper onto the base, to a machine shop. The sign outside said SQUADRON MAINTENANCE. Jiang was shown a tool jig and some scrap metal and told to weld. He managed to get the acetylene flowing and the torch lit and a crude fillet weld laid down--he had done a little welding as a knockabout in Fujian, before joining the People's Liberation Army. Lamar-san seemed satisfied, after giving the bead and the pieces a cursory examination.

"Good enough, son."

With this test, he was hired on the spot and told to report to the base main gate at 6 o'clock the next morning.

"You'll be working on that hangar complex out there. Frame welding. Hope you're not afraid of heights."

Thursday morning, Jiang reported as ordered and was given a contractor's pass and bussed to the work site. The hangar was for B-29 bombers, he learned, newly arrived from the States to fly missions over North Korea for the 307th. Jiang met his supervisor, a Japanese man named Toronaga, who introduced him to his section boss and helped him get his apron, welder's gear and a face shield for his helmet.

The section boss put Jiang right to work at the prep bench below the steel skeleton of the hangar frame. His job was to fillet weld girder segments into working assemblies, which would then be hoisted into place by a huge bridge crane planted next to the site. The prep crew consisted of two other welders and a few laborers.

After concentrating on his work for the first few hours, Jiang felt more comfortable browsing around the prep site, retrieving supplies, positioning girder segments, even testing welds at the work table with a magnifying lens and lamp arrangement.

Throughout the morning, as he welded segments together, he took careful note of aircraft operations on Kadena's Runway 15, especially the takeoffs and landings of the B-29s. Intrigued by the sheer number of aircraft, he asked one of the welders about the base.

The welder was a Japanese migrant named Konizawa. Konizawa pushed his faceplate back and mopped sweat from his face.

"Actually, there are several airfields here. Kadena's just the main base. The Americans came in April '45...bombed the hell out of everything. After the war, they fixed it up and took over. Now the place really looks like hell."

"These other airfields--where are they? What aircraft fly from them?"

Konizawa scratched bristly stubble on his head--he was mostly bald--and lit a cigarette from the end of his torch, then banked the flame and screwed up his face in deep thought.

"Well, there is a rumor of an old abandoned field over on Mishida. Don't know how much I believe that. Maybe about forty minutes flying time from here. West, I think. I've heard it's being re-opened."

"For the Americans?"

"I suppose. They've got the money. And the planes. I know several welders, an electrician, too, who were hired off this site to help refurbish the field, build some new hangars. They say Omisumi's paying top dollar for that job."

"Omisumi Corporation?" Jiang was immediately alert. He knew from intelligence Kitchens had revealed that Omisumi was Tetsuko's firm. "Why? Why are the Americans building another field?"

Konizawa snorted. "There's a war going on, tomodachi. Who knows why Americans do anything? They keep bringing more aircraft in. Outgrowing Kadena."

Jiang was already thinking fast. "I'm interested in that job. You say it pays big dollar? How much?"

"I've heard some things." The Japanese welder shrugged. "Whether I believe them--that's another story." He dropped his faceshield with a quick snap of his head, then re-lit his torch from his cigarette butt. "If you're interested, see Toronaga. He's the superintendent."

"Domo arigato," Jiang thanked him. He went back to his own welding, fusing a nice weld bead onto a piece of rough-cut cast iron that made up a girder joist. He mulled over what the American major had passed on at The Happy Rose Petal. One name kept coming back: Clayton LaSalle. LaSalle was Air Force, a two-star general somehow mixed up in the plot. Kitchens had evidence from other investigators, evidence he didn't want to fully share. The Army investigator had theorized that LaSalle was in charge of the planes the traitors would use.

That meant Clayton LaSalle might well be here...on Okinawa.

Jiang finished up the girder job and paused to watch another B-29 rumbling down Kadena's runway. It roared past the hangar and struggled into the air, no doubt fully loaded with bombs for a mission over Korea. Perhaps even over China itself.

Jiang clenched his teeth, watching the huge bomber make a shallow bank out to sea, circling the field to form up into a squadron for the run in to the target. His own countrymen would be in the bombardier's sights in several hours. Time was short. Another B-29 was already at the end of the runway, running up its engines.

The next takeoff would well mean an atom bomb detonating over China.

Jiang knew what he needed to do. Over the next day, he needed to do a little reconnaissance around the Kadena base. Special or highly secured areas, places with unusually tight security, would need a closer look.

Then he had to find a way to see what was going on at Mishida. The mere fact that Omisumi was involved was good evidence that atom bombs might be there now, or soon would be.

Jiang helped fit up a steel beam into position along a newly erected wall frame. The hangar would take several weeks to complete. Jiang wouldn't be around that long.

Somehow, he had to find a way to hop a ride over to Mishida and see for himself. If the field turned out to be the nest of traitors he thought, his next move was already decided, given to him by Marshal Peng himself.

He would leave Okinawa and make his way back to China by a pre-arranged route, a 'tunnel' that agents of the People's Republic had been using for years. Picked up in Naha's harbor by a trawler that was owned by a company with hidden ties to the mainland, he would transfer that same night to a PLA Navy cutter at a rendezvous point called Okino Banks, several hundred miles west in the East China Sea. The cutter would make a nighttime speed run north straight to the naval station at Tsingtao. By morning, he would already be ashore, organizing an assault team of the Sharp Swords.

And by sundown the next evening, if all went well, Jiang Chen Li would be leading a commando raid on Mishida Island field, a full-scale assault to shut down Gallant Flag before it ever launched.

Assuming the traitors were at Mishida Island.
CHAPTER 24

Thursday, January 25, 1951

Tokyo

8:00 a.m.

Shinjuku was foggy and drizzly as Lyle Kitchens pulled up to the corner of the Omisumi building in the Army car. He got out and studied the scene for a moment.

Arrests were always tense times. You planned for everything, expected anything, hoped for nothing out of the ordinary. The first rule on apprehending suspects in the field was overwhelming force and a stern but correct manner. Kitchens had long practiced his stern look in the mirror, his two daughters tugging at his lips and cheeks to mold his face into all kinds of grotesque shapes. As for overwhelming force--

"Cover the front and back exits," Kitchens ordered. The rest of the detail--six white-helmeted MPs from the 5th Military Police Company, deployed quickly to cover all doors and possible routes of escape. Kitchens took the bulk of the detail--six men in all, two with M-1 assault rifles, into the building itself.

With Masuhiro Tetsuko, you couldn't be too careful. He had a protective shield of yakuza thugs around him at all times. Under normal circumstances, yakuza steered clear of interfering with police operations run by the U.S. Army. It was a simple matter of self-preservation. The Army had bigger guns.

But this was not a normal day.

Major Lyle Kitchens had come to place Tetsuko under arrest. The charge: conspiring to defraud the Occupation Authority. There were over a hundred counts in the warrant papers Kitchens would serve.

They found the Japanese industrialist at his desk on the eighth floor, quietly scanning papers.

Kitchens did the formalities, while two MPs secured the prisoner. For good measure, Kitchens grabbed all the papers off his desk and a few file drawers as well and dumped the contents into a box. Two burly 'cousins' guarding the doors to Tetsuko's office had been pinned into submission by the rest of the detail. They didn't resist but their faces could have cooked meat. Kitchens was silently thankful the resistance had not been more physical.

"Masuhiro Tetsuko, you are under arrest for conspiracy to defraud the Occupation Authority. You'll have plenty of time for statements later."

Tetsuko was calm, even meek, throughout the ordeal. He let the detail hustle him out of the office and down the stairs to the caravan of waiting cars with no real struggle. His face was pale and his eyes were big but otherwise, apprehending the suspect was routine. Even as the industrialist was placed in the back seat of the black Ford, Kitchens ordered a perimeter defense set up around the cars, in case the yakuza tried some kind of kamikaze snatch and grab at the last minute.

But the detail pulled away and headed west down Yasukuni Dori with no incident.

Tetsuko was taken to the military stockade at Atsugi Field and formally booked. He was strip searched and handed a pile of fatigues to put on, which he firmly refused. Kitchens was in no mood to dicker with the guy, but he had a lot of questions he wanted to ask. The major told the sentry to put the pile of clothes in the cell Tetsuko would be calling home.

For the time being, they would talk.

Kitchens found a bare room at the end of the corridor and confiscated it. He offered the industrialist water, coffee, cigarettes, but Tetsuko was playing tough guy and refused all of them.

He sat like a naughty schoolchild in the hard wooden chair, hands in his lap, glaring straight ahead. Behind the chair, Kitchens had stationed two MPs, with explicit orders to keep their eyes on the suspect's hands at all times. He half expected a suicide attempt at any moment.

Kitchens stared down at the great daimyo and decided to play his hand fully.

"Tetsuko-san, I know all about Gallant Flag. The whole deal is unraveling even as we sit here. I've got signed confessions from all the traitors involved. You may as well make things easy on yourself and give it to me straight. I know about the diverted atom bombs and the mission against China. And I know about your little warehouse in Kobe. Remember...I was there. Your 'cousins' took a few shots at me too. You got one chance to get this right, pal. If I don't hear what I want to hear, you're going to take the fall for murdering Hiro Osawa too. Plus a few other assaults as well. I've got a sheet on you that stretches out that door."

Tetsuko was unmoved. He stared at the table, grim and uncommunicative.

Kitchens never really expected much from the man. Tetsuko didn't disappoint him.

"Three days ago, there was an assault on a geisha house in the Ginza. I was there, so was a buddy of mine. My buddy was shot to death. Several of the girls were wounded. I'm adding that to the sheet too. I don't have to...but I like you, Tetsuko-san...I want you to know that." He scribbled some gibberish on a clean white sheet of paper on the table. "Accomplice to murder, conspiring to kill an Occupation officer, ordering numerous hits around town. You know what: any one of these could get you the gallows, pal. Now you've got three at a minimum. Feeling any luckier?"

Kitchens knew he was exaggerating and acting for effect, but for the first time, Tetsuko's hard face seemed to soften visibly. He flinched and his eyes came up. They locked onto Kitchens'.

"A cigarette, if you please, Major Kitchens-san."

Kitchens extracted a pack of Lucky Strikes and dropped them on the table. "You're a businessman. Successful, in a cockeyed kind of way. Make me a trade. Give me something I can use...and the pack's yours."

Tetsuko glared back at him. His lips pursed, the slightest quiver, betraying a need for tobacco. "I've never murdered anyone. That is a false accusation."

Kitchens shrugged. He made a show of studying the mostly blank sheet. "Don't see any murder charges here, pal. Should there be?" He put the sheet down, tugged the pack of cigarettes an inch back in his direction. "Sorry. No deal. You'll have to do better. You want a smoke...I got smokes. The whole pack. Give me something worth that."

Tetsuko's mouth was now open, the lips parted. They were parched dry. He began to blink fast. "There is nothing illegal at the warehouse in Kobe. Only machine parts, for shops in the city."

Kitchens smiled faintly. The guy was beginning to show a few cracks. "Sorry. Not good enough. Let's see if we can steer this truck down another road. Gallant Flag--I won't ask if you've heard of it--has aircraft dedicated to the mission. Where are they? Where do they fly from?" He nudged the cigarette pack a half inch toward Tetsuko.

By now, the daimyo had his eyes fixed on the pack. If his eyelids had been long enough, they would have reached out and grabbed the pack. Tetsuko's mouth tightened, a contest of willpower. Kitchens could see he was losing the contest.

Visible softening of the lips. The squint disappeared from his eyes. His hard cheeks sagged slightly. The mask was coming down. Tetsuko was a man after all.

"Mishida Island," he said.

Kitchens didn't move or say anything. The cigarette pack stayed put. Tetsuko willed it to move, but it stayed still.

Finally, the Major said, "Never heard of it."

"Nansei Shoto, what you call Ryukus...near Naha. Part of Okinawa, main island."

"You're saying this island...this Mishida, is it?...is the place? The planes are there?"

"I don't know about planes." Tetsuko looked down at the hard scuffed and stained linoleum floor. Faint brown-red patches were streaked all along the tiles below the table. Blood, maybe?

"The bombs then?"

Tetsuko nodded. "At Mishida."

Kitchens sat back with a sigh. His heart was pounding. He almost forgot about the cigarettes. A crack in the gate...he had to be careful, keep widening the crack. "And--?"

Tetsuko now openly hungered for a smoke. He sat up straighter in the chair, eyes on the pack. "There is an airfield. Omisumi helped re-build it."

"And the bombs are there?"

"They are. Or they will be."

"When is D-Day? When do the planes fly?"

Tetsuko shook his head. "Major Kitchens-san, please, you must believe me...I don't know any dates. I--they do not tell me. I don't want to know--" He shook his head, then dropped his eyes.

"Who are they?"

Tetsuko stared at the wooden floorboards. "General Craft-san is my contact inside the Dai Ichi. I have always worked just with him."

Paul Craft.

A staff O-7 under Wright. Had something to do with liaison to the rest of the Occupation forces. A planner and paper-pusher, from all accounts. Jiang had fingered Craft as a suspect himself, from his Formosa recon trip.

"Brigadier General Paul Craft?"

Tetsuko nodded solemnly. His eyes never left the floor.

"Who else?"

Tetsuko shuddered. "All my contacts are with Craft-san. No others."

Kitchens was already thinking fast, scribbling notes. "We'll see about that later. What about the bombs? Where are the bombs?"

Tetsuko was silent long enough to earn a glare from the Major. His eyes fixed on the pack of Lucky Strikes. Kitchens nudged the pack across the table. Grateful, Tetsuko quickly extracted a cigarette. Kitchens lit it for him.

"The bombs--"

Tetsuko nodded. "Craft-san learned of this investigation you are conducting. He knew he was under--what is the English word?--ser...servay--"

"Surveillance. Go on."

"Ah, yes...that is a difficult word. There are many words in English that I struggle--"

Kitchens slammed a fist on the table so hard that the cigarette pack fell onto the floor. Tetsuko jumped.

"Enough baloney, Tetsuko-san! The bombs--"

"Yes, of course." The industrialist adjusted his tie and primped himself, regaining a small measure of composure. "General Craft-san made a decision. The bombs would go directly to Mishida Island. They are to be unloaded just a day or so before the planes takeoff."

"And when is that?"

Tetsuko implored Kitchens. "Major-san, you must believe me. I have no knowledge of these matters."

"I'm betting you do, so we'll come back to that, pal. The bombs are now aboard a ship, is that right?"

Tetsuko nodded. "The Orient Star. Before the bombs are loaded, they must be inspected a last time. Craft-san was most insistent. Some experts are coming to make this inspection. After that, the bombs will be armed. And loaded aboard the planes."

"What experts?"

Tetsuko shook his head. "I don't have any names."

"It doesn't matter," Kitchens was scribbling as fast as he could. "I've got a pretty good idea." Given the proximity of Eniwetok and Operation Greenhouse, he figured it the inspection had to involve Albert Ranier. Now they were getting somewhere.

He fired off more questions, but Tetsuko seemed to be telling the truth. His knowledge of the plot was compartmented, his single point of contact Paul Craft.

Kitchens laid out the facts of the case. "The charge is conspiracy to defraud the Occupation Authority. You understand what this means?"

Tetsuko was glum but silent.

"I've worked up--let me see--" Kitchens made a show of counting down his sheet, "something like thirty-two separate counts on this one charge. Each count's worth about two years in the stockade. That's military time, pal. Hard labor and all. You won't be enjoying any samurai castles or geisha houses on military time. You do the arithmetic. Two years times thirty two counts. Seems to me you'll be a very old man, if you even survive, before they let you out. If they let you out at all."

Tetsuko had nothing more to say. He puffed on a Lucky Strike and glared at the floor, stiff as a board. Kitchens stifled an urge to knock the cigarette clean out of his mouth.

"You think about this matter, Tetsuko-san. Think real hard. Right now the charge is fraud against the Occupation. If Paul Craft and his cronies manage to pull off this plot and drop atom bombs where they shouldn't, the charge isn't fraud anymore. It's treason, abetting a conspiracy, giving aid and comfort to the enemy. I don't have to describe what the penalty is for that."

Kitchens didn't wait for an answer. He nodded to the MP, who roughly pulled Tetsuko up. The industrialist wobbled limply, and was marched out of the room to a waiting cell.

Kitchens didn't waste anymore time on the Jap. He went back to his office in the basement of the Dai Ichi. On the way in, he spied Paul Craft turning a corner of a first-floor hall, heading for the elevators. Craft was the key. Kitchens watched the officer barrel around a corner with an armful of papers. He was a thick linebacker of a man, steel-gray flattop framing narrow slit-eyes, rodent's eyes, Lloyd Gilruth had once called them. He wore black-framed glasses, giving him an owlish look, a startling contrast with his thick chest and biceps. A fat owl, Kitchens muttered.

A fat owl sitting on a nest of snakes.

Kitchens descended the stairs to the basement offices of the 5th MPs. Gilruth was there, sorting through evidence papers when the Major burst in. Gilruth looked up, question marks in his eyes.

Kitchens dropped the news from Tetsuko on him. Gilruth whistled low, over the steam of a hot cup of coffee.

"You've got to be kidding...Craft? Paul Craft? The guy's just one of Pinky Wright's weasels. You sure Tetsuko's not pulling a fast one on you?"

Kitchens helped himself to the dregs of the coffee and sat down in a squeaky chair. Fatigue washed over him and he lay back, rubbing his eyes. "No, I'm not sure at all. And what's worse, Craft's a superior officer. I can't just barge into his shop and start throwing accusations around. I've got to get this back to Washington, let the Judge Advocate General and the Chief of Staff sort it out."

"We don't have a lot of time, Lyle. The evidence says this thing's about to pop anyday. Shouldn't you run this by Colonel Kades first. He's the Adjutant."

"I know that. But Kades reports to Hickey. And Hickey reports to MacArthur. The whole damn chain leads right to the top. What do you think will happen to me if I start unraveling this mess and the facts point right to the Old Dugout Doug? Who's Washington going to believe, right in the middle of a shooting war, while the Reds are kicking our ass to Pusan and back? What's worse is there's got to be an Air Force connection. Robert Blount was convinced as hell that Clayton LaSalle is a big part of this. But flyboy's outside my scope of authority."

Gilruth started clearing papers from his banged and battered steel desk. "Okay, so it's checkmate. So what have we got now?"

Kitchens snorted. "One hell of a mess, pal." He glared down at the rancid coffee. "Gilruth, I wouldn't feed this crap to a rabid dog. What's in here anyway?" He snatched up a pencil and started fishing out oily clumps of something.

"Oh, just cinnamon and seaweed and--"

"Seaweed!"

Gilruth shrugged. "Japs like it. I tried it and liked it too. Gives you some vitamins while you slurp."

"Forget this." Kitchens sat up abruptly, knocking case files off on the floor. The room was stale with coffee and cigarettes and several unidentifiable odors. He wondered when Gilruth had last taken a bath. He decided not to ask.

"We got to get those bombs, Lloyd. Screw the paperwork and the chain of command. Tetsuko said they're still on his ship. Orient Star, she's called."

"I'll get cooking on her background right now. Any idea where she is?"

"No, but it's a safe bet she's a short steaming time from the launch base. Mishida Island..." He rummaged around the office, finally turned up a map of the Pacific Basin. His fingers found the Ryuku Islands. There was Okinawa. Okino, Tukuno, Amami. And Mishida. A speck in the ocean, northwest of the main chain of islands. "Jesus Christ--" he ran his finger over to Korea and the Chinese mainland. "--if there's an airfield there, it's a damn short run to any targets. We've got to find that freighter."

"We'll need the Navy for that. Locate her, put her under surveillance, maybe board her."

"Back to the chain of command." Kitchens smiled a tight smile, reciting his orders from memory. "Thou shalt not go outside the chain of command in the conduct of this investigation. I've got to talk with Washington."

"I don't know who's worse--the Reds or own politicians."

"I need what the FBI has on LaSalle. Robert Blount sent daily summaries back to the Task Force in Washington. Hoover's got what I need...I know he has. I shouldn't have to scream and stand on my head to get it."

The two majors laid out the details they would need to get Washington moving.

Gilruth cleared off a desk piled high with folders. "Maybe I'm wrong, but I only see two options. Stop that ship from unloading its bombs at Mishida Island."

"Or shutdown Mishida itself," Kitchens completed the thought. He knew he needed help and he needed it fast. Given the distance to Washington and the delays that cables and telecons created, plus the inevitable time lag for bureaucracy to make a decision, he wondered if his best choice might not be Jiang and Trofimenko after all, despite the risks.

He had a contact number at the Soviet Embassy. Someone named Matterhorn, undoubtedly Soviet code for a ranking member of the rezidentura. It was the only way he knew to get in touch with Trofimenko. Maybe the Russians could help locate Tetsuko's freighter at sea.

He also wanted very much to track down Dr. Albert Ranier. Ranier had been a key part of the plot from the beginning. And if Tetsuko was telling the truth, the Czech physicist would be on hand to check out the bombs before they were finally loaded.

But to arrest the doctor, Kitchens knew he would need approval from Bradley, or someone in the Joint Chiefs. Lightning Joe Collins would have to hash it out with Admiral Sherman, the CNO. The Navy ran the Pacific Proving Grounds, and Eniwetok.

Back to the chain of command.

Lyle Kitchens wasn't sure if his phones were tapped or not. It wasn't a good idea to be dialing up the Soviet Embassy from inside the military headquarters of Far Eastern Command--and he didn't need his Military Justice books to tell him that.

But time was short and he was getting desperate.

Kitchens reached for the phone on Gilruth's desk and started dialing numbers.

Thursday, 1-25-51

Mishida Island

11:00 a.m.

General Paul Craft thought Mishida Island was about as ugly a place as any dry snake-infested arroyo he had ever seen back in his Texas days as a child. Black ash and volcanic rock the color of dried blood, the whole island was a windy spit of scabrous, bony ridges, like some giant's claw had raked up the ocean's muck and flung it into the sea. The narrow defile of a twisted anvil-like valley split the island into two halves. Airfield M-3, as it had been known to the Army Air Forces bomber crews on their long, aching, bumpy rides over the Home Islands of the Japanese Empire, was stuck in the middle of the valley, like an open sore.

Craft came to Mishida because he was worried. He wanted to consult with LaSalle and see for himself how Gallant Flag preparations were coming along. He had left for Mishida (actually Kadena) early that morning on a C-54, literally a few hours after he had heard Tetsuko had been arrested. The Omisumi staffer had practically been in tears that the great daimyo of Omisumi Corporation was taken away like some common thief.

Serves the weasel right, Craft thought, but he was worried just the same. It was a safe bet, if he knew Tetsuko-san, that the Japanese industrialist would eventually squeal to Kitchens, probably spilling everything he knew to save his own skin.

Craft had worried himself into a severe upset stomach on the bumpy flight down from Atsugi. The transport had wallowed and vibrated like a sick whale and half the passengers had been kissing their airsickness bags the whole flight down. Craft was just glad when the plane finally bellied onto Kadena's runway with a sickening lurch.

If Gallant Flag was even close to being ready, he intended to come back to the Dai Ichi and press the Old Man to give his final permission. The hard truth was that if Gallant Flag didn't launch in the next three days, Kitchens and his investigators might well be able to shut them down completely. If that happened, SCAP could well be in trouble with Washington, more trouble than he could handle.

And in the Army, a superior officer's problems had a way of becoming the whole staff's problems pretty fast.

Craft had hopped another plane over to Mishida, a Grasshopper sent by LaSalle himself. It was like flying in a coffin with wings. Once on the tarmac, Craft swore off flying for a few hours and strolled among the assembled B-29s parked on the ramp. Five in all. Just like Clayton LaSalle had promised.

Ground crews swarmed over the planes. One had its outboard starboard engine stripped down to bolts and wires on a strip of canvas laid out on the concrete. Craft wandered over and asked for General LaSalle.

"That one, sir," said a blond, grease-covered mechanic, squinting in the stiff wind. He pointed to a Superfort with markings from the 307th Bomb Group. "Hellzapoppin'"

"Thanks, airman." Craft went over to the open cockpit hatch and hauled himself up the ladder. Another airman started to interfere, but backed off and saluted, seeing Craft's general's stars.

Up inside the bomber's birdcage, he found Clayton LaSalle, sitting crossways in the pilot's seat, running down a checklist. They shook hands. Craft dropped into the co-pilot's seat.

"What brings you to this hellhole?" LaSalle asked. He was checking switch positions from a chart of the instrument panel.

Craft tried out the control yoke and rudder pedals for size. "Bad news." He explained what had happened, how the Army had just picked up Masuhiro Tetsuko. LaSalle kept at his checklist, his face hardening as Craft went on. "It's best to assume Tetsuko-san won't keep his mouth shut. That bugger's about as reliable as Tojo."

LaSalle was annoyed but continued focusing on getting Hellzapoppin' ready. "Tough break, Paul, but it doesn't mean a hell of a lot now. I'm just trying to get my aircraft shipshape. That and get the bombs in here safely."

Craft asked, "Where are our big beauties now?"

"Two days' steaming time away. Orient Star is just circling in the East China Sea. If anybody checks her out, she looks just like a Chinese freighter, plying the normal trade routes between Japan and Formosa. Our babies are well taken care of, and well guarded too."

Craft picked up a loose sheet of paper from a binder on the floor of the cockpit. LaSalle had wedged it in between the red brake levers on the center console. The paper was another checklist. The title read 'Breech Plug Loading Procedure.' He scanned the list:

1. Check green plugs installed

2. Remove rear plate

3. Remove armor plate

4. Insert breech wrench in breech plug

5. Unscrew breech plug, place on rubber pad

6. Insert charge, 4 sections, red ends to breech

7. Insert breech plug and tighten

8. Connect firing line

9. Install armor plate

10. Install rear plate

11. Remove and secure catwalk and tools

"If you don't mind," LaSalle removed the list from Craft's hands and put it back in the binder. "That's part of the arming procedure. I'll take you aft to the bomb bay in a minute, give you the executive tour."

Craft said, "We have to get the bombs in here as soon as possible, in the next day or so, if we can."

"It'll take Orient Star nearly two days to cover the distance. And we have to unload at night. Otherwise every flight out of Kadena will know what we're up to. I've already had to deflect inquiries from Group about the planes over here."

"What did you tell them?"

LaSalle had flopped down to peer over into the bombardier's well, adjusting a piece of equipment. "That we're a special test group from the States. Gave 'em the whole 'Paul Tibbets' spiel. Practicing special bombing tactics and so forth. One of LeMay's babies. That quieted things down."

"Isn't that dangerous?"

LaSalle chuckled. "Not as dangerous as carrying unauthorized atom bombs over China, my friend."

"We've only got a few days. If we don't get airborne by Sunday or Monday, Kitchens and the Army may blow this thing sky high. Now they've got Tetsuko--"

"Just keep them off my back until we're loaded."

"What the hell do you think I'm trying to do? Jesus, I've got wiretaps going all over the place--borrowed those from a Signal Corps buddy of mine--so every time Kitchens farts, I know about it. I've even got a tail set up, but he's wise to it, I'm sure. Frankly, the only thing that's saved us this far is the bureaucracy. Thank God for Army regulations."

"Some things never change." LaSalle squeezed past Craft and dropped back down to the navigator's station behind the birdcage. "Come on. I'll show you the bomb bay."

The two generals squeezed past the radioman's console and climbed a short ladder into a narrow tube, running aft through the bomber's fuselage. The tunnel ran some forty feet in length, all the way to the aft gunner's compartment. In flight, the tunnel was fully pressurized, though the bomb bays were not.

After grunting and sweating their way along, LaSalle and Craft came to the forward bomb bay. They perched themselves on a catwalk surrounding the open doors. LaSalle pointed out features he had modified.

"We've been working 'round the clock on this stuff, trying to get these planes into Silverplate configuration."

"Like Enola Gay and Bock's Car?"

"Exactly. Look there--" he pointed to the release mechanism overhead. "That's called an H-frame rack. We've beefed up the hoist assembly and sway braces too, just like Silverplate blueprints. Getting those prints was a ticklish job, let me tell you. I had to grease a few palms for those. And the release mechanism--see there?--that's the latest British design. Heavy-duty shackles, remote timing on the release, with an intervalometer. Slick stuff those Brits came up with. Bomber Command used these with their Lancasters over Germany...the Big Bertha bombs. Worked like a dream. Of course, our babies are even bigger."

"Like nine thousand pounds in all."

"Nearly. Put one of the Mark VI's in here, and Hellzapoppin would just about fall on her face, she's so nose heavy. To counter that, we stick several hundred cans of lead shot in the tail. Fifteen hundred pounds in all. Helps trim her for takeoff and climbout."

Craft eased around the perimeter of the catwalk. He ran into a stack of boxes with wires and dials. "Part of the arming system?"

"Pretty much. We hook those boxes up to the fusing and arming circuits once we're airborne. I don't like to arm these babies on the ground. Hellzapoppin has any kind of problem and we crash, we could pretty much take out half of Okinawa. Less likely with the implosion device, but I don't want to take the chance."

"I just hope your bombardiers know what they're doing. We've got one shot at this. Don't plan on aborting and coming back here with your bombs."

LaSalle laughed. "No chance of that. Once we're airborne, we're going downtown for sure."

Craft felt along the burnished steel of the release rack. Heavy-gauge stuff, he told himself. "What happens when the bomb leaves the plane?"

LaSalle was leaning over the catwalk, re-positioning one of the shackle cleats. "Well, the procedure's pretty straightforward. Strategic Air Command's got quite a few crews who've practiced this...some of 'em are here now, with the 19th, the 98th, the 307th. Once the bomb leaves the bomb bay, it's motion downward pulls out some wires, called arming wires. That allows the bomb to start running on its own internal power. Safe-separation timing clocks hold open some switches, so the bomb doesn't accidentally detonate near the aircraft. As the bomb continues to fall--we usually drop from about 28,000 to 31,000 feet--barometric switches inside the casing close more switches. It's all part of the safety system. The bomb actually has its own radar system and after about thirty seconds of fall, the radar fusing starts, with the radar looking at the exact height of the bomb above the ground."

LaSalle was illustrating the bomb's movements with his hands. "Somewhere about 1540 feet, final arming and firing switches are closed and the condensers--back in the aft part of the casing--discharge their voltages to a bank of detonators attached to the high explosive lenses. The detonators go off, triggering an implosion inward. The shock wave then compresses the ball of plutonium in the center--including the breech plug you were reading about...by the way, the bomb can't fire without that plug, it won't go critical. The plutonium is compressed in a few millionths of a second. As that is happening, a tiny initiator at the very center of the sphere goes off. This baby's the key to the whole shebang. It's made of beryllium and polonium and sprays loose neutrons around inside the plutonium, to get a chain reaction going. Once that happens--" LaSalle swept his palms up like a big mushroom cloud and grinned--"ka--boom! The target is vaporized."

Craft had seen footage from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He could well visualize what LaSalle's armwaving really meant. In the blink of an eye, Mao's hordes would cease to exist. When the smoke had cleared and the radioactive rubble had stopped bouncing, maybe then, the Reds would decide they couldn't digest South Korea after all.

The two generals discussed tactics for a few minutes. They both agreed that Orient Star should be contacted at once and the bombs unloaded by no later than Saturday, January 27.

LaSalle said, "My boys can be ready to launch by Sunday morning, say 0700 hours. That's the twenty-eighth. Once we know the targets, we can get the bombs loaded, checked out and airborne in less than eight hours. Assuming your buddy Ranier gets here on time."

"I'll make sure of that, "Craft promised. "As for targets, I haven't heard anything more from the Chinese. They've got a commando and recon squad on the mainland, supposedly gathering intel but nothing has come through the channel I set up."

LaSalle shrugged. "We've got targets of our own in mind. I say forget 'em."

Craft agreed. "If I don't get anything by Saturday night, 2400 hours, then Gallant Flag goes with the original target list."

"Including Peking?"

"Absolutely. Subject to the Old Man's approval, of course."

Craft left LaSalle to finish prepping his aircraft and caught the next shuttle back to Kadena. The weather had calmed a bit as the morning wore on. The next Tokyo-Atsugi run was scheduled to leave in about two hours, a routine Air Transport Service C-54 ferry flight. Craft signed in as a flag-rank passenger and found his way to a coffee/snack shop set up in a corrugated hut outside the waiting area. He settled in to wait, watching as more B-29s wallowed along the taxiways, ready for another bomb run up North.

Paul Craft was conscious of the possibility that Major Kitchens might suspect him and might even have managed to set up a surveillance tail. He didn't see anyone around the coffee shack or the waiting lounge that looked out of the ordinary. But you couldn't be too careful. Kitchens had proven to be a tenacious pain in the ass.

Unknown to Craft, his comings and goings through the Kadena terminal had in fact been noticed, though not by any surveillance Kitchens had set up. The presence of an Army general on an Air Force base was hard to keep quiet anyway, and his arrival had been duly noted by one Jiang Chen Li, working as a welder on a nearby hangar.

Even as Craft was boarding the C-54 for the flight back to Atsugi, Jiang was making his own preparations. He would be leaving Mishida that evening, heading back to Okinawa City and the port. There, he would quietly board a commercial trawler that would put to sea later that night. After a few hours steaming northwest of Okinawa, the trawler would make a midnight rendezvous in the middle of the East China Sea. Transferring to a PLA Navy cutter, Jiang would be in Tsingtao by sunup, ready to start organizing an assault operation on Mishida Island. The Sharp Swords would do what all of Marshal Peng's field armies had so far failed to accomplish: defeat the Americans once and for all.

Craft boarded the plane and the twin-engine Dakota transport lumbered into the air on time for the six-hour flight back to Tokyo. Once airborne, the Army general tried to rest but he was anxious, and his mind wouldn't stop. Craft gave in and pulled out a small pad, intending to jot down some phrases he figured to use on General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander. He intended to see Hickey right away once they hit the ground at Atsugi and get a meeting with SCAP as soon as possible.

The Old Man has to decide to launch now, Craft thought.

If he doesn't, Major Kitchens and the weak willies in Washington would take away the best opportunity America might have for a generation to deal the Communists a mortal blow.

Friday, 1-26-51

East China Sea, aboard the Orient Star

6:40 a.m.

Jiang Chen Li had seen enough. For the past four hours, he had hidden himself among the ventilators and ducts of the hangar rooftop, watching from cover as one after another flatbed truck hauled heavy equipment to a building at the end of the flight line. The building was a smaller than a hangar--there were no doors large enough to accommodate large aircraft. Still, lights blazed from within the building all night as trucks and ground crews came and went.

A large ship had anchored off the northwest promontory of Mishida Island. Jiang could see dim red lights on its superstructure and a few floodlights sweeping the waters around the ship's stern. Dim outlines of a smaller craft were visible. To Jiang, the craft resembled an old American Navy Landing Ship, Tank, probably scrounged up from some backwater cove around Okinawa and made just seaworthy enough for tonight's duty.

The LST made numerous trips from the stern of the freighter to a shallower anchorage near shore. How the craft was unloaded wasn't visible from the hangar rooftop. Perhaps a small beach or landspit, Jiang surmised. The LST made half a dozen trips, by his count. Her cargo was transferred to waiting trucks and driven along a narrow gravel road, through a steep cut in the cliffs, onto the hardpan of the airfield ramp and then into the building. Each trip was a slow painstaking affair, taking the better part of an hour. The truck eased along the road at less than five miles an hour, he estimated, slow enough for a small platoon of ground crew to walk alongside.

Under a tarpaulin on the flatbed, a large hump was visible in the dim light. Whatever the truck carried was big and heavy.

Jiang knew what was underneath the cover.

After four hours, the truck had made seven trips, five with large-humped cargo on the trailer. Five atom bombs, the Major told himself. Each had disappeared into the building, presumably to be secured and readied for loading on its aircraft. Jiang didn't know how long the Americans would need to prepare the devices for flight.

The only question now was: could he get to Tsingtao and organize the Sharp Swords fast enough to prevent the unthinkable from happening? The Americans had already staged five B-29s into this tiny airfield. All of them had been parked along the flight line, undergoing repairs and modifications around the clock for the past several days. The carrier aircraft were here at Mishida. Now the bombs had arrived.

He couldn't imagine the preparations taking more than a few days at most. That meant Sunday, Monday at the latest, Gallant Flag would be ready.

The Sharp Swords would have to make their assault before then. And the building where the bombs had been placed would be their primary target.

Jiang had studied the layout of the airfield and its ramps, runways and hangars for two days, memorizing everything of tactical importance. He had made a few notes, on details of guard force deployment, weapons available (he had seen nothing more than small-caliber infantry weapons, and one anti-aircraft artillery emplacement in a revetment in the cliffs overlooking the valley). The cliffs were steep. No doubt the Americans had set up a free-fire zone in the valley leading down to the anchorage and the small beach. Better to assault the airfield from over the cliffs, by night, if possible. There wasn't much ground cover, but there were undoubtedly caves and ravines and hollows in the hills. If the Swords could get a small force ashore without being spotted, they could probably conceal themselves in the folds of the terrain.

Jiang wasted no further time reconnoitering the area. The first shuttle plane into Mishida would be arriving in half an hour, just after sunup. It would be a small L-2, a flying box that ran contractor personnel to and from Kadena and Okinawa City. Jiang had finagled himself onto the late shift yesterday. He could more easily scout defenses and targets at night without being missed from his welding job at the prep bench.

He planned to sign aboard the first flight out of Mishida an hour later, and disappear into Okinawa City after that. Walking back across the ramp from his perch atop the last hangar, he spotted a gathering of officers huddled in animated discussion, backlit from bright floodlights beaming down from Hangar Number Four. He made sure his welding equipment was plainly visible and gave the officers a wide berth. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that one was a general, 'flying' an imaginary mission to his partners with swooping and diving hand gestures.

The officers paid no attention to Jiang. The Red Chinese major slipped into the crowd of workmen around the build site and disappeared.

General Clayton LaSalle finished his story of the unauthorized recon mission he had flown up North. "We stirred the nest with that one, boys. MiGs thicker than stew, swarming all around us. We had cockpit damage, ailerons sluggish and limited rudder. Plus my co-pilot was dead, slumped over his wheel."

"You were lucky, General." The speaker was Major Don Jacobs, pilot of the Hellzapoppin'. The men had just come from an inspection of the Silverplate mods done to his aircraft.

"Damn lucky, son. I told the engineer to goose those big Wright Cyclones and we hightailed it out of Indian country like roosters in heat."

"That's when you ditched in the ocean?"

LaSalle nodded. "And the less said about that, the better."

"General, can we get a look at our weapons?" Major Chester "Kit" Carson was a hotshot from the 307th. Kadena was his home field.

LaSalle cinched up his flight jacket a little tighter against the chill early-morning wind. "Like the Japs say...achira asoko...that-a-way, boys." He pointed off to the ordnance bunker where the trucks had taken the bombs.

Clayton LaSalle knew that tomorrow afternoon was the bottom of the ninth inning. The best players were coming up to bat and the scene was set for a grand slam. Albert Ranier was due at Mishida tomorrow afternoon, too. He was coming to give the bombs their final checkup. By Saturday night, at 2000 hours, he'd conduct the final mission briefing for the crews in the squadron ready room they'd cobbled together in the operations building and by 0400 hours Sunday, if they had SCAP approval, Gallant Flag would finally be underway.

They passed the perimeter guard detail of Air Police, now armed with M-1s, and entered the bunker. It was dimly lit, while the doors were still open. Spotted around the open space were small prep bays, 'theaters' shrouded with leaded curtains and scaffolding over broad pits sunk in the cement floor. Each theater hosted a separate Mark VI bomb, fastened to a wheeled dolly. The bombs looked like patients, ready for the operating room. Thick ganglia of wires and cables snaked in and out of the pits.

LaSalle watched the last of the bombs being secured, a surprisingly ticklish operation, given the nine-thousand pound weight of the device. The casing was a dull black finish, hemispherical up front, boxed off with ballistic fins at the back. Anti-static drapes had been lowered over an opening in the side of the casing.

"Ugly beasts," Carson muttered. His voice was low, whether out of respect or fear perhaps even he couldn't have said.

"' The Devil's Fist,' I heard one scientist say," LaSalle told him. "Major, go round up the others and we'll have a quick look at our target folders in the ready room."

The rest of the Gallant Flag team gathered in the ready room. LaSalle wanted only pilots, navigators and weaponeers. Jacobs was there. Kit Carson too. The other volunteer pilots were Major Tony Scopes, '29 driver from 19th Group at Andersen-Guam and Lieutenant Colonel Randy Sherman, also from the 19th. The room was a plywood and tin roof enclosure nailed up in a corner of the hangar. It was cramped and stifling. Sections of aeronautical and terrain maps had been tacked up across two walls.

The General stood hands folded behind his back between a map of China and a map of the Soviet coastline.

"Men, we still have no further intelligence from our Chinese friends on preferred targets. That being the case, Gallant Flag will refer all mission planning to the targets originally put in your folders. You may open them now--"

There was a rustling of pages, and a few coughs, as the folders were unsealed. LaSalle went on.

"The targets, as approved by Supreme Commander are five in all." He rapped them one after another with his wooden pointer. "Shenyang, Tsingtao, Port Arthur, Harbin. And Peking."

A chorus of whistles and throats being cleared swept around the ready room.

"In your folders, you'll find some intelligence from Willoughby's shop and his G-2 fairies on what to expect in each target area. Each target listed is to be considered the primary. There are pages after each primary...just turn and you'll see them. Those are the alternates, in case of weather. Two targets are considered primary and must be hit, regardless of conditions." LaSalle looked each of his five pilots in turn. "Let me repeat that. There are no alternates for two of the targets. Shenyang and Peking. Shenyang is a major Chicom supply and troop marshaling point in Manchuria. It supplies most of the gooks that have chewed up our men the last few months. Big railyard, lots of ammo dumps, the works. You hit Shenyang with one of our Mark VIs and she'll burn for weeks."

LaSalle's lips tightened. "I don't have to tell you anything more about Peking."

"The capital city, sir?"

"Peking's on the list at the express request of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. MacArthur made a promise. Peking is non-negotiable."

There was an awkward silence. LaSalle let his crews chew on that for awhile.

"Your folders have the latest scoop on target coordinates, altitudes for the bomb run, probable air defenses, visual reference points, historic weather patterns, and tactical radio procedures. Port Arthur's a big Red supply dump on the Shantung Peninsula. Reds take guns and ammo from all over the Bloc in through there. Harbin's a big rail center. It's a primary supply point for the Russians. Knock Harbin and Shenyang out and all the Chicoms in Korea starve in two weeks. Tsingtao's down here--"LaSalle shifted his pointer to a port city east of Peking, also on the East China Sea. "Big PLA Navy base. We incinerate Port Arthur and Tsingtao and the Chicoms have no workable port facilities for a thousand miles. That's helps our boys stabilize the lines and start hitting back."

Jacobs spoke up. "What about air defenses, General? We've been hearing some real horror stories from MiG Alley lately. Sounds like the Reds like to sucker our '29s into a trap and jump 'em with several dozen bandits at once."

Carson remembered the trip up North he'd taken with LaSalle. "I can answer that one, General. It's more like a big pinwheel, I'd say. Chicoms like to come at you from out of the sun. They like to play chicken with head-on approaches too...come screaming in, turn on their wingtips and dive down from above. They make all their guns passes from above. Make sure your top gunner gets a good night's sleep."

LaSalle concurred, adding, "Gooks have Top Cans all over the place up there. Russian long-range radar. Plus some serious 85-millimeter guns north of Hungnam. We've had to cut back on Shoran raids too, go to night-time tactics because of the flak. That and the MiGs are making life pretty miserable for our bomber crews. North of Hungnam and Pyong'yang, the reception gets kind of bumpy."

Tony Scopes piped up. "General, scuttlebutt has it you've already scouted Indian country for us. Want to let us in on any trade secrets?" There was a smattering of chuckles around the ready room.

LaSalle snorted. "No secrets, boys. The rumors are true, but that's off the record. I don't want Rosie O'Donnell or LeMay breaking any more of my fingers." He thought back to Lucky Lucy's mission in early December. "Bleak country. Mountains, ice, wind gusts like the Devil's own breath. Your best tactic on the run-in is to stay low, on the deck. Two hundred feet if you can manage it. Find you some cloud cover and make like a silver ghost. If you can stay low, you give the bastards less to shoot at. They like to dive but the window for firing is short if you dragging your toes. Just a little jinking and jiving and they can't get a bead on you."

"But, General, we can't release these babies from two hundred feet." Randy Sherman had picked up a little knowledge of Silverplate tactics from his days as a check pilot for the 509th back in '45. "SOPs say release from not less than 31,000 feet."

"True enough, and you'll have to start your climb to drop altitude in time to put you at angels 310 over the target. All I'm saying is stay low as long as you can, especially on your speed run out of the target area. Once you clear the blast area--remember there'll be two shock waves, one from the detonation and one from the ground reflection--hit the deck and stay there until you make it over the ocean."

"You going to drill us on ditching procedures, General?"

LaSalle smiled over a chorus of guffaws. Lucky Lucy's ordeal had become O-club legend in less than five weeks. "Not on your life, Colonel. Follow the book on escape and evasion tactics. If you have to ditch--" he shrugged, "hold your breath and keep your balls warm. That water's colder than a witch's lips. By the way, normal rescue and recovery forces will be deployed in the Sea of Japan, the usual helos and garbage scows. And I'll make sure we've got assets in the Yellow Sea too. That's not a FEAF area of operation, so it'll have to be undercover, but somebody'll be there for you." LaSalle struggled a few seconds with his next sentence.

"I expect each and every man here to make it back alive. You'll be goddamn heroes when this is all over, once the political crossfire dies out. I have given some thought to what happens if you go down and survive, or wind up being captured. Any man wants them, I can get you a poison pill. One for every member of your crew. I'd advise you take them too. Gooks aren't known for their hospitality. Once you've dropped a few atom bombs on them, they could get downright nasty."

There was silence around the Ready Room. Major Scopes spoke up.

"General, we've discussed this among ourselves quite a bit, in spite of orders. All of us are proud and chomping at the bit to go fly the mission and dust up the Red bastards but good. You given any thought to courses and headings yet, sir?"

LaSalle nodded. "Night and day, son." He turned back to the tactical maps, tapped them with the pointer. "I'm aiming for an early evening launch, say about 1900 hours. Dark is better. We don't want any interference from Kadena and the 307th is running ops every day as it is. We head out of here, low, below two thousand feet."

"Why so low, General?"

"Two reasons: to avoid getting mixed up with any squadrons forming up out of Kadena. And to stay below radar coverage--" LaSalle zeroed in on two spots with his pointer. "Remember, there's radar at Kadena and also a big site at Itazuke, up here in Japan. Primary tracking there. We stay below two thousand and we'll be lost in the clutter from all the other aircraft FEAF's got up. I'm counting on that...since we're not exactly filing a mission plan with Atsugi." That brought a few more chuckles.

"We head northwest out of Mishida, roughly on a heading of 330 degrees, a nice cozy little group of five '29s." The General rummaged around in a nearby desk and found a handful of push pins. He stuck one right in the middle of the Yellow Sea. "I'll work up the exact coordinates but this is Flagpole Point. Flagpole is going to be our call sign, by the way. Here, we part company and go our separate ways. Each aircraft turns to its assigned heading and begins the climb to drop altitude. I want all weapons armed and verified by the time we reach Flagpole Point."

"Looks like a point of no return," Carson observed.

"Exactly. Past Flagpole, we're committed." LaSalle let that sink in. "Now, for the next two days, we've got a lot of work to do. The aircraft are coming along--the crew chiefs have told me each bird'll be shipshape and flyable by this evening. Tomorrow morning, we're doing practice takeoffs to get a feel for the runway and the winds, the visuals, everything. Each crew muster here at the ready room at 0600 hours sharp. The birds will be gassed up overnight and armed for practice."

"With what, sir? Are the bombs here?"

"Not yet. Overnight, I'm having the crews load dummy casings full of sand and gravel and lead shot in your bomb bays. They're taking each plane to the 'pit', running through the whole loading procedure, just like it was D-Day. When you takeoff tomorrow morning, you'll have a load pretty close to a real Mark VI. I want you to feel what it's like to stagger into the air with nine-thousand pounds strapped to your belly, how the plane handles with all that weight. We'll have the lead shot canisters in the back of each plane too, to trim them for flight. Just like for real. In two days, God and Douglas MacArthur willing, it will be."

Jacobs nudged Carson in the ribs. "Ol' Kit here can't wait for the shootout at the OK Corral. He's polishing up his six-shooter already. Say, General," Jacobs added, "what about mission assignments? And who's Flagpole Leader?"

"I am." LaSalle turned serious. "Mission assignments will come Sunday morning. There are four pilots here, beside myself. Peking's mine. I'll divvy up the others at the briefing."

Randy Sherman was a blond, crew-cutted linebacker of a pilot. "What's the explosive yield of the bombs, General?"

LaSalle shook his head. "Worth about six and a half Hiroshimas. Nominal yield is eighty kilotons--that's eighty thousand tons TNT explosive equivalent. We've got a physicist from Los Alamos due here tomorrow afternoon. He's here to give the babies their final checkup. By late tomorrow night, I anticipate getting final approval from SCAP. Then it's all in our hot little hands."

Carson saw a film projector had been set up in the back of the cramped room. "You got cartoons for us, General?"

LaSalle had already directed Tech Sergeant Cook, one of the crew chiefs, to thread some 8-millimeter film into the projector.

"Better than that. Newsreel footage from Tokyo, courtesy of Movietone and Armed Forces Radio."

Sergeant Cook signaled the projector was ready and LaSalle had him douse the lights. The projector clattered into action.

There was a few minutes of grainy and jerky footage, showing preparations for the Greenhouse Dog shot, the support ships, observation planes taking off from Guam.

"Hey, there's Woody's jalopy," called out Tony Scopes. A WB-29 silhouetted by dawn sunlight plowed into the sky from Andersen Field. "I heard he was pulling Task Force duty. Look at old Eight-Ball, all spruced up, new paint job too. Weather reconnaissance, for Chrissakes."

"This is the Dog shot a few weeks ago at Eniwetok," LaSalle narrated. "Gallant Flag aircraft are carrying carbon copies of the same device."

The film dissolved to a brilliant, flickering sunrise, then at the moment of H-Hour, Dog went off and an unearthly light flooded the screen. Silence cloaked the ready room as the shock waves rolled over miles and miles of ocean, the mushroom cloud building like a throbbing fist slammed into the air.

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph," someone muttered.

From the back of the room, Don Jacobs, pilot of Hellzapoppin', swallowed hard. His throat had suddenly gone dry. "Man o' man, look at that baby go."

Carson nodded in the darkness. "Just like Hiroshima."

Jacobs said, "I just hope to God it ends the war, like Hiroshima."

Friday, 1-26-51

Yokota Air Base, Japan

9:15 a.m.

Yokota Air Base was fogged in Friday morning, curtailing morning operations from the squadrons of the 35th Fighter-Intercept Group but the poor flying weather was of little concern to Hoyt Vandenberg. General Vandenberg had been nominated by Harry Truman to be Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force on April 30, 1948--the same day Arthur Godfrey had tried out a new ukulele on the radio, he somehow always remembered--and as such, it fell to the service's top uniformed officer to make occasional briefings to the troops on the President's policy and the strategy the Nation would be taking to kick the bejeezus out of the Reds in Korea.

General Vandenberg arrived at the Flight Ops building in a caravan of Jeeps and Fords, snapped off a barrage of salutes and made his way inside. Standing before a giant mural of MacArthur's first steps on Japanese soil in September 1945, Vandenberg primped in the reflection from the glass and considered that the briefing he was about to give was surely the strangest briefing any crew of airmen had ever received. Vandenberg was meticulous about his appearance. He was a tall and lean 165-pounder, with dark hair and fine features. His face was only faintly lined with the weight of command responsibility. Indeed, the General was noted for appearing much younger than he really was, a fact that had caused some background jealousy in his rapid rise through the ranks of such an infant service.

Vandenberg had come to the home of the 35th, normally alive and smoking with the thunder of her F-80 and F-84 jets taking off at all hours, to brief a select group of pilots on a mission of critical importance to the future balance of power in the Far East.

Their mission would be to intercept and, if necessary, shoot down a flight of rogue Air Force B-29s over the East China Sea.

The crew of the select unit, known officially as the 44th Fighter Intercept Squadron - Provisional, and rather informally as Cunningham's Posse, after their squadron leader, assembled in the ready room and stood at attention as Vandenberg was ushered in and introduced.

Vandenberg stood stiffly at the lectern and glared out at the crewmen. He saw what he expected to see: anticipation mixed with a generous portion of curiosity, with perhaps a leavening of uneasy shifting and coughing thrown in.

Good, he figured. No one should ever take any comfort from such an onerous duty.

"Gentlemen, I'll give it to you straight," the Chief of Staff announced. It was the same forthright manner that had brought him two Distinguished Service Medals and a Silver Star, as well as the undying loyalty of thousands of Army airmen with whose lives he had gambled countless times over the skies of Europe and the Pacific. Most of the time, he had gambled well.

He hoped today would be one of those times.

"Right now, even as I speak, there's a group of traitors somewhere here in the Far East. They're Americans and that makes this hard for me. But the truth is, this group of rogue pilots and crewmen have somehow diverted five atomic bombs from Operation Greenhouse. They're planning a mission and this mission is completely unauthorized. The mission is to conduct an atomic bomb strike against targets in China, Korea and Russia."

After the murmuring and feet-shuffling had died down, Vandenberg thumbed a line of sweat off his lips and went on.

"Let me repeat that this mission, while nominally approved by authorities here in Japan--" Omar Bradley had made him promise not to name MacArthur by name, not until there was better proof--"this mission has not, repeat not, been approved by the President or proper authority. This mission is in violation of national policy and must be stopped at once. In fact, the President has authorized a mission, of which this briefing is a part, to intercept these traitors, should they be able to somehow launch their stolen aircraft and threaten to drop their bombs.

"As I speak, there is a coordinated effort by the Air Force with the Army, the FBI and other agencies to shutdown this illegal operation and apprehend the traitors. Make no mistake about it: this mission will be stopped...either on the ground or in the air. If the traitors can't be located and stopped on the ground, your job will be to intercept the bombers and turn them around. If they refuse to turn, you are authorized to shoot down any aircraft that do not obey your lawful orders. Is that clear?"

There was an undercurrent of mumbling. Vandenberg knew that to order Americans to shoot down Americans when MiGs and ack-ack were doing a damn fine job of it themselves would be hard to swallow.

The squadron leader, Major Darcy Cunningham, stood up abruptly and loudly commanded the ready room to come to order and cut the backtalk. "The General has not dismissed this briefing yet!" Then, Cunningham posed questions that were on every pilot's mind: what kind of aircraft were involved? Where was the launch point? What were their headings and altitudes and launch times?

Vandenberg motioned for a staff captain to erect maps and charts on a pair of easels beside the podium. He answered every question as honestly as he knew how.

"I can tell you what intelligence we have at the moment. The number one unknown is the actual launch point and time. We suspect Okinawa or some airfield in that area, though Formosa can't be ruled out. The time is soon, by all indications. Targets are thought to be Red bases and supply points in Manchuria, possibly North Korea, maybe even Russia. I can't emphasize strongly enough how serious are the ramifications if even one of the atom bombs reaches its targets. That's why the Air Force has been tasked with intercepting any bombers that get airborne. The 44th Provisional will have that duty. As of 1200 hours today, and until further notice, aircraft assigned to the 44th under Major Cunningham here will stand 24-hour alert duty, with aircraft on ten-minute scramble. Your aircraft will be kept armed, fueled, and powered up. Pilots and crewmen will be required to be able to launch four flights--sixteen aircraft on ten minutes' notice."

"General Vandenberg," Cunningham asked, "how many aircraft am I going to have?"

Vandenberg consulted some notes on inventory. "As many as you need. Four squadrons will be made immediately available. I know that puts a dent in how much support you can give FEAF over Korea. I'm looking at other sources for ground support missions. The boys in the trenches need all the help they can get. But this mission has the highest national urgency. The President, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs all concur: these traitors have to be stopped."

Vandenberg discarded the lectern and came down the podium steps to stand directly in front of Cunningham and the other pilots. "I know you boys may be unwilling to shoot down your own comrades in the air. I am too. But if those B-29s aren't stopped, either on the ground or in the air, we just well may be facing the beginnings of World War III."

Vandenberg answered a few more questions, then turned the briefing over to Cunningham and left the ready room. After the General had departed, Cunningham called the pilots to the easels and launched a discussion on tactics.

"We need altitudes and headings," said Major Rick Summers, an F-84 driver from the 40th, recent recipient of his first DFC. "If those buggers launch from Okinawa, say Kadena or that area, look where we'll have to go to cut 'em off. They could be over the mainland in several hours." Summers ran a finger along his proposed intercept course on the map. "We'll have to vector almost due west, try to catch 'em over the East China Sea. My '84 does about 500 knots with a tailwind. I'm not sure we can even bag a big old B-29 given the distances."

Cunningham could see the problem. "It'll be close."

Captain Lou Ballantine, another Thunderjet ace, piped up, "Depends on how much warning we get. A Superfort with an atom bomb has a pretty heavy load. They won't exactly be burning up the sky the first few hours. I say we ask the General if we can put a few planes down at Kadena. Or at least at Miyazaki, down here at the south end of Kyushu. Then we've got a fighting chance."

"Hey, I've got an idea," Summers said. He tapped Okinawa and Guam with his fingers. "'29s run missions up North from Kadena and Andersen all the time. Why can't we run some practice intercepts against these boys? We could work on our scramble times, ground vectoring, best altitudes and speeds, squadron tactics, that sort of thing. It'd be great training."

Cunningham thought the idea had merit. "I'll put it to General O'Donnell right away. Legit bombing missions are being flown everyday by the 307th and the 19th. The sooner we get in the air, the better."

Summers and Ballantine could scarcely conceal their excitement. Nobody wanted to shoot down a comrade in arms. But the men of the 44th Provisional were sick and tired of doing ground support in the skies over Korea, hunting an ever-elusive Red foe. Even MiG hunting in the Alley north of Sukchon was off-limits. That had been reserved for other fighter groups from Yokota, the lucky bastards.

Vandenberg had brought a breath of fresh air to the ready room of the 44th. Now they had a chance to get in some real air-to-air action.

Friday, 1-26-51

Peking, Peoples Republic of China

11:15 a.m.

It was cold but clear at the People's An Shan Air Base when Mao Tse-tung and Zhu De arrived in a caravan of dusty Fords and Chevys. The Great Helmsman and the Commander in Chief of the Peoples Liberation Army had come to the home of the Revolutionary An Shan Aerial Brigade Number One to inspect preparations for defending the glorious jong-gou against aerial attack by the imperialist traitors. As the officers and staff of the Central Military Commission alighted on the icy ramp of the base, Mao turned to his old comrade-in-arms with a broad smile. He gestured toward a long row of silvery MiG-15s, lined up wingtip to wingtip, their red stars gleaming in late morning sunshine.

"Comrade Zhu, it's an impressive sight here. Look at our pilots--" he tossed off a half-salute at the assembled airmen, lined up in ordered ranks in front of their aircraft. "--courageous, resolute, eager to leap in the skies and defend the Revolution. That's the spirit that beat Chiang and the Kuomintang bandits. With this kind of zeal, the imperialists don't have a chance. Not a single bomb will fall on China."

Marshal Zhu De was used to such exuberant nonsense from the Defender of the Revolutionary Masses. He had marched with Mao back in '37, all the way to the caves of Shensi and back. The two of them had stitched a tattered and beaten Red Army back together, made it a credible fighting force, and struck out against the Japanese invader and Chiang's warlords, sweeping China clean of the scourge after years of bloody civil war. Mao was a charismatic, even mystical leader of the masses, when it came to politics. In matters military, he didn't have the common sense of a mule's ass.

"Our new aircraft," Zhu announced, as the leaders walked down the flight line, admiring the readiness of the air brigade. "Just arrived by train from Harbin, from the Soviet Union. They are called MiGs and they're giving the capitalists fits over Korea."

Mao broke from the ranks of the inspection and walked up to the stepladder of the nearest MiG. The pilot and crew chief stood at attention, saluting crisply. Mao patted the side of the MiG's fuselage, rubbing the metal as if it were a big cow, murmuring soothing nonsense. General Xie Feng, Zhu's Chief of Staff, filled in details.

"Comrade Chairman, this beast is a fabulous weapon. It has a range of nearly nine hundred miles, and an operational ceiling of over 50,000 feet. It can fly as fast as 668 miles an hour, nearly as fast as sound itself."

Mao was impressed, running his hand over the rivets of the wing. "And the cannon here?"

Xie was a man for detailed memory. "The left cannon is 23-millimeter. The one on the right is 37-millimeter. This new revolver design holds more rounds."

"Excellent. And our pilots are giving the enemy hell in the skies?"

Xie and Zhu looked awkwardly at each other. "Actually," Zhu said, "most of our combat pilots aren't Chinese. These men are in training."

Mao whirled around, his face cocked at an inquisitive angle. "You mean these men can't fly the MiGs into battle?"

Zhu shrugged. "In time, they will. Now, most missions over Manchuria and Korea--what the Americans have started calling 'MiG Alley'--have been flown by Soviet pilots. Only a few sorties have been flown by Chinese pilots. But that is changing quickly. Soon, we'll fill the skies with our planes like migrating geese."

Mao found this both disturbing and a bit embarrassing. "A shame. Still, I'm sure these men will do their duty for the Revolution." He leaned closer to Zhu as they continued the inspection. "Having Russians in our planes isn't all bad, anyway. Stalin, at least, has committed his own flesh and blood to the war. That has to be good."

The inspection lasted another half an hour, then the officers retired to a red brick and slate roof building off the flight line, where they were served cabbage soup and green tea. After a brief tour of the Operations Building and its Flight Control Room full of radio gear and flickering radar scopes, Marshal Zhu ordered the Brigade Commander, Xiao Wen Fung, to conduct a briefing on air defenses in Military Region 1, the capital district around Peking and its northern and eastern approaches.

Mao and Zhu seated themselves in comfortable chairs before a tackboard filled with maps. Many of the maps were yellowed and creased and filled with Japanese kanji script. In the middle of a ferocious struggle with the imperialist West, the Peoples Liberation Army did what China had always done: adapt and make do.

Mao and Zhu both knew, from Jiang's intelligence and from intelligence shared by the Russians, that MacArthur and the Americans were targeting atomic bombs for Peking and several other locations. Shenyang and the Port Arthur docks complex were probable targets. Mao wanted to know about the PLA's air defenses: where were they based? How were they equipped and how did they train? Could they stop a flight of B-29s in-bound with atomic bombs?

Brigade Commander Xiao was a short, wiry, nervous mind, with an irritating tic at the corners of his mouth, a leftover scar from childhood palsy. He stood before the assembled officers like a courageous mouse in a roomful of cats.

"Think of a stone tossed into a pond, Comrade Chairman. The stone makes waves in the water. The ripples spread outward, becoming fainter as they do. Our air defenses in this sector are organized in much the same way."

Zhu frowned sourly up at the Brigade Commander. "Fine poetry, Xiao. Now give us the details."

"At once, Comrade Marshal." Xiao fumbled with another map, quickly tacking it up. "As I said, we have rings of defenses, starting with our 85-millimeter and 57-millimeter anti-aircraft guns around the capital. No doubt, you've seen these being sited. As well, the sector is home to some six air bases, just like An Shan. These form the second ring, just outside the inner defenses of our guns. Each base, stretching from Taiyuan here in the south, to Jinzhou up by the Manchurian frontier, is responsible for a slice of the sector. I've circled the zones of operation in red on this map. Each base is equipped as An Shan is, with a full brigade of the latest MiG-15 jet fighters, as well as older aircraft such as the Shturmoviks. That's over three hundred aircraft from each base. We can put two thirds of them into the air in less than an hour, a wall of steel surrounding critical points in the capital sector. And--" Xiao rapped a wooden pointer at Peking on the map, "--in the skies over our glorious capital, we dedicate one regiment from each base and two from An Shan. That's over a hundred MiGs, just to protect the vanguard of our leadership and the heart of the Revolution from capitalist attack."

Mao nodded solemnly. Zhu adjusted his glasses, preferring to filter the zealous rhetoric for what precious few hard facts Xiao had to offer.

"And what of our Soviet colleagues?" the Infallible Teacher of the Timeless Doctrines asked. He pulled out a pack of Red Lantern cigarettes and lit up one, puffing hard. "We have cooperative arrangements, so Stalin assured me in Vladivostok."

Xiao admitted as much. "The Russians take some responsibility for regional air defense, since their MiG pilots are already in combat over Korea. Especially, the Russians patrol the Manchurian borders, and the skies along the coastline all the way back to Khabarovsk and the Amur River valley."

"Any coordination problems? Any conflicts?"

Xiao paused. "No major problems. We coordinate sector defense with Marshal Vasiliev in Vladivostok. The Russians are, however, somewhat secretive when it comes to sharing air defense tactics. They don't tell our pilots much when they return from combat with the Americans."

Zhu snorted. "We can't expect a bear to dance like a ballerina, can we?"

"What would you do, right now," Mao asked, "if a flight of American B-29s suddenly appeared on our coastal radar?"

Xiao had given the scenario a great deal of thought. He and his brigade staff had spent hours imagining ways to respond, and more importantly, ways to satisfy the Central Military Commission that they knew how to respond. That they could indeed fulfill their revolutionary duties.

The Brigade Commander described that scenario now, ticking off which air bases would scramble in what order, squadron by squadron. "Each base has a ground control center, similar to the one you just saw. These centers have access to radar. They would interpret their radar images and steer the MiGs toward their targets by giving the pilots voice commands over their radios--which way to turn, how far, how fast, what altitudes. It's all been worked out ahead of time. We're confident we can intercept the intruders. Each time we practice this mission, our glorious pilots visually acquire their targets and make the kills. There have been no failures, in any of our training.

"You may be certain that the Revolutionary An Shan Air Defense Brigade Number One will inevitably blast the capitalist bombers from the sky."

Mao Tse-tung was thoughtful, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips, but not particularly impressed. "Comrade Brigade Commander, a question of tactics."

"Certainly, Comrade Chairman--"

"Would it not be better if the American bombers could be intercepted and shot down over the ocean, so the atom bombs wouldn't fall on Chinese territory?"

Xiao pursed his lips in chagrin, embarrassed at having not thought of that point. "Of course, you are right. I will revise our procedures at once." He waved at a staff aide, who hurriedly jotted down the idea.

Mao was not angry at the oversight. "Not to worry comrades. We have agents in Japan and Korea right now. They're making every effort to stop this criminal plot on the ground, before the bombers even takeoff. In fact, even as I speak, we're forming a special forces unit to assault the base where the bombers are thought to be located. It's near Okinawa, I'm told. We have every reason to believe this assault will be successful."

And just in case, Mao confided to Zhu De after the briefing was over and the motorcade was heading back to Peking, we will designate shelters for evacuating key people in the Party and the Army outside the city. The Valley of the Ming tombs will be perfect for such shelter. What could be more appropriate: protecting our top people in caves full of terracotta statues, caves that have survived five hundred years of war?

Just in case any of the American bombers get through our defenses.

Friday, 1-26-51

Tempelhof Airport, Berlin

7: 00 a.m.

Major General Brent Scoggins was worried. He stared gloomily out the window of the C-54 as it cleared low-hanging clouds out of Berlin's Tempelhof Airport. A few breaks remained as the wintry fog moved in; he caught a quick flash of the River Havel, now ice-choked, as the aircraft climbed out, nosing its way toward Airway Victor Charlie, one of seven corridors through East German airspace allotted to the Western Allies.

Scoggins was First Infantry Division's G-2 and he was worried about the intelligence briefing he had just come from. Not by what had been said. He was more worried by what hadn't been said. Intel officers were supposed to deal with facts. In this case, the facts warranted only a normal level of alert caution. But there had been a subtle undercurrent to the briefing...he had seen it in the faces of the Seventh Army G-2 lieutenants and captains, who had been called in for a quick get-together on worrisome movements by the Red Army along the inter-German frontier.

Scoggins was on his way back to EUCOM, European Command Headquarters at Heidelberg, with the consensus of Seventh Army's Berlin Garrison G-2 on what the unusual maneuvers meant. He stared out the loadmaster's window at the snow-covered fields of the Wiesen Wald west of Berlin. There was the Pfauen Insel Wannsee, a huge now-frozen lake pointing north like a crooked finger, pointing toward the stone parapets of Spandau Prison, with its lone prisoner Rudolf Hess. We're all like prisoners here, Scoggins thought. Prisoners of geography and politics.

The truth was that Ivan was rattling all the usual sabers, but that wasn't enough to ring any bells at SACEUR in Paris. At least not yet. Scoggins had heard suggestions and hints of other subtle, yet troublesome indicators: things like increased radio traffic on the usual tactical channels, increased convoy traffic on some of the highways in and out of the Berlin area, stricter border inspections at the highway junctions leading to the Allied sectors. Individually, none of the indicators might mean anything. Collectively, they were suggestive.

Was it a field army-level exercise? Scoggins wondered. A re-deployment? Or something more ominous? Stalin had done much the same kind of shuffling of Red Army tank and motorized rifle units in the weeks leading up to the Berlin crisis in '48. It wasn't beyond possibility that the Red tyrant would try to starve the Allies out of the German capital again.

"General, come look at this." Major Jack Larraby, the loadmaster for Flight Able Tango Ten, motioned for Scoggins to come to the window again. The blond Air Transport Service officer pointed through an opening in the snow clouds. "Awful long column of trucks down there."

Scoggins peered out. "Magdeburg Highway, Major. And those aren't trucks. They're tank transporters." The clouds made a gauzy film, obscuring their view. "Looks like tarps covering the trailers. Ten to one, Ivan's got a column of T-34's on the move."

Larraby shook his head. "General, I make this run up Victor Charlie several times a week. We've seen a big increase in the sheer volume of road traffic in recent days. Plus the Reds are getting itchy in the air too. Last week, this same plane got buzzed by Yaks all the way from Erfurt to the runway at Tempelhof. Colonel Westland even lodged a formal complaint with the Allied Commission."

Scoggins nodded grimly. "Could just be an exercise," he told the Major. But Ivan doesn't normally exercise forces this far west. What the dickens were the Reds up to?

Seventh Army had already gathered a fairly complete picture, through radio intercepts and a few ground spotters inside the Russian zone, of a massive movement of tank and infantry forces toward the inter-German border. There was already solid evidence of a full armored division--the 10th Guards Tank out of Doberitz, being re-deployed. To what positions? Nobody knew. And the 14th Motor Rifle Division from Juteborg had also picked up their feet and started marching west-southwest, if sources in Rosslau and along the Elbe River bridges were to be believed.

An awful lot of firepower being massed in a small region, Scoggins told himself. It was axiomatic in intelligence work that you didn't let the facts obscure the big picture. Even the best spooks could get bogged down in the minutiae of details and facts and miss the most important strategic signs.

What did Ivan's movements mean? What was the obvious import of all the intercepts, visual sightings, traffic analysis, and aerial harassment?

Stalin had to be planning something, something big, and he was trying to hide it as long as he could.

General Brent Scoggins paid attentions to hunches, probably more than he would ever have admitted publicly. Something very like a hunch was now forming in the back of his mind. He got up from his seat and made his way forward to the cockpit of the plane. A sergeant started to bar the way, but backed off when he saw the twin stars on Scoggins' lapels.

"Yes, sir...this way, sir. Colonel Bennett's flying the aircraft today. I'll take you up there--" The sergeant hustled through some lashed-down crates and squeezed into a narrow corridor, leading up to the C-54's 'front office.'

The cockpit was jammed with controls and dials and four crewmen, bundled in leather jackets and fur collars. Bennett was slurping some coffee, about to bite into a bologna sandwich, when Scoggins appeared.

Salutations out of the way, Scoggins posed a question.

"Colonel, what would it take for you to make a slight change in your flight plan?"

"Reds don't take too kindly to sightseeing, sir. I'm required by treaty to stay within a mile of my current heading. I'm restricted to altitudes above ten thousand feet too, until we reach Leipzig. Then I get a westward vector, and climb to fifteen thousand. Hopefully, we raise Scheerhausen then. At least, they're on our side. Vector us over the border and we're in the chute for the descent into Rhein-Main."

"I'd like to make a little detour, Colonel."

"Detour to where, sir?"

"Paris. Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe. I'm got a burning need to talk with General Billingslea. Maybe Ike too. There's something going on down there and I don't like the way it's adding up."

Bennett looked pained. He swallowed the last of his bologna sandwich. "General, we get in big-time trouble if I veer off from Victor Charlie. We could even get shot down. Those Yaks don't have a sense of humor."

"Once we cross the border, Colonel, once you're in contact with Scheerhausen, ask for a new heading. Get this tub to Paris, one way or another. That's an order. We don't have a lot of time."

After some residual static, Bennett understood the General meant business. He discussed possible changes in flight plan with Scheerhausen Control, and the local air defense authorities. Once they had made the Taunus Mountains and crossed over into West Germany, Bennett received new vectors and Able Tango Ten set course for Paris.

The rest of the flight was uneventful. The C-54 set down at Orly Field just after one p.m. and Scoggins was walking into SHAPE Headquarters an hour after that. Housed in the former Hotel Astoria on the south side of the Avenue des Champs Elysees, SHAPE was the nerve center for all Allied military operations in western Europe. President Truman had appointed General Dwight Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander for Europe (SACEUR) in December, and after his approval by members of the new NATO organization, he had activated the command and move lock, stock and barrel into temporary quarters until more permanent facilities could be made available near Versailles.

Scoggins requested an immediate briefing with SHAPE's G-2, General Louis Billingslea, on the fourth floor. The duty officer ran Scoggins up to G-2's offices right away. The staff had taken over what looked like an emperor's suite of rooms overlooking the Arc de Triomph. The rooms still had red damask wall coverings and carpeting, though the basic trappings of a military intelligence operation were being carted in by workers even as Scoggins arrived. Boxes of files had been piled high along one wall, with crates serving as temporary desks until standard-issue Army gear could be rounded up.

Billingslea was an Omar Bradley look-alike: short, round and dog-faced. He saluted and grasped Scoggins' hand, pumping it with the enthusiasm of a circus barker.

"Brent, you slimeball, what brings a spook from the Big Red One to Paris these days?"

The officers retired to a small anteroom serving as Billingslea's office. A popular patisserie was in full view out the beveled glass of the windows. The office was jammed with boxes and crates.

Scoggins found a map of western Europe and unrolled it on top of the crates. "Lou, I just came from a briefing in Berlin. Seventh Army got all their spooks together for a little pow-wow on current indications--we've been picking up smoke signals from Ivan--sources behind the Iron Curtain as well as our own ears."

"I've heard rumblings here as well," Billingslea admitted. "Ivan's got some big show planned."

"It may be more than a big show." Scoggins went over the details from the Berlin briefing. He described the convoy of tank transporters he had seen from the loadmaster's window aboard Able Tango Ten, laying out the course the C-54 had flown out of Tempelhof. "Airway Victor Charlie crosses the Magdeburg Highway here--" Scoggins circled an area between Potsdam and the Elbe River. "For the Reds to move a column of tanks so brazenly, out in the open like that, in full view of passing aircraft, tells me one thing."

Billingslea nodded, lighting up a pipe. "Show of force?"

Scoggins nodded. "Without a doubt. Uncle Joe's sending a message. My guess is Korea's on his mind. We've already got signals showing major re-deployments of the 10th Guards Tank Army and the 14th Motor Rifle Division, plus intel on other troop movements. And that's just the stuff we know about."

Billingslea studied the map for a moment. "Axis of concentration?"

"Fulda Gap, from indications. Classic invasion route in the southwest, right through the mountains. Just like we always wargamed. Hell, we used it ourselves in '45. Patton sent some of his tank boys that way into Austria."

"I don't like it, Brent." Billingslea picked up the phone and made an inquiry. SACEUR was in a briefing of his own, up in Brussels. "Due back tonight?" he repeated. His forehead furrowed. "Thanks." He replaced the phone in its cradle. "This is no field exercise."

"More like a full-scale wartime mobilization. Radio traffic's up. Logistical reserves and stocks are on trains from western Russian depots, there's one hell of a big drawdown--has been the last few weeks. Big quantities too--like division scale. It's either wartime mobilization or the mother of all exercises."

The SHAPE G-2 carved out a seat for himself among the crates. Scoggins perched by the window, watching mid-day strollers along the Champs Elysees. "Just for your information, Brent, we got word this morning that Strategic Air Command is going to higher state of readiness too. RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall are already hosting two squadrons of LeMay's B-29s, atomic-ready. Looks like Ninth Air Force picked up some of the same warning signs you guys did at 1st Infantry. Russian Long-Range Aviation Army Tu-4s are mobilizing at bomber bases all over western Russia and the Ukraine, staging forward, flying extended hours, mission profiles that mimic air assaults across the border. That's probably why Ike's in Brussels, trying to get NATO onboard."

"I don't like it, Lou. If this is like poker, why is Joe Stalin's showing his hand so early in the game?"

"Russians don't know poker like we do. They play chess instead. More complicated, more moves, longer view. Try this on for size: I got a tidbit this morning from one of our channels into East Germany, a civilian source somewhere around Zossen-Wunsdorf. That's Soviet Group Headquarters. Just a small bite, mind you, but it chilled me to the bone."

"What kind of bite?"

Billingslea looked at the ashes in the bowl of his pipe, stirred them with a finger. "Visual on some awfully big cargo being trucked into an airfield near Zossen. Flatbed trailers, middle of the night, huge round containers, and security tighter than a whore's ass."

"Artillery?"

Billingslea shook his head. "The containers are the size and shape of atom bomb casings. It was dark, late at night--"

"Mother of God," Scoggins breathed. "To an airfield?"

"With Tu-4s based nearby. We're trying to get corroboration from the source now, but it'll take a few days."

"We may not have a few days."

Billingslea gestured to another crate. "Make yourself at home, General. Ike's due back at 1900 hours. I'll talk to his chief of staff, see if we can get a hearing later, maybe 2100 or 2200 hours. We better be prepared for a full blown intelligence briefing by then."

"Recommendations?"

"The works. I think with what we've got here, Ike'll be on the phone to Bradley back in D.C. by Saturday morning. Ivan's playing his hand now. Looks like we better be ready to play ours pretty damn soon."

The Generals stared at each other for a moment. Then, Billingslea called up the duty officer in the outer office and placed an order for a tray of sandwiches from the commissary and three pots of fresh coffee.

It was going to be a long night.

Saturday, 1-27-51

Washington, D.C.

6:45 a.m.

General Omar Bradley walked up the icy steps to Blair House in a driving sleetstorm. The President's Secret Service agent, Floyd Boring, was inside the vestibule. Bradley stamped his feet to shake off the sleet, removed his overcoat and field cap.

"He's upstairs this morning, sir," said the agent. "The back room."

Bradley clutched a leather satchel under his arms and found the stairs.

Blair House had a small corner bedroom on the second floor. It was called the Back Room, informally, since it looked out on a snowy courtyard behind the townhouse. Bradley went in unannounced. Truman was at the window, holding a sash curtain aside, staring at the snowfall. A steam radiator clanked away in one corner. The room was dominated by a scuffed mahogany table and a few chairs. A coffee pot perked away on a nearby cart.

The SecDef, General George Marshall, was already present.

"Mr. President, I came as soon as I could." Bradley lay his satchel on the table, opened it and withdrew the latest cables from SHAPE Headquarters in Paris. "These came over night from Ike."

Truman turned back to flip through papers. He was grim, tight-lipped, his spectacles reflecting light from an overhead chandelier. "Well, General, the news from Korea isn't much better. Ridgeway's got this Operation Killer going. Killing lots of Reds, and gaining a few yards."

"The Chinese have dug in north of the 38th Parallel," Marshall advised. "Eighth Army's facing something like a quarter million men in those hills. It's like trying to push a horsecart uphill. We're losing several hundred men a day, for a few pitiful yards."

Truman picked up one cable and studied it in more detail. "Ike's worried. What the hell's going on over there in Europe?"

Bradley pulled out a map and explained the intelligence Seventh Army and SHAPE G-2 was seeing, moves the Russians were making all along the inter-German frontier.

"The most worrisome thing, Mr. President, is this report--" Bradley handed one page over. "It's from a source inside East Germany."

Truman scanned it, his frown deepening. Age lines around his eyes had grown in the last few months. And his hair was white in patches. "Atomic bombs." He put the page down with exaggerated care, as if it were a thing contaminated. "How believable is this source?"

"Hard to say, Mr. President." Bradley stood with arms folded behind his back. No one wanted to sit at the table. "Ike must put some stock in it, to forward the report to us."

Truman turned back to the snowy courtyard. "Gentlemen, we have all seen far too much war in recent years. I'll be damned if World War III starts on my watch, if I can possibly do anything about it. What are we doing to counter in Europe?"

Bradley and Marshall spent the next ten minutes describing the counter-mobilization Eisenhower had won from the NATO countries over night.

Bradley ticked off the steps. "We're moving elements of the Seventh Army forward from Heidelberg and Stuttgart. Closer to the border, especially the Fulda Gap area. Third Infantry is reinforcing them. We've already got prepared positions all throughout the mountains, thanks to the Germans, that we can occupy."

Marshall added, "Plus 1st Armored has detached five platoons of tanks to take up positions in a defensive ring we call 'Dodge City,' just east of a line from Ansbach to Wurzburg. That's about sixty Pershing tanks in all."

Truman's reflection was visible in the window glass. "We're outnumbered along the border, aren't we?"

"Technically, yes, Mr. President," Bradley admitted. "The Soviets have a three to one superiority in tanks. But our Pershings would acquit themselves well in any shootout with the T-34s."

"What about aircraft?"

Marshall read from dispatches he had collected at the command center that morning. "Ninth Air Force has already staged several squadrons of B-29s, all atomic-capable, forward, to RAF bases in England. Plus, we're moving tactical squadrons of F-84s and other units forward in Germany, bringing wings at Bitburg and Rhein-Main up to combat strength. We've got ammo trains on the move as well, bringing war stocks to all forward forces. Enough for two weeks of sustained combat."

"War stocks." Truman repeated the phrase. "Doesn't sound very promising. Did you know that's how the Great War started in 1914? Mobilization plans. Troops and supplies started rolling on the railroads and so much momentum built up, nobody could stop it." He shook his head, jammed his hands in his jacket pocket. In the window reflection, he seemed sad, lost. "I just hope to hell we're not taking guns and bombs away from our boys in Korea."

"We're not, sir," Marshall told him. And least, not yet. The country wasn't prepared for another two-front war. The demobilization of the last five years had gutted the armed forces badly. Korea had proven that.

Truman turned back to the table. He took a deep breath, seemed on the verge of deciding something, then thought better of it, his face a battlefield of conflicting emotions. Finally, he sat down, steepling his fingers on the table.

"I think Joe Stalin's bluffing us," he announced. "He's playing a bigger hand than he's got. Hell, I'm old poker player from way back. The bastard's playing like he's got a royal flush. Truth is, he's barely got a straight. We've got some cards of our own." Truman looked up, expecting the generals to help convince him. Neither officer said a thing. "The only question is: which cards are wild? I'm thinking Stalin's using this damned plot and our so-called 'cooperative investigation' to improve his strategic position in central Europe."

Marshall conceded the point. "As a professional soldier, Mr. President, I have to be prepared for the worst. You may well be right."

"But you're not going to stake your reputation on a hunch, is that it?"

Marshall winced, smiling faintly. "As you said, sir, you're a poker player from way back. I'm not so good at the game."

Truman smiled back. He waved his generals to sit. "George, what would you do, if you were Joe Stalin in this situation?"

Marshall sat back, folding his arms, thinking. "First priority to me would be getting the Allies out of Berlin. Having American and British garrisons there is like a finger constantly poking me in the belly."

Bradley warmed to the scenario. "Then, I'd be making plans to unify Germany again, by force if needed. But under a heavy thumb. I'm talking about a communist Germany, partially castrated so they couldn't make trouble again."

"But any attack across the German frontier is sure to trigger war with NATO," Truman said. "I'm not so sure Stalin's willing to take that risk just yet. I've just got a gut feel about this. It's a power play, a show of force."

"That may be so, Mr. President," Marshall said, "but prudence dictates we counter their moves. If Ivan moves ten divisions to the border, we have to do likewise. Otherwise, he can blitz his way to the Rhine faster than we can blink an eye. Don't give the Russian bear any sniff of the picnic...that's my thinking."

"You're right, of course," Truman admitted. His face darkened into a scowl. "Damn it, if we don't stop this Gallant Flag plot now, and atom bombs start falling on China or Russia, Stalin won't need a sniff of any picnic. He'll have all the excuse he needs to start the tanks rolling. Then we'll really have a fight on our hands."

Truman fretted over Marshall's map of NATO deployments for a few more minutes, then decided to call up J. Edgar Hoover. He snatched the phone up when the Director was on the line and ordered him to Blair House immediately.

Hoover was in the upstairs conference room with his own satchel of papers in less than half an hour. His face was red from the freezing temperatures. He was wheezing slightly from the exertion.

Truman was abrupt and to the point with the Director. "I want this damned plot shut down by Monday." He looked from Marshall to Hoover and back. "That goes for both of you. The bombs are to be located, the principals on MacArthur's staff arrested and removed from command positions. All collaborators at Los Alamos and the Pacific test site, like this Ranier fellow, are also to be arrested and returned to the U.S. for justice."

Hoover tried to dissuade Truman. "Mr. President, two more days could make a big difference in the case we're making. We've this close--" he held his fingers close together--"to making arrests now, with bulletproof evidence."

"He's right, Mr. President," said Marshall. "The Army's made some breakthroughs in the case the last day or so. Major Kitchens' report last night said the bombs weren't where he thought at all. All the evidence points to an airbase on Okinawa--an outlying airfield not used for years--as the center of the plot. That's where the bombers are thought to be launching from. Vandenberg's already got the Air Force OSI troops tracking down every B-29 in theater, putting a 'lock' on them, so the plotters can't fly any out."

Truman listened to all the arguments, an impatient scowl on his face. He took of his glasses and wiped them down. "Wherever that base is, cordon it off. Hell, send troops to occupy the damn thing, if you have to. Just so you don't interfere with Korean operations. George, I also want the Navy helping out here. Pull out all the stops. Find that Jap freighter now and get those bombs back." Truman glared angrily around the table. His glasses had already fogged up again.

"Gentlemen, we cannot afford to give Stalin or Mao any excuse for action in Europe or Asia. Some place like Germany or Taiwan is just like a bomb itself, ready to go off at the slightest provocation. Stop Gallant Flag now! Shut the bastard traitors down!"

Marshall, Bradley and Hoover exchanged furtive glances. They had little choice but to obey. The Commander in Chief had issued direct orders. Truman dismissed them and retired to a small office down the hall, to start working the phones with key congressmen. He was trying to get more money from the Hill for aid to Europe. The Marshall Plan was working. But the Continent was staggering under debt and poverty and famine. Communist insurrections in Greece and Italy weren't helping.

Outside Blair House, the three men met on the icy sidewalk below the canopied porch. Traffic was just beginning to build along Pennsylvania Avenue, even as the sleet came down harder. Driving was hazardous; cars probed for traction through gloomy early-morning streetlights. The wind had picked up too. The generals had to hold their field caps on.

"I'll cut the necessary orders for CID," the SecDef told Bradley. "You'll need a full detail of MPs."

Bradley nodded glumly. "Arresting a flag-rank officer in the middle of war is something I never thought I'd live to see. A black day for the Army. Very black."

"Two flag-rank officers," Marshall reminded him. "General Craft and General LaSalle. I just hope we can find them both, before it's too late."

"What about the Navy, George?"

Marshall was already composing the orders in his head. They walked with Hoover toward a pair of staff cars idling at the curb, smoke pouring from their exhaust pipes. Sergeants in winter uniforms stood at attention by the open doors, sleet building small piles on their shoulderboards. Hoover accompanied the generals.

Marshall stopped at the car door. "I'll cut orders for the Navy, get them to Admiral Sherman by 0900 hours. The Navy's got to detain Albert Ranier in the Marshall Islands. And start a determined search for that Jap freighter. We've got to find and secure those bombs. The plot collapses if we can get the bombs."

Not to be outdone, Hoover said, "The Bureau's been working with Atomic Energy Security Service for several months now. We've got tails on most of the co-conspirators at Los Alamos and Hanford. My agents can round them up inside of a day."

Marshall and Bradley said goodbye to Hoover and climbed into the olive-drab Army Ford. The driver pulled away from the curb and circled the White House, heading for the Mall, then down Constitution toward the 14th Street Bridge. Traffic was light. It was Saturday morning in the Nation's Capital and a winter storm was rolling up the eastern seaboard.

Marshall and Bradley warmed their hands in the stifling heat of the car's backseat.

"George, you know as well as I do MacArthur's not going to take this decimating of his SCAP staff lightly."

Marshall grunted. "It really doesn't matter now, does it? The plot's got to stop. It's gone too far as it is."

Bradley stared straight ahead, wondering how in hell the sergeant driver could even see the road for the snow and sleet. The Ford bumped across the bridge, skidding slightly on an icy patch. One mistake, and we get dumped into the Potomac, he told himself. A fitting end to an illustrious military career.

"He may just appeal this to the UN. Try to go over the President's head. It wouldn't be the first time."

That made George Marshall visibly angry. He clenched his teeth. "Bullshit, Omar. Doug's a soldier, just like you and me. He'll follow orders. Just like any soldier." And God help him if he doesn't, Marshall thought silently. The SecDef knew, deep down inside, that Bradley was probably was right. Maybe if the thought hadn't been voiced....

There was just a chance that Douglas MacArthur, as theater commander in charge of a multi-national force, might throw the MPs and the CID investigators out, refusing to recognize their authority. He had played football with the President's directives before.

What do we do then? Marshall wondered.
CHAPTER 25

Saturday, January 27, 1951

Tokyo

8:50 p.m.

For the first time in nearly five years of endless staff briefings in the Dai Ichi's sixth floor war room, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur felt unaccountably confined, even imprisoned, by the walls of the room. He had been meeting for the past half hour with General Paul Craft, reviewing plans and progress on the Gallant Flag mission, a mission that would turn the war right around and send the Red hordes packing back to their huts and hovels in China.

SCAP had learned that the Mark VI atom bombs 'procured' for the mission were scheduled to be unloaded tonight from a Japanese freighter at a port near the Mishida Island airfield. LaSalle was at Mishida now, with planes from the 307th and other bomb groups, as well as ground and flight crews, going over details.

A decision was in order and SCAP felt the weight of forty years of illustrious service to the United States Army tingling in his bones. Decisions were the razor edge of life, the line of demarcation. Decisions separated great men from mortals. Great decisions changed history.

Douglas MacArthur knew without a doubt that it was History itself that coursed through his veins. All he had to do now was make the final decision on targets, so that final flight planning could go forward.

Craft stood at a wall-length map of the Far East, colored pins marking major units and planned operations. There were no pins in the map for Gallant Flag. Yet, if this mission were successful, all the pins on the map would suddenly become meaningless. The map itself would change.

Douglas MacArthur lived and breathed for moments like this. A pity no crowd of jostling reporters and cameramen were in the war room, to record the moment for history. He studied a map that Craft had laid out on the table.

"Our targets must be well chosen, General Craft. Two days ago, Ridgeway began a new assault along the west coast of Korea. Operation Thunderbolt, it's called. Elements of the 5th, 7th and 8th Cavalry, plus the Turkish Brigade, the South Koreans and the Brits...all of them pushing north against strong Red resistance. Willoughby says at least five field armies and a North Korean army along the coast road. Suwon's already been re-taken, last night." MacArthur chewed on an unlit pipe. He ran his finger along the second day's phase line, from Anyang to the Twin Tunnels at Koksu-ri. "God willing, the United States Army will be at the gates of Seoul in a week. Now's the time to smash the Reds in the rear."

"General," Craft explained, "we were expecting targeting intelligence from a Chinese commando team on the mainland. Heilungchun, they're called. Dragon's Tail. But nothing's been heard from them."

"Brave men," MacArthur said.

"Sir, I recommend we go back to our original target list, with the addition of Peking, as Generalissimo Chiang requested."

"Show me...."

Craft drew lines on the map with a pen, depicting probable flight paths, from launch at Mishida, to the element separation over the Yellow Sea.

"Five aircraft will fly at low altitudes until they reach this point, sir. Then, the individual aircraft will peel off, and head for the targets, following these approximate headings and altitudes. These are from General LaSalle. He's at Mishida right now, getting the planes ready."

"Each plane will be carrying a single bomb?"

"That's correct, sir. A single Mark VI. LaSalle's been going over target coordinates and visual references. Here's one of the target folders...including probable damage from the bomb." Craft had worked up the details overnight, after talking with LaSalle a few days ago.

SCAP studied the spec sheets on the targets. Each one had been chosen for maximum impact on the Chicom war effort. MacArthur gravely ran his fingers across each sheet, pausing at the written estimates of casualties and collateral damage.

"Shenyang will help us the most, Paul. Shenyang is the backbone of their supply train. Port Arthur, Tsingtao, Harbin, all are valid military targets. And Peking. Ah, Peking...." He sat down beside the mahogany table and read the prelims on damage around the Chinese capital, murmuring to himself. "...fifty thousand fatalities in the first twenty four hours...maximum blast damage out to three miles from detonation point--I see your bombardiers are targeting the Forbidden City--"

"Yes, sir. Good visual references. Centrally located."

MacArthur let out a heavy sigh. "A pity. Peking is several thousand years old. Center of Han civilization from the time of the Egyptian pharaohs. Did you know the Han Chinese were writing great poetry and building beautiful monuments, before the Indians were skinning buffalo on the American plains?"

"No, sir."

MacArthur drew an imaginary circle around the Chinese capital on the map. "Fifty thousand people...such damage and destruction as that city has never seen. Even the Mongol hordes would be appalled...have you been to Hiroshima, General?"

Craft nodded. "Yes, sir. A few years ago. The city seems to be recovering, rebuilding now."

"Mmm. I made a solemn promise to Generalissimo Chiang." He folded up the map, stared straight ahead through the walls, addressing unseen audiences in the deep baritone he reserved for important moments. "And I shall keep that promise. Peking remains a target." SCAP looked up at Craft. "The situation in Korea is still grave, Paul. The Reds could still push us off the peninsula." His face darkened. "If Washington doesn't do the job for them." He closed the target folder with a thump, shoved it back.

"The target list is approved. What's your next step, son?"

Craft re-pocketed the folder. "General, we need your permission to begin final mission preparations. The bombs are being brought to the airfield now. Then they have to be checked out and loaded aboard the bombers. That takes time. General LaSalle will need your approval to begin preliminary arming, and get the planes fueled, brief the crews on the approved targets, that sort of thing."

MacArthur lit up his pipe and puffed for a few moments. He began pacing the war room, face wreathed in smoke. He paused at a tactical map of the western front in Korea, fingers tracing the succession of phase lines that Ridgeway was driving his Eighth Army boys toward even now. How many were dying in the cold, icy mountain passes south of Koksu-ri? SCAP placed the palm of his hand over Inchon itself. Inchon had been a stupendous gamble five months ago--everyone from the Joint Chiefs to his field commanders had been against it--yet Inchon had also been a breathtaking success, the left arm of a classic double pincer against the North Korean juggernaut. Inchon had been MacArthur's greatest success since the Surrender in Tokyo Bay.

To Craft, it seemed almost as if SCAP pressed his hand on the map at Inchon for strength, for the magic of bold decisions, the glory of his greatest triumph.

MacArthur spoke, as much to the map as to Craft.

"War is a terrible business, Paul. I've seen an awful lot of it in my nearly forty years service with the Army. A military commander must do all in his power to defeat the enemy, to minimize casualties on both sides and to bring the war to a just conclusion. To do any less is to waste human life needlessly." He turned around and stood before the map of Korea, a statue in the making. "Truman knows this. He made the same decision in 1945, with Hiroshima. An awful decision. But the right decision. I can do no less."

MacArthur made the fateful decision. "General Craft, nothing will be committed to paper here. I give you my verbal permission to begin final preparations."

"I understand, sir. The planes should be ready to launch by Monday morning, no later than 0200 hours, by my calculations. General LaSalle has told me that if the planes take off by then, they should each be over their targets, for visual bombing, by sunup. That's accounting for predicted weather and other delays."

"The weather is acceptable?"

Craft consulted some notes. "The coastal targets, Tsingtao and Port Arthur, have acceptable visibility conditions for visual bombing. The northern targets, Shenyang and Harbin, are facing the first stages of a weather front coming down from Siberia. Launch timing is critical there--those planes have the furthest to go. General LaSalle has requested that radar bombing be permitted as a backup."

"Approved," MacArthur said. "What about Peking?"

"Clear skies Monday morning. Unlimited visibility. Winds from the northwest are the only concern. At their worst, they could scatter fallout and radiation quite a ways downstream. The footprint could stretch into the Yellow Sea."

"Any threats to our forces?"

"No, sir," Craft lied. He and LaSalle had discussed that very possibility and discounted it as unlikely, given historic wind patterns over North China. There was a faint possibility, but LaSalle was for taking the risk anyway.

"Very well. Paul, proceed with the final preparations. I intend to withhold permission to launch the aircraft until Sunday night or Monday morning. I want to see how Ridgeway does with Thunderbolt, how the situation develops along the front in Korea. Right now, there are ferocious battles all along the western sector. Possibly, I will order one or more of the targets to be dropped from the list. I'll be giving you a go or no go order by 2400 hours Sunday night. Keep yourself available, and close by. I also want to keep open the possibility of delaying the mission by a few days, for maximum impact on Communist forces."

"General, you should know that each day we delay increases the risk that the entire operation will be compromised by Red spies and saboteurs or others who wish to stop us."

MacArthur smiled. "Paul, confronting Communism on the battlefield and defeating it here in the Far East is my destiny. No MacArthur has ever shrunk from battle. Or from his destiny."

Saturday, 1-27-51

Eniwetok, the Marshall Islands

8:30 p.m.

By the time Lyle Kitchens had found his way down to the Curtiss' 03 Level and logged in at the Marine sentry station outside the brig, he was beginning to have the same feeling he always got when a tough case was beginning to unravel. Like when he was with the 10th MPs in England, in the tense, pre-Overlord days of March 1944.

He'd been sent in from Battalion to investigate a large supply diversion scam that was at first thought to be linked to German agents in England but turned out to be a band of enterprising GIs with the 2nd Armored. Kitchens had worked the case night and day for three months--Battalion and higher commanders always breathing right down his neck the whole time, in fact right up almost to D-Day. They called it the Champagne Scam, because the perpetrators had highly refined tastes in what they skimmed from the Army's supply system. Whole platoons had been involved, diverting supplies being staged for the invasion of Europe and black-marketing the stuff in high-bidder auctions around an England swarming with American servicemen with too much money and not enough time. For Lyle Kitchens, it had been an especially satisfying bust. Some of the ringleaders had even set up shop in English country manor houses, like friggin' nobility, for Chrissakes. The platoons were raking in thousands of dollars in cash, scrip and chits every week.

Cracking the Champagne Scam had been especially satisfying for Kitchens and his co-investigators. The bust was noted as high as Eisenhower himself, who approved Distinguished Service Medals for all.

And when the Champagne Scam started to fall apart, and the rats were leaping off the ship in droves, Kitchens had felt a great rush of adrenaline, like you got after a long run in the country.

He had that same rush now as he waited in the interrogation room for Dr. Albert Ranier to be brought in.

Kitchens had just boated over to the U.S.S. Curtiss, command ship for Joint Task Force Three, and the Operation Greenhouse fleet. The trip had taken him almost the entire day. He had flown from Atsugi Field to Andersen Field, then taken a small Navy seaplane up to the anchorage at Parry Island, before finding a small cutter that would make the two hour run up to the Curtiss.

The Navy had already arrested Dr. Ranier. Kitchens had seen to that, placing frantic calls back to Washington, cabling evidence Robert Blount had left with him, even though he knew the Bureau still had pieces of the puzzle they were holding close. Kitchens didn't know what had happened in the rarified levels of the bureaucracy, only that holding Ranier as a material witness to the bomb theft and the plot was vital.

Just before leaving Atsugi, he'd gotten a wire that the captain of the Curtiss had put the Czech physicist in the ship's brig. If Masuhiro Tetsuko was to be believed, there was every reason to think that Ranier had already made arrangements to leave Eniwetok today.

Ranier was escorted in, clad in Navy dungarees and a gray tee shirt. He was grim, sullen, generally untalkative. Kitchens had never met the man before. He had a horseshoe of bushy gray and white hair on the sides of his head. Slightly stooped, he had a pianist's hands--long and delicate. Half of his right index finger was missing, the result he would later learn, of an accident at a Los Alamos machine shop in '45. He had hard blue eyes, and a suspicious squint as he sized up the Army major.

"What is the meaning of this outrage? I am not a 'crook', as you Americans call it. I'm a physicist, assigned to this project."

"Dr. Ranier, I need information. Here's how the game works: I ask the questions and you give me the answers. You give 'em to me straight, no baloney, in full. Got that?"

Ranier scowled back, saying nothing.

Kitchens pulled out a pad and doodled, as he talked. Old habit. He'd once worked on a crossword puzzle while interrogating a suspected Red spy in Germany a year ago. What's a six-letter word for traitor, begins with 's'? The spy got so wrapped up in the puzzle, he wound up incriminating himself in fifteen minutes.

"Dr. Ranier, you got serious charges against you. You understand these charges...what they could mean?"

Ranier glowered through Kitchens at the muscular forearm of the Marine sentry stationed outside the door. "These are absurd accusations. I'm an American citizen...I've taken the oath. I've memorized the Constitution...have you? We the People, in order to perform a more perfect union.... This is how Communists treat their enemies...like dogs."

"Dogs don't commit treason and espionage, Doctor. You've been assigned to this bomb project for awhile, haven't you?"

"Nearly a year. We are testing weapons here, young man. Weapons for America's arsenal."

"Tell me how the bombs were made. And how five of them were diverted from Greenhouse for an unauthorized mission."

Ranier huffed. "Are you a physicist, now? The science behind these bombs is complicated. To explain it...that would take some time." He waved at the cramped interrogation room. "And a chalkboard. I don't see a chalkboard here. Perhaps, you could get one."

Kitchens' doodling had somehow created a sort of a spider web of lines and slashes. "Dr. Ranier, your accomplices in the States have already implicated you. They've been yakking away like my wife's aunt for the past two weeks." Not true, strictly speaking, since the Bureau hadn't rounded everyone up yet. But he had confidence in J. Edgar Hoover. "I've got a bookshelf full of confessions back at my office. Full of juicy stuff. All the latest gossip...like how you doctored up the production logs at Hanford, got extra bombs tacked onto the Greenhouse tests, then faked processing errors to 'prove' the bombs were duds." He shrugged, turned the pad around so Ranier could see the intricate spider's web, with the silly cartoon face trapped in the center. "It's all there, right on my bookshelf."

"You have no proof. Plutonium is notoriously hard to work with. Mistakes are made all the time. Innocent mistakes. A mistake doesn't mean the technicians are criminals."

"It does when it's all planned out beforehand, right down to the fake logs and the instruments and how they were miscalibrated. Oh, don't you worry about proof, Dr. Ranier. Don't worry your little head about that at all. Leave that detail to me. You want proof, I got proof. You want me to show you the transcripts of conversations you had right on this very ship, with Edvard Tolkach and others? You want copies of papers and files detailing how tight the timeline was to get the bombs taken off the test list? No? How about surveillance logs of meetings with General Paul Craft in Los Alamos? And a nice little romantic walk along the beach at Engebi Island with General Clayton LaSalle, just a week ago. You two make such a handsome couple. Planning a secret getaway, I imagine. Got that one...photos and surveillance logs too. Atomic Security Service."

After that, Albert Ranier loosened up a bit. He was still gruff, answering in snatches of sentences, spitting out words. Brusque and elliptical, but he talked. Kitchens kept on doodling, bigger and bigger spider's webs, until he had filled up several pages.

"Major Kitchens," Ranier said, "I've done nothing wrong. All you have is evidence of a concerned citizen trying to help his country."

"By selling atomic secrets to the Russians?"

"I have sold nothing to anyone! And I will do nothing to stop this operation, either. Communism is an evil. Have you seen Communism in the face? Have you had your family, your friends, your very life shattered by it? What do you know about evil, Major? Have you had your own mother--your own flesh and blood--hauled off from her sickbed in the middle of the night? Then hounded to death in prison for the next six months? This operation is sanctioned by the highest military commanders, men who fight Communism everyday. They know what evil is like. Now we have a chance to strike a blow, push the beast back in the shadows. You're the traitor. You're the criminal. Every man is a soldier in this war. Real treason is standing still when the battle is joined. Those who fight evil are heroes. No matter what weapons they use. Those who stand in the way are traitors--worse, they're cowards. People like you deserve the scorn of every soldier."

Kitchens broke the point off the pencil. Angrily, he shoved the pad off the table. "I don't see a uniform on you, Doctor. I've taken an oath to uphold the Constitution. I took shrapnel in my legs in Italy. By the way, I did a little checking with the Atomic Security Service before I came. Seems that oath you took...memorizing the Constitution...sorry, Doc. That was a security oath. You and about two dozen bright fellows got grandfathered in on a special national security visa. Manhattan Project and all that. You do weird things in the middle of war. But citizen?--" he laughed, shaking his head. "That's the beauty of this whole game. Immigration says there's no U.S. citizen named Albert Ranier. No such animal. Truth is--" Kitchens leaned forward and tapped a pointed finger right in the middle of the physicist's chest--"I could have you deported tomorrow. Undesirable alien. Violation of security oath. Violation of visa requirements. Read the fine print, pal. V-4 admittees are deportation meat if they engage in unlawful political activities."

Ranier froze like a stone monolith. Only his eyes flared.

Now I've got your attention. "Tell me a little more about the Mark VI bomb."

The Army major and the Czech physicist sparred for awhile longer, but Ranier seemed to have softened. He stared down at the table, where Kitchens placed his retrieved pad, artistically engraving each page with curlicues and arabesques and cryptic notations.

Ranier confirmed the bombs were aboard a Japanese freighter. "Orient Star," he muttered. "I don't know the registry."

"Not to worry. I do. Where are they?"

"I was to fly this afternoon to Okinawa. To inspect the bombs, checkout the arming and fusing circuits, the breech plugs, everything. LaSalle insisted. They're to be loaded tomorrow. He wanted me there for that too, in case something came up."

"And the launch time?"

Ranier slumped in the chair, drumming fingers on his knees. He turned his palms over, tracing the lines with a finger. They all seemed to lead back to the same place. "General Craft and LaSalle were aiming to send the planes Sunday night or Monday morning, I was led to believe. I don't know about the mission, so much. Basic arrangements, that's all."

"Who approved the mission?"

Ranier looked up at Kitchens, as if he thought the major stupid. "General MacArthur, I assume. Isn't he the top commander?"

Kitchens stopped doodling. "At the moment. Look, think, will you? I need every detail about the mission you can remember. The targets, for instance--"

Ranier was emphatic. "I had no knowledge of military things like that. I could only guess at targets. My job was to make the bombs available. And make sure they were ready."

Kitchens was no longer doodling. Instead, he was writing notes. "The bombs...they were aboard the Chesapeake? Yet the Chesapeake sank...there had to be a plan. Ahead of time."

Ranier looked down at the deck, studying the palms of his hands again, reluctant.

"Look, I don't have time to play games with you, Doctor. We can do this here, or I can arrange to have you deported. Back to Czechoslovakia. You want to fight Communism? You can do it from the streets of Prague."

Ranier's face hardened. "I've given America so much...my best work. I worked with top men...Bethe...Weisskopf...even Oppie. I want America to be strong. Face up to her responsibilities."

"Then face up to yours, pal. America is strongest when her people are strong. What do you know about Chesapeake?"

The physicist was rubbing his hands nervously. He shifted uneasily in the hard seat. "The Navy ship was sunk. Deliberately."

"Deliberately how?"

"When the bombs were returned to the ship, and she was heading back to the States, she was shadowed. A submarine. A Chinese submarine."

"You had help onboard, didn't you? A saboteur of some kind?"

Ranier shrugged. "I was never told all the details. General Craft insisted on that. The ship was to be disabled, in the middle of the ocean, somehow, I don't know how. The freighter was to be following her, out of sight, but nearby. After the bombs were transferred--" Ranier sighed. "It was necessary--there couldn't be any witnesses. Craft insisted there was no other way. I remember his words: 'Every war has casualties. No casualties are better than any others. Dead is dead. What matters is why they died. Are we closer to winning the war because someone died? If we are, it wasn't needless.' Courageous words, I thought, and worth remembering." Ranier looked up heavily. "I tried to remember that, when I felt sad for the crew of that ship."

Kitchens swallowed hard. Jesus, an entire Navy auxiliary, lost at sea. Torpedoed by a submarine.

"If I learn that you had prior knowledge of this crime," he told Ranier evenly, "if the facts tell me you assisted in this crime, you'll be charged as an accessory to murder. If you're not deported, when this is all over, you could be hanged."

Ranier only stared at the deck. His voice was thin. "I would like to have an attorney now, please. I have the right."

Kitchens knew he'd taken a risk questioning the physicist without counsel present, but military justice was different, and Ranier was a national security risk. Under the Articles, security risks could be debriefed without counsel. Prejudice was harder to prove in a military tribunal than a civilian court. It was a risk he had to take.

"Doctor, you're coming with me. To Okinawa. You and me and going to shut the door on this little operation for good."

"I am no use to you, Major. I have no knowledge of the operation. After the bombs--"

"Maybe not, but nobody knows those bombs better. I need an expert to render the bastards safe. But first, I've got a few matters to take care of--" He nodded to the Marine sentry. The sergeant escorted Ranier back to his cell. "Don't get too comfortable. I'll be back for you."

Kitchens mind was spinning. Chesapeake sunk? Atom bombs in Okinawa? American boys dying by the hundreds every day...Ranier was right, damn him.

He watched the Czech physicist hang there, like a naughty dog, waiting to be smacked. Pride and guilt at the same time...an explosive mix.

Who the hell am I to gum up MacArthur's strategy? I'm just a friggin' cop from Philadelphia. Trying to do my job and arrest the sons of bitches. So what? I nab my man and what happens then? This isn't Champagne Scam all over again, pal. Bad guys go to jail. Then what? Even worse guys kill a hell of a lot of GIs. Which crime is bigger? Something's not right with this puzzle...some of the pieces are missing.

Kitchens could see no future in letting those thoughts get the better of him. Orders were orders. Wars weren't won by freelancing on the battlefield. He had a job and a case to solve. His ass was dogmeat if he didn't solve it...and that came from General 'Lightning Joe' Collins, the Chief of Staff.

He had an idea. He'd take Dr. Ranier in tow and together they'd hop a flight to Okinawa. Find the bombs and put an end to this nonsense.

The only problem was he'd probably need a couple of platoons to storm the place, not to mention special arrest warrants from Washington, in order to take a flag rank officer into custody. It was a sure bet Mishida was well protected.

Kitchens left the brig compartment and headed topside, immediately banging his shins on the edge of a bulkhead frame. 'Knee knockers' the Navy boys called them, and with good reason. Kitchens could have easily spent hours wandering the rat's maze of Curtiss' lower decks. He snagged a seaman, got directions and after a few wrong turns, wound up in open air and bright sunshine, where God had always meant men to live. Especially soldiers. He hated to beg assistance from sailors like a common rube from the hills but time was running out.

A yeoman steered him up to the task force quarters in a compartment just aft of the ship's bridge.

Kitchens knew he to get a cable back to Washington and fast. Clanging up ladder after steel ladder, he passed a weather office and a machine room. He 'wrote' the cable's contents in his mind as he climbed.

Air Police detail and maybe a few platoons of MP's too, for insurance. And they'll need trucks or planes to get to the island.

Alert General Stratemeyer, Far Eastern Air Forces, to keep his fighters on standby alert in case any of the bombers got off before the airfield could be secured.

Talk with Captain Egan...Navy needs to set up a search force for that Jap freighter, stop her and secure the bombs.

Need special arrest warrants and a detail to take into custody an Army General and an Air Force O-8. Interservice cooperation and all that...mustn't step on any toes now.

He needed to talk with the Curtiss' skipper. Captain Egan could arrange for fast transport to the seaplane anchorage. Then he'd need a plane to Andersen Field, Guam, then another plane into Kadena. He could meet up with the detail there and go over tactics for the move on Mishida. Once he found out where the hell Mishida actually was.

Cable communication was slow. Lyle Kitchens needed to talk face-to-face with General Collins and General Bradley in the worst way. This was uncharted territory for an Army major with six years in the 10th Military Police Company in Europe. This wasn't a bunch of bored GIs scamming powdered milk and K rations from field kitchens in merry old England.

Flag-rank officers of the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force were conspiring to drop atom bombs on a sovereign country without permission, extending on their own authority a shooting war into another theater, into the very heartland of an enemy combatant, perhaps even further than that.

Politics and chain of command, personal responsibility and military strategy, tactics and morality, leadership and Communist atrocities...

Kitchens had seldom run across words like these in a lifetime of crossword puzzles. There was no longer enough time to fill in all the pieces.

It all added up to one hell of a confusing day.

Maybe Collins and Bradley will have some brilliant ideas, he told himself. I'm running a little low. Just the thought of having to arrest a flag-rank soldier in the middle of a war, for doing his duty, made him sick to his stomach.

Major Lyle Kitchens was out of breath, heaving in gulps of salt air, heart pounding, when he finally reached the bridge level. He burst in on Captain Egan and the bridge crew.

Time was fast running out and the Army major somehow had to make things happen now.

Saturday night, 1-27-51

Aboard the U.S.S. Knox, East China Sea

11:45 p.m.

Commander Blaine Ryland scanned the lights on the horizon with his binoculars, listening to the crackle of radio traffic from the boarding party. The detail had set off half an hour before, armed with two squads of Marines and sidearms all around, to board and inspect the Japanese freighter now hove to three thousand yards off the starboard bow. At first, the Jap hadn't bothered to respond to Knox's hails, preferring to steam blithely onward on her original course of 215 degrees, southwest toward the easternmost shoals and reefs of Amami o' Shima, the most northerly of the volcanic Ryuku chain.

A few warning shots from Knox's five-inch guns across her path had convinced the freighter captain that the U.S. Navy meant business.

Now Ryland was nervously waiting the first reports from the boarding party. The cable he'd gotten a few hours before, after the exec had stirred him from a deep dreamless sleep in his sea cabin, had been a curious, even confusing dispatch. Several readings produced no further enlightenment. But the tone and the gravity of the dispatch from Seventh Fleet at Pearl had left no doubts as to the seriousness of the matter.

Atomic bombs?

As far as Commander Ryland knew, the only atomic bombs the Navy had in its possession were consigned to well-guarded ordnance bunkers at Pearl Harbor, not out here in the East China Sea on some rustbucket of a Jap freighter plying coastal waters through the Ryukus.

But when the Orient Star failed to heed Knox's first hail and challenge, Ryland had no recourse but to fire on the vessel. A few rounds went shrieking over her forecastle and her captain wisely chose to bank his steam plant and stand to before the next rounds were sent over a little closer.

The boarding party had boarded the Jap freighter without incident an hour later.

Ryland spent the next half hour tensely waiting word from Lieutenant Broome, head of the boarding detail. The Orient Star had come to a complete stop less than two miles off Knox's starboard bow, wallowing in heavy seas in a light surface fog. Visibility was less than five hundred yards. The freighter had not dropped anchor and was drifting steadily southward with the current. Ryland ordered the helmsman to steer slightly behind the freighter, to avoid any chance of a collision.

Ryland was smoking nervously on Knox's starboard bridge wing when the officer of the deck popped outside with a message.

"Skipper, sonar reports surface contacts nearby, bearing 175 degrees. About five miles north of here. Closing at twenty knots."

Ryland flicked the cigarette into the ocean. "Any ID yet?"

"No, sir, but sonar reports the blade count's like a Soviet destroyer. Maybe two of 'em."

"Anything on the boards for this sector, Lieutenant?"

"Nothing, sir."

Ryland drew his pea jacket tighter against the stiff evening breeze. "Contact Broome and the boarding party. Tell them to hurry up the inspection. And--" he jammed his fists in his jacket--"tell Gunnery crews to stand by the five-inch forward mounts. Load up. Full warshots but keep the guns safed. I don't know if our visitors are Russians or not but I'm not waiting around to find out."

"Maneuvering instructions, sir?"

Ryland considered the tactical situation. The Jap was no threat. But they still had a boarding party to recover. "Circle the Jap. Bring her right to 065 degrees and lay the guns on the bearing of our visitors. I don't want anybody interfering with this inspection."

"Aye, aye, sir." The OOD slipped back inside to the bridge.

As soon as Broome reported on what the boarding party had found, Ryland intended to get the detail back on board and wheel around to deal with these nosy Red tin cans.

And if atomic bombs or prohibited munitions were found in the hold of the Orient Star, Ryland wasn't sure what he would do. His orders were simply to stop and board the freighter. He decided to send a request for clarification back to Yokohama Fleet Radio. Meanwhile, they'd keep an eye on those pesky Russians.

Ryland went back to the bridge. In the darkened room, ghostly green radiance from instrument dials painted the faces of the helmsman and the OOD. Ryland scanned the surface radar screen; twin blobs edged ever closer in the fading trace of the radar scan.

What the hell are you guys doing in my neck of the woods? Ivan didn't venture this far south very often, and then usually in packs of five or ten. Nosing around for intelligence, he surmised. Maybe recon on flight operations out of Kadena and southern airfields. Knox would have to do a little sanitizing of the area before she departed.

"Message coming in from Lieutenant Broome, sir." The OOD had just gotten a radio flimsy from the radioman. He handed the sheet to Ryland.

Ryland frowned as he read. No evidence of any contraband found aboard. Unusual deck fittings. Primary cargo is crates of produce. Manifest in order. Bound for Kobe docks.

"What the hell?" Ryland studied the words as if they were another language, trying to tease more meaning from the letters. No atomic bombs or any other prohibited munitions. Broome had said that much. What did he mean unusual deck fittings?

"Skipper, the Russians have turned. New bearing 195 degrees. Speed down to fifteen knots."

Ryland studied the radar plot. "Heading for the Jap freighter, I'll bet."

"Looks that way, skipper."

"We better get the boarding party back aboard. Send an order to Broome. 'Return to ship.'"

The OOD turned to head aft to the radio room. Ryland stopped him.

"Send another message. To the skippers of those Russian ships. Try the international frequencies first. 'Stand clear. This is U.S. Navy inspection. Do not interfere.' Send that first. Then tell Broome to get his ass back here, on the double."

"Aye, aye, skipper."

Twelve thousand yards northeast of Knox, two Skory-class destroyers of the Red Banner Pacific Fleet of the Soviet Union closed on their target at fourteen knots. The Nakhimov and the Blagonravov were both tin cans of nearly 2600 tons displacement. Each had twin five-inch mounts forward, augmented with a rack of torpedo tubes amidships and a quad 57-millimeter gun mount aft.

On the Nakhimov's bridge, Captain Alexei Starenko scowled at the back of his visitor's head, silently wishing only ill health and misfortune for the NKVD agent who had occupied his territory. It was bad enough that an officer of the People's Commissariat could walk unchallenged onto his ship as if he owned the vessel. Worse still, Starenko felt like a custodian on his own bridge, taking operational orders from this stupid donkey who didn't know a rudder from a capstan.

"Continue closing on that ship," Fyodor Trofimenko said. He stared ahead through ghostly fog, squinting to see their quarry. "I'll tell you when to stop."

"Comrade, if we continue closing at this rate, you won't have to tell me. The ships will collide head-on. Let us at least slow down. Ten knots...eight knots. Nakhimov takes time to stop."

"Nonsense, Captain. Our orders are clear enough. Do you think that American Navy destroyer is alongside her for a New Year's Eve party? The Americans are trying to hide their atom bombs. Switch ships in mid-ocean. But it won't work. This time, we've caught them."

Indeed, Trofimenko's orders were directly from the Peoples Commissar himself, Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, and not to be disobeyed: stop the Japanese freighter Orient Star, board her and seize as many of the renegade American bombs as possible.

"What is our distance to the freighter now?"

Starenko estimated the narrowing gap from the radar plot. "Less than eight thousand yards, comrade. We must stop now. To close any more will bring us within range of the American ship's guns. They've already advised us they are inspecting the freighter."

"Nonsense. The Americans are taking their bombs away before we catch them. We have to--"

Trofimenko was interrupted by a shout from a bridge spotter. "We've been fired on!"

A shrieking whistle rocketed across their field of view. Seconds later, twin spouts of water geysered into the air. The explosion lit off several hundred yards astern, muffled slightly by the fog. A distant boom! rolled over the sea again, another shrieking whine and two more concussions detonated astern, closer this time.

"Hard about!" Starenko ordered. "Come left zero nine oh degrees! Flank speed....Gunnery, ready the forward mounts!"

"Stay on your course, Captain!" Trofimenko ordered. "It's just a warning shot!"

Starenko glared at the NKVD officer. "You...get off my bridge at once! I'm captain of this ship! When a Soviet warship is fired on, we will fire back!"

Trofimenko quickly pulled out his Makarov pistol and nudged the barrel of the gun against the temple of the helmsman. "Maintain present course, seaman!"

Starenko started to move, but thought better of it. On his own ship, he was outnumbered. The crew would side with him. But the political officer--the fat cow would do whatever the NKVD told him. Starenko bit his tongue but stayed put. It was absurd. Even in combat, a Soviet warship had one hand tied behind its back.

Starenko seethed. "You'll get us blown out of the water yet, Major.

Trofimenko kept his Makarov trained on the bridge crew. Stupid oxes couldn't see what the Americans were doing. He switched glances, from the helm to the radar plot to the forward windscreen, squinting for a glimpse of the freighter. "It's a bluff, Captain. They're just trying to scare us off."

"Still maintaining course, Captain. One fifteen degrees. They have slowed to ten knots. It's a collision course, sir."

Commander Blaine Ryland was sure this was all a bad dream. He was in the middle of a fog back in the East China Sea, with two Soviet destroyers bearing down on him on a collision course, trying to recover a boarding party that had been detailed to search a Japanese freighter for missing atomic bombs. Some kind of Ray Bradbury fantasy, no doubt. A Texaco Theater mystery. A nightmare and he couldn't wake up....

"Sound collision!"

A shrill warning klaxon blasted throughout the ship.

"Hard left, helmsmen! Come left two eight five degrees. Flank speed. Give her the gas, Mr. Barnes!"

"What about the boarding party, skipper?"

"They'll have to duck the best way they can. What's that friggin' Russky nutcase up to anyway?"

Knox heeled hard to port and churned up to fifteen knots in a boiling froth of seawater. Emergency maneuvering in close proximity to other ships was always a dicey affair, under the best of circumstances. In thickening surface fog, it was asking for trouble.

"Captain, that Jap's getting underway!"

"What the hell--"

It was true, and just as well. Captain Aburo Hasijawa had taken advantage of the confusion and ordered the Orient Star's steam plant back on line, just as soon as the first shots had been fired and the boarding party had departed. Hasijawa had no idea why the Russians and the Americans were shooting blindly at each other through heavy fog in the middle of the ocean. He didn't intend to stick around to find out either. In less than five minutes, the freighter was up to full steam and making way out of the area, on a westerly bearing. With Knox suddenly steering her way, a near collision had been averted. But the maneuvers had placed the American destroyer right on their stern, and gaining speed.

Hasijawa stood stiff at the windscreen, silently praying to his esteemed ancestors that the Americans didn't fire on the freighter. His imprecations were suddenly interrupted by a loud, grinding squeal several thousand yards to stern.

"Captain, the--"

"I heard it, seaman...maintain course and speed!" Hasijawa had already left the bridge and made his way along catwalks and ladders to the ship's forecastle, now coming awash with sea spray from state four seas breaking over their gunwales.

Less than two miles east of them, one of the Russian destroyers and the Knox had turned at the last second, sideswiping each other. The collision had been an angled blow, at a closing speed of sixteen knots, their forehulls scraping along as plating and frameworks were stove in. The ships bounced off each other, collided again, then drifted apart for a few moments, as their captains reversed engines. Wave action continued slamming the ships together for a few more minutes, until maneuvering control could be re-established. The Nakhimov dropped astern, and wallowed, while the Knox drifted forward and cut her engines. The ships lost all forward way and the Nakhimov quickly developed a pronounced portside list.

Suddenly floodlights burst on and began playing across the gap between the ships, shining up and down the length of each other's hundred-yard gash, then across the whitecaps of the churning waves. Voices and shouts filled the air, Russian and American alike.

"Damage control...report!" Blaine Ryland was already scampering down to the amidships catwalks, even as rescue lines were being cast into the water. On both ships, the force of the collision had knocked several men overboard. And there was still Lieutenant Broome's boarding party to locate, if they were still alive. Almost lost in the confusion and chaos, the low rumble of diesel engines several thousand yards ahead could still be heard. Orient Star had nearly blown her boiler piping revving up to flank speed, but Captain Aburo Hasijawa wanted no part of the collision scene.

In less than ten minutes, the freighter had disappeared completely from the area.

Aboard Knox, her dwindling radar plot was noticed by hardly anyone.

Aboard the Nakhimov's bridge, Fyodor Trofimenko was livid with Captain Starenko.

"The freighter is getting away, Captain! Send Blagonravov after her!"

Starenko glared at the radar plot. The Japanese ship was a fading trace, now more than ten miles distant. He shook his head. "We have casualties here, comrade. The hull's breached aft and we're taking on water in the engine room."

"Yes, but Blagonravov isn't. Order her to pursue at once."

But Starenko refused. "I don't want Nakhimov left alone until we ascertain the extent of the damage. We have hull damage, Major, possibly severe. The engine room is taking on water. We're barely seaworthy as it is and I want Blagonravov nearby in case the situation gets worse. Plus, we don't know what the Americans are going to do." Starenko had no desire to have to explain to his fleet commanders in Vladivostok why he had lost a ship. Best to keep the other destroyer nearby, to render assistance.

Trofimenko fumed, stomping around the bridge. Outside the windscreen, floodlights made strange shadows in the fog, as the American ship struggled with its own damage control, several thousand yards to port.

Trofimenko left the bridge to get some air. Mindless apes. Morskoi Flot was full of them. He pulled out a cigarette, cupped his hand against the wind to get it lit and

gathered his thoughts.

Beria had made his orders quite clear. The Americans were to be stopped, the bombs somehow sabotaged. Now the Japanese freighter had gotten away, thanks to the stupidity of Starenko. It was clear that the bombs would soon be unloaded at Mishida Island, if they weren't already there. Jiang Chen Li had already scouted the base. He had watched large tarpaulin-covered crates being unloaded a few nights ago. Maybe the Japanese freighter had been a decoy all along.

Trofimenko knew he needed the special naval landing troops aboard the Blagonravov. Spetsnaz forces had come aboard the destroyer just before she sailed, for boarding the Japanese freighter and securing the bombs. Now there might be a different mission for them.

Maybe I can prevail on Starenko to drop the Spetsnaz unit off at Mishida. Trofimenko re-entered the bridge, finding the captain immersed in chart talk with his navigator.

"A word with you, comrade Captain. I've got a plan."

Starenko sighed. "What is it? Can't you see I'm busy? We've got serious damage to our hull and we may have to ground the ship, if I can't get a towline over from Blagonravov."

Trofimenko broached the idea of detaching the other destroyer for a little amphibious landing in the Ryukyus.

"Are you insane? Can't you see what we're up against here?" Starenko's face was red, puffed out like a baboon. "I need that ship to help us."

Patiently, Trofimenko explained what he had in mind. After discussing the details of Nakhimov's hull damage, Starenko weighed the options. If he let Blagonravov go before Nakhimov could be stabilized, there was a real risk the ship might founder or capsize. Already, she had been counterflooded, to right her fifteen degree portside list. Several compartments around the engine room had suffered serious flooding casualties and the damage control parties were barely keeping up.

On the other hand, Trofimenko was NKVD and had authority direct from Moscow to complete their mission. Starenko knew he could exert authority in emergency situations needed to save the ship. But Trofimenko was still in charge of the mission. Any deviations from the mission would have to be explained. And Starenko had never been very good at explanations.

Reluctantly, against his better judgement, he agreed.

"I'll get a launch ready. You can transfer over within the hour."

"You'll inform Captain Ligachev? The success of the mission is a paramount concern."

"Of course, comrade." And the sooner I get you off my ship, the better for both of us.

Just after 0100 hours local time, Fyodor Trofimenko motored over to the Blagonravov in a small launch. Seas were heavy and the NKVD officer was vomiting freely by the time he was hauled aboard, green and pale and drenched with salt spray.

Lieutenant Walter Archer, U.S.N., had been the duty officer at Yokohama Fleet Radio for little more than three hours when the dispatch from the Knox came in on the wire. Archer was one of the few officers who actually enjoyed the solitude and relative freedom of the mid-watch. No superior officers breathing down your neck all watch. No brass roaming the halls right outside the radio shack, forcing you to salute half a dozen times on your way to and from the head and the galley. In between managing normal operational and housekeeping traffic between the largest naval base in the western Pacific and her far-flung brood of Seventh Fleet ships, Archer had plenty of time to catch up on the latest Superman comics and an occasional practice round of canasta with the radioman and electrician's mate pulling the same watch.

When the dispatch from the Knox came in, shortly after 0030 hours that Saturday night, though, Lieutenant Archer ditched the canasta game and copied the terse message onto another sheet of paper.

Jesus H. Christ, he muttered, as he typed. A collision at sea with a Soviet destroyer. This was definitely not your average run of the mill course, speed and weather advisory.

This one had to go to Admiral Winter right away. Archer snatched the paper out of the Remington and bounded down the hall to the Admiral's office.

Rear Admiral Harley Winter looked up startled as Lieutenant Archer rapped sharply on the glass pane of the door.

"Come!" Winter buttoned his shirt back up and straightened his tie. He had been catching a few winks after completing far too many reports on personnel dispositions around the District.

Archer gave the Admiral the dispatch. Winter thanked him. "That'll be all, Lieutenant. Stand by in the radio room, though." He quickly scanned the dispatch from the Knox, a low whistle on his lips. "We may be burning up the airwaves tonight."

"Yes, sir."

Winter's practiced eye went straight to the code phrase the CINCPAC advisory had sent out two days before. Alamo. A phrase fraught with meaning, if ever there was one, he told himself. CINCPAC orders gave any message coded Alamo absolute priority in all radio and other communication channels. Winter knew this was hot.

The Navy had been tasked to intercept a Japanese freighter the previous day. Critical cargo was aboard. That's all Winter knew. Now the intercept had failed, the Knox damaged in a collision at sea. A Soviet destroyer? Winter tried to imagine the reams of paper the inquiry would generate.

Probably enough to flatten a few forests. In any case, CINCPAC orders were clear enough. Any dispatches from Knox were to be forwarded immediately to Seventh Fleet at Pearl and to Far Eastern Air Forces command headquarters at Atsugi Field outside Tokyo.

Winter had been in the Navy long enough to read between the lines, and long enough to know when not to make waves. CINCPAC was running some special operation with the Air Force. It was the only explanation that made sense. Maybe a combined operation behind Red lines...Hungnam, perhaps. Or Wonsan. Another Inchon, just like last September. Stick a knife in the gooks' behind, then run Eighth Army right up their gut.

That had to be it.

Winter looked up the cable number for General Stratemeyer's office at Atsugi. FEAF would undoubtedly have a duty officer in some stale, smoke-filled office too, ready to take any priority traffic straight to the top.

The sooner he got this one off, the better.

General George Stratemeyer was awakened in his quarters at the BOQ by a gentle rapping on the door. He grumbled--he hadn't had the Tahiti dream about running naked through the surf in weeks--and switched on the light. The staff sergeant slipped in and gave him the dispatch.

"Just came in from Yokohama Naval Radio, sir. Priority code on it. I thought you should see it right away."

"Thanks, sergeant." Stratemeyer woke up when he saw the ALAMO code at the top. "You did the right thing." The sergeant disappeared. Stratemeyer sat up to scan the page more completely.

General Marshall had alerted him two days before to the Gallant Flag plot. Stratemeyer hadn't initially put a lot of stock in the intelligence. S2's were always hyperventilating over Red conspiracies and plots. Still, Washington thought it was serious enough to send the Navy after some Jap ship. Now, Stratemeyer read, the Jap had been located and boarded but no atom bombs had been found. Worse, the Russians were in the neighborhood and there had been a collision at sea.

Marshall's orders had surmised that the plotters, if there really were any, planned to bring their stolen atom bombs to a remote airstrip in Okinawa. Mishida, it was called. Stratemeyer had never heard of the place. And how the hell do you make off with atomic bombs in the first place...hell, the damn things weighed nearby nine thousand pounds. Our own Superforts can barely make into the air with them as it is. Marshall's orders had warned him about the possibility the conspirators would try to commandeer a few B-29s for an unauthorized atomic strike mission over China.

For George Stratemeyer, the whole affair seemed surreal, like one of those radio mystery theater shows. Commandeer B-29s? Hijacked atom bombs?

Still, you couldn't ignore orders from the SecDef and the Chief of Staff General Vandenberg. Washington must have something to be sending Navy destroyers off in the middle of the night.

This one called for a telecon with the Pentagon brass. Stratemeyer started to dress. It was going to be one hell of a long tense night in Atsugi's comm center.

The telecon, or teletype conference, required a room large enough to be a small theater. Atsugi had one in the Operations Building, with a movie screen and projector to boot. Stratemeyer phoned ahead and got the technicians moving to set up the link. It was midday in Washington, nearly fourteen hours behind Tokyo time.

Nearly two hours would elapse before the telecon link was finally established and critical players rounded up.

By 0430 hours, Stratemeyer had more details on the Knox's adventure in the East China Sea and what the Air Force would be doing to ensure Gallant Flag was shut down.

He located Colonel Joe England, FEAF's S2 intelligence officer, and the two of them sat with steaming mugs of coffee in the darkened staff room before a large screen. The teletype machine was a big desk with keyboard and tape spools, spitting out and receiving messages that were projected on the screen. It was surreal and eerie, Stratemeyer thought, to be alone in the middle of the night, in a theater built for thirty, watching typed exchanges pass back and forth between Tokyo and the Pentagon.

Ten thousand miles away, Generals Marshall, Collins and Bradley, Admiral Sherman and General Vandenberg were in attendance.

Stratemeyer dictated an accounting of events as he had received them in the Knox dispatch, standing over the back of the teletype technician, as he laboriously pecked out the words. The whole process took several minutes, during which time Stratemeyer paced the theater, occasionally glancing up at the fuzzy, half-lit screen, listening for the clatter of the teletype keys.

Stratemeyer sent: Knox broken off pursuit of Jap freighter. Collision at sea with Soviet warship. Moderate damage. Bombs not found on freighter by boarding party. Bombs presumed already on site. Okinawa?(s) Stratemeyer, FEAF.

Stratemeyer's uneasy thoughts were interrupted by the steady clacking of teletype keys.

That didn't take long. The length of time for a response was usually an indicator of the urgency of the exchange.

The general stood before the screen as words slowly materialized.

INTELLIGENCE INDICATES BOMBS ARE AT MISHIDA AIRFIELD, WEST OF KADENA. MARINES FORMING AN ASSAULT TEAM NOW. YOU ARE ORDERED TO FLY MISHIDA IMMEDIATELY. SHUT DOWN ALL FLIGHT OPS IN PROGRESS. (S) MARSHALL

Stratemeyer folded his arms and rubbed unshaven stubble on his chin. Colonel England offered a thought.

"General, that place could be a real snake's nest. You don't know what you're getting into. May I suggest forming a team of Air Police to come with you. At least, don't fly down there unarmed."

Stratemeyer nodded. He went to the teletype, bent over the machine, as if seeing the words on the tape would elicit more meaning. "Sergeant, send this: Please send details of any assault or enforcement operation. Is FEAF assisting?"

The sergeant typed hurriedly, correcting several misspellings, and sent the message.

Less than a minute later:

GENERAL ORDER 11-7566 HAS BEEN ISSUED TO ALL AIRFIELDS IN FAR EAST THEATER. CEASE FLIGHT OPERATIONS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, PENDING REVIEW OF SAFETY ISSUES REGARDING WEAPONS RELEASE. TECHNICAL BULLETINS FOLLOW. MARINE ASSAULT TEAM BEING FORMED AS BACKUP. ENFORCEMENT OPERATIONS PROCEEDING NOW AT FAR EAST COMMAND AND OKINAWA. YOUR PRESENCE VITAL...(S) VANDENBERG

"That cinches it, Colonel," Stratemeyer said. "Looks like I'll be flying down to Kadena this morning."

"Shall I inform the staff, sir?"

Stratemeyer thought about it. "I'll call up the dispatcher over at Ops, grab me a plane. Contact Colonel Burke, will you? Get me a detail of Air Police, fully armed for forcible entry. Just in case."

England saluted and hustled out of the auditorium.

Stratemeyer stared at the frozen words on the screen. Disembodied voices, thunderbolts from the sky, commands from Mount Olympus...he had heard all the snickers and jokes from the staff about the telecon process. The hell of it was...they were all true.

Stratemeyer signed off and went back to his own darkened office, a floor below, in Mahogany Village, as the wags called it. What the hell did Vandenberg mean: enforcement operations at Far East Command? The Dai Ichi? The Old Man's staff? Did this cockamamie scheme Marshall had laid on him have tentacles that high?

Stratemeyer buzzed through to the Flight Operations dispatch office.

"Dispatch. Lieutenant Petty, duty officer."

"Lieutenant, this is General Stratemeyer. I'm flying down to Kadena this morning. What's on the ramp now that could be gassed up and made ready in an hour or so?"

He could hear Petty rifling through papers and the status cards Dispatch kept on a slotted board in the tower, detailing the readiness of every aircraft on the base. "Well, sir, looks like we have...oh, General, wait a minute. I almost missed this." There was a pause. Then: "Just got a message an hour ago. For you personally. Signed by the Old Man, too. Eyes only."

Stratemeyer was too busy stuffing papers in an attaché case to wait for some missive from MacArthur. "Read it to me, son."

"Yes, sir." Petty cleared his throat. "'By order, Supreme Commander Allied Powers...as of 0800 hours this morning, 28 January, 1951, an all-arms staff conference is called at the Main War Room downtown. Bring all necessary staff aides and briefing materials. Subject is tactical support for upcoming Eighth Army Operation Thunderbolt. Options for Seoul campaign and Han River crossing.' That's all, General."

Stratemeyer was immediately suspicious. A staff briefing on Sunday morning? MacArthur was usually at church services Sunday morning, rotating around from one denomination to another.

"When did this come in, Lieutenant?"

Petty checked. "0530 hours, General. Came through on the wire just a few minutes ago."

Now what? Stratemeyer was thinking, interrupted by the dispatcher. "Does the General still need an aircraft prepped for flight?"

"No, I guess not. Not at the moment. Thanks, Lieutenant. That'll be all." He put the phone receiver back in its cradle with exaggerated care.

Ordered by no less than the Secretary of Defense to proceed to Okinawa, with an armed escort if needed, and personally ensure that all flight operations were shut down and stayed shut down, Stratemeyer stood in his darkened office for a few minutes. He wasn't sure what to do now.

He damn well couldn't ignore a direct order from the Old Man to be at the staff briefing. Staff briefings weren't cocktail parties. Attendance was mandatory, especially when a campaign and its supporting elements were being planned. MacArthur would take a sizeable bite from his hide if he were absent, even on a mission ordered by Washington.

And Vandenberg had already sent word that some kind of enforcement action was being planned at Far East Command.

Stratemeyer had a theory about dealing with conflicting orders...a kind of personal pain theory. You obeyed first the orders that could cause you the most personal pain if disobeyed, then worked your way down the list to the orders from more distant superiors. Which meant that everybody had an equal chance at your rump. But the kick in the pants seemed less painful when delivered from afar.

Lightning bolts from heaven or gods on Mount Olympus? The Dai Ichi or Kadena airbase?

Stratemeyer reached for the phone again, dialing up his staff aide Major Kent.

Kent was a short, red-haired gnome but a damn fine staff man and valet for an often demanding boss.

The major answered the phone sleepily, no doubt awakened from a wet dream in the BOQ.

"Major Kent here."

Stratemeyer was brusque. "Kent, get me a car right now. The Old Man's called an emergency meeting downtown at 0800. And get a hold of Colonel Langley too."

Kent was instantly alert. Langley was head of the Air Police detachment at Atsugi. "Any trouble, sir?"

Stratemeyer was dying for a coffee and a cigar. "I hope not, Major. I want Langley to ride with me to the Dai Ichi. We've got a few matters to discuss."

"I'll ring him right away, sir. Your car will be ready in half an hour."

"Very well." He hung up. Stratemeyer flexed his fingers, finding them clammy and wet with sweat. His neck was stiff and his temples throbbed. The dawn of a new headache.

He didn't know what he would tell the Air Police colonel on the ride into Tokyo.

What the hell's going on down there in Okinawa? Atom bombs and conspiracies and disappearing bombers, that's what. And to think the Air Force might well have people mixed up in these shenanigans.

Stratemeyer went down the hall to the head, to freshen up and shave.

First chance I get to hop down to Kadena for a look-see, somebody's ass will definitely be barbecued when I get to the bottom of this.

He only hoped it wasn't his.
CHAPTER 26

Sunday, January 28, 1951

Okinawa

8: 45 a.m.

Major Lyle Kitchens guided his reluctant passenger down the stairs to the rain-slick tarmac at Kadena field and steered him toward the Operations building. Dr. Albert Ranier was unshackled, accompanied by no escort other than Kitchens. The major had signed the prisoner out of Curtiss' brig on his own recognizance and shuttled the good doctor off to Okinawa to defuse a few atom bombs.

Just your average, run-of-the-mill prisoner transport, he joked to himself, as the two of them entered the sweltering crowds inside the terminal. Sure, and I'm the tooth fairy in drag, too.

He dropped Ranier off at the head for some relief, then guided the physicist-prisoner up some stairs to the Dispatch office, looking for the next flight over to Mishida Island.

He found his plans completely frustrated by a bull-necked Air Force tech sergeant named Kelley.

"I'm sorry, Major, but orders are orders. There's a complete shutdown. Everything's grounded, the whole theater. Hickam Field to Atsugi to Kadena. Only combat ops are flying, and only by specific approval from Washington. I don't know what the hell is going on, sir."

"I have to get to Mishida, sergeant. Critical mission. National security..." Kitchens displayed his MP-labeled ID folder, but Sergeant Kelley wasn't budging.

"It's security, sir. I heard something about safety bulletins too." He shrugged, waved out at the misty field, now silent, filled with aircraft on the ramps and taxiways. "Complete lockdown...just came over the wire. Orders from FEAF, General Stratemeyer."

Kitchens knew there was no sense butting his head against this wall. There was a mandatory halt to all non-combat flight operations throughout the Far East. Though he was momentarily stymied, he knew what was going on.

They're trying to dragnet the whole damn theater, hoping they can catch the perps in the act. It was like putting an entire war on curfew, so the cops could search the neighborhood for the bad guys.

He decided the best course was to ignore the lockdown completely.

With Ranier in tow, Kitchens headed outside again, squinting in the icy mist that had descended over northern Okinawa that morning. He was armed with his service .45 and something even more potent...written orders signed by the Secretary of Defense General Marshall and the CJCS General Bradley, giving him authority to pretty much go where and when he wanted in the investigation. Under normal circumstances, such orders were the written equivalent of a 155-millimeter howitzer.

But these were definitely not normal circumstances.

He saw a small gathering of pilots huddled under the dripping wing of a C-54 near the terminal and decided to try out his big guns on them.

Kitchens warned Ranier to stick around unless you want a few extra orifices in your backside. The Czech physicist glowered at him and hung back by the landing gear bogey.

Major Hank Cartwright read the chest patch of the nearest Dakota driver. Cartwright was regaling the others with some bawdy story of a night on the town in Okinawa City. He was blond, stocky, and all perfect teeth and recruiting poster face, except for his tiny eyes.

Kitchens came up. He displayed his Army ID folder, making sure Military Police was seen by all.

"I heard about the shutdown. You guys grounded today too?"

Cartwright nodded. "Like a naughty teenager. You aiming to snag a flight somewhere, Major?"

Kitchens jerked his thumb in Ranier's direction. "My pal and I are trying to hop a ride over to Mishida. Big meeting today. One of you boys wouldn't be interested in giving me a lift, would you?"

Cartwright smirked. "I can show you a good whorehouse in Okinawa City. Ten minute Jeep ride, right from this spot."

Kitchens nodded. "Some other time, Major. I need to get over to a place called Mishida Island."

Cartwright screwed up his face. "Can't say I ever heard of it. Army got something going on we don't know about?"

"Hey, Cart," another flier spoke up. He had a blond moustache that twitched like a mouse. "You know Mishida. That old Army Air Forces strip...abandoned after the war. We use to plaster the runway with smoke bombs for target practice a few years ago."

Cartwright squinted at Kitchens. "Have to take a boat today, Major. We're pounding the pavement now, thanks to FEAF."

Kitchens looked around at all the parked aircraft: C-54s, C-119s, a few B-26s and a long row of recently uncrated F-86 Saber jet fighters...the Air Force's newest. "I heard combat missions weren't affected."

Moustache said, "You heard right, soldier. You got bombs and personal approval from the Pentagon, you can pretty much go anywhere you want, as long as its over Korea." The others chuckled.

Kitchens explained a little of his mission. "Fellas, I've got permission and authorizations so high it'll make your nose bleed." He showed them orders countersigned by the SecDef and the CJCS.

Cartwright whistled, examining the signatures. He started to scan the orders, but Kitchens whisked them away. "Sorry, pal. Classified stuff. I'm a cop, as you can see. There's a little operation going on over at Mishida and my job is to shut it down. You help me and my partner get over there, and I'll see you get into my write-up."

"Big deal," Cartwright said. "Why would I want to be in a write-up on an Army matter?"

Kitchens leveled an even gaze at the pilot. "Because it isn't just an Army matter."

"Mishida was abandoned by Twentieth Air Force five years ago. Last time I flew over the strip, it was all weeds and dirt."

"And when was that, Major?"

Cartwright thought for a moment. "Maybe a year...year and a half. Why?"

Kitchens shook his orders at the pilots. "Then maybe you ought to take a closer look. There's a crew over there right now, planning to kill one hell of a lot of Reds and Communists. They're working up a mission that just might start World War III."

"Hey, sounds like my kind of gang," said Moustache. "Where can I sign up?"

Kitchens' voice dropped. "You don't want to. This deal's a free-lance job all the way. Totally unauthorized. Why the hell do you think everybody's grounded? That order came from Washington, by the way."

"Weapons release safety...that's what I heard," said Cartwright. "Pure and simple. We're back in business, as soon as the release circuits are checked and verified. I heard it this morning."

"Bullshit," Kitchens challenged them. "Check some more. Ask a few questions. Look, I'm investigating this phony operation. I could go over your heads but I don't have the time."

Cartwright was shaking his head, running his hand along the edge of the aircraft wing. He frowned, looking at his fingers. Fuel residue, for Chrissakes. Got to fix that leak. "Let me get this straight, Major. You're CID and you're checking out some--what do you want to call it? Some cockamamie scheme that's got everybody from here to the Pentagon all riled up. All non-combat flight operations are grounded for safety reasons and yet you want me to get in one these planes--against all regulations and orders--and fly you over to an abandoned airstrip, where this dastardly scheme is underway."

"And it's going to kill 'one hell of a lot of Commies too'" said Moustache. "Don't forget that part." He smirked.

"Well, hell's bells, Major..." Cartwright bellowed. "Are we or are we not in the business of killing lots of Communists? Last time we checked, we were at war with the sons of bitches."

Kitchens bit his tongue to keep his temper. "If I don't get to Mishida, it won't be just Commies that'll be dying. We'll be at war in Europe too. The kind with mushroom clouds."

Moustache and Cartwright looked at each other and shrugged. "Sounds to me like you've got some kind of scheme going yourself, mister. Want to let us in on it?"

Kitchens decided he'd use any hook he could. "As a matter of fact, I could do that. Get me a ride over, and I'll let you have your pick. Premium stuff, too."

"What kind of stuff?"

"First, the ride."

Cartwright studied Lyle Kitchens like he was a lab specimen, up and down. "You're a work of art, you know that, Major? I don't know what kind of deal you've got cooking on that island, but it must be a doozy."

"Hey, Cart," Moustache nudged the flier. "We could probably do it."

Cartwright stared out through thickening fog at the airfield. "How?"

"I just remembered...isn't there an old Grasshopper across the field? L2 parked off the west taxiway, by those piles of stones. Near the gun mounts that are all rusted out."

"The scrap pile?" Cartwright closed his eyes, mentally driving an imaginary Jeep along the strip. "Yeah, I think there is. Or was. Pranged a prop on the tarmac the other day, didn't it? Wasn't that Peters?"

"Yeah, got his butt chewed but good by LaSalle, I heard. I thought he damaged the blades pretty good."

"Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. You and I know a few things about prop repair, don't we?"

Cartwright grinned. "What kind of reprehensible, juvenile delinquent idea have you got in that feverish brain of yours?"

Moustache indicated Kitchens. "The Major here's made an offer. I just think we should be gentlemen and take him up on it. What do you say?"

Kitchens was hopeful. "It's been a pretty lucrative deal for me and my men, I can say that much."

"Smoke and feathers," Cartwright spat. "He's probably running contraband office supplies, for Chrissakes. Pinched a few typewriters. Besides, how the hell do we take off when we're grounded? It's not like somebody won't notice us."

"In this crap?" Moustache waved his hand at the fog. "I say we take a hike over to that L2 and see what's what. Maybe we can straighten the prop, if she still has one, and get away without stirring up a fuss. Hell, the way this fog's rolling in, we'll probably be lucky to see the runway."

Cartwright seemed about to make a decision. He jammed his hands in his flight jacket. "What kind of cut?"

Kitchens couldn't afford to waste any more time. These guys seemed to be his best shot. "Tell you what, Major. You're Air Force. I like you boys. Shoot, you're all still like Army, practically kissing cousins, only you don't know it. I'll let you name your cut. Take me and my buddy to Mishida and check out the merchandise. You like it, I'll work with you. Whatever you think is fair."

Cartwright and Moustache could hardly say no. Kitchens rounded up Ranier--he told the fliers the Czech physicist was an accomplice--and they walked on foot, nearly a mile across fog-bound, icy runways, ramps and taxiways. By the time they had reached the abandoned liaison plane, the tower, hangars and Ops building were shrouded in a gray cloak, nearly invisible.

Cartwright checked out the Grasshopper's three-bladed prop, while Moustache climbed into the cockpit.

"Not so bad," Cartwright said, feeling along the edges of the blades. "This one's bent, but I'd probably pass her. A few nicks, but she feels shipshape. I don't feel any seams or cracks. Better check the spindle and mount, though."

Half an hour later, after some discussion and weighing of risks, Cartwright and Moustache--whose real name was Lou Bynum-- decided the prop would hold.

"Of course, I'd prefer to take her into the machine shop, let a mechanic look her over, maybe run a scope on her," said Cartwright.

"And we're a little low on gas," Bynum added, hopping down from the cabin. "But I think I can get us a few gallons of Av-1. I'm tight with one of the fueling crews. Be back in a few minutes." Bynum trotted off, heading in the direction of parked B-29 at the end of the strip.

"You rated to fly this contraption?" Kitchens asked. Ranier was strolling around the other side of the aircraft, making his own examination. Kitchens kept an eye on the physicist, in case he decided to make a break for it.

"Son," Cartwright leaned against a cabin strut, propping his boot on the lowest step, "you are looking at a man who's Daddy used to barnstorm all over the Midwest. I'm talking barnstorming too...wingwalking, inside loops, Immelmans, the works. It's in my blood." He flexed his arms like Superman showing off his biceps. "If it's got wings and an engine, I can fly it. My regular job's right over there--" he waved at one of the C-54s sitting silently like a totem in the fog. "I make the rounds every week: Kadena to Andersen to Hickam to Yokota to Atsugi to Kimpo to Kadena. Just like a friggin' Pan Am airliner. Regular Clipper pilot, that's me. I been shot at by Russian Yaks over Seoul, struck by lightning on final at Andersen, hailed on, slammed by geese once up near Kiska in the Aleutians." He shrugged, aw-shucks kicking at imaginary dirt clods on the bare ground. "Yessir, this ol' country boy from Iowa can definitely fly this pile of parts just fine. All I need is some gas."

Bynum returned driving a small Jeep loaded with jerry cans of AV-1 fuel. "Best I could do, Cart. I had to pitch 'em a story...told 'em we were firing up the engine to check the prop. 'On whose orders?' they asked me. I said Colonel McCluskey told us to taxi this critter back to the shop. I don't think they really believed me."

"To hell with them. Let's get going...before I regain my senses and chicken out of this harebrained scheme."

Gassing up the L2 took ten minutes. Ranier and Kitchens climbed aboard, squeezing into the rear seat, though it was more bag space than seat. Bynum begged off at the last minute, offering to help out with the start, then using the truck to create a diversion.

"Sorry, Cart, I just can't. But you're safe with me. I won't spill a word. And I can help with the startup. If she starts--"

"Suit yourself." Cartwright shut and latched the cabin door. He quickly pre-flighted the instrument panel, checking things with Bynum outside.

"Here she goes--" He tentatively pressed the Starter button.

At first, nothing happened. Then, suddenly, the entire aircraft shuddered like a bird shaking wet feathers, and hopped twice, up and down, on its landing gear. The 63-horsepower Continental engine smoked and wheezed and coughed and grumbled. Finally, it turned over once, then again, and caught. At the same time, to mask the sound, Bynum revved his truck's diesel and held his foot on the gas pedal.

There was a pronounced shuddering vibration up and down the length of the fuselage. "It's the prop!" Cartwright shouted over the noise. "Hope she holds together!" They began to roll, and Bynum drove behind, as if to follow the Grasshopper back to the hangar.

But instead of turning right to cross the taxiway, the L2 turned left and bounced its way to the end of Runway 08. Bynum kept the truck at a respectful distance, in case she threw the prop.

The takeoff roll seemed to last forever, a shaking, bouncing, shuddering, weaving dash down the runway. Cartwright jerked them into the air--with Kadena Tower crackling in the radio headset he had left off on the seat, requesting "unauthorized aircraft on 08, identify yourself at once," and immediately banked left, goosed the engine a notch, and disappeared into a gusty fog bank. In seconds, they were over the ocean, just clearing the bowl of black volcanic hills that surrounded Kadena. Through gauzy tendrils of fog below, a rough line of whitecapped surf rolled toward the island's rocky beaches. Then the L2 flew into thicker fog and all visual contact with the ground was lost.

The entire flight lasted twenty minutes. Cartwright circled several islands west of Okinawa, dropping down to barely two hundred feet above the rough surf to reconnoiter the terrain, before finally spotting a white slash across a black rainswept valley in the distance. It was the refurbished airstrip...Mishida Island ahead.

"Well, I'll be damned. There is a new runway. Whole island looks like a crow's beak," Cartwright muttered. He gained a little more altitude, heading back out to sea, then crisscrossed the northern ramparts of the tiny island, trying to gauge the wind patterns. "Gonna be a Coney Island gutbuster trip in today," he said, clenching his teeth. Maybe this wasn't such a great idea, after all.

Eyeing the AAA gun positions sited around the little valley, he swallowed hard and found his throat was completely dry. He wasn't sure just what kind of reception the caretakers of this godforsaken little outpost in the middle of the ocean had in mind.

Only one way to find out, he told himself. "Brace yourselves. We don't exactly have clearance to land here--assuming I can hold this bugger on course. One more wind gust like that last one and we'll be plastered all over those hills."

They rocked and they rolled and they bounced and they bobbed and they skidded, all the while boring in on the faint white strip freshly carved from dark volcanic soil. At the last instant before touchdown, another wind gust tipped them hard right and they pancaked and nearly toppled over as the right wheel bit first into the tarmac. The plane started to skid right, but Cartwright slammed on the brakes and quickly feathered the prop, which rattled and seized in a gnashing, grinding puff of smoke as it spun down. The Grasshopper corkscrewed its way down the runway, finally coasting to a stop.

A reception committee of two Jeeps and a deuce and half truck rolled up alongside. Several squads of armed sentries hopped out and surrounded the plane.

Cartwright, Kitchens and Ranier emerged with their hands up.

The detail leader was a gruff Air Police sergeant with a .38 sidearm and an M-1 slung over his soldier. "Tie their hands," he barked. In seconds, all three were tightly bound with cord and roughly hoisted into the Jeeps. The sergeant's nameplate said Morris. He hopped into the front seat of Kitchens' Jeep and the convoy sped down the runway, cutting across a bare field newly cleared toward a line of low corrugated buildings. The ghostly shapes of B-29 bombers could barely be seen lining a ramp in the distance.

"I'm Army!" Kitchens yelled over the wind noise as the Jeeps bounced along. "Fifth MPs, CID, out of Tokyo! I've got orders to be here. Special mission, authorized by the Secretary of Defense. General Marshall's signature. I'm on a case and I want to see your commanding officer immediately."

Sergeant Morris never turned around. Kitchens eyed sinewy muscles standing out on the man's bull neck. This guy must be a hell of a tiddlywinks player, he thought. "Sorry, Major! I got my orders too! This is a secure field. Classified operations. Unless you got a written need to know, and the right level of clearance, you're officially nobody. And we got just the right place for nobodies."

Kitchens decided he'd have better luck once they were inside one of the buildings. He was cold and damp, his arms and shoulders ached from the flight and the cords that bound his wrists, and Sergeant Morris wasn't inclined to friendly chatter.

Friggin' Air Police apes.

Ten minutes later, Kitchens found himself being roughly shoved into a tiny six by ten foot cell, in a makeshift board and plywood stockade thrown together in a back corner of a hangar. Ranier was led off to see LaSalle.

"Hey, ape-man, I said I've got written orders from Washington--"

Sergeant Morris slammed and locked the cell door, pocketing the keys. "And I'm the Queen of Sheba, friend. Look, pipe down, will you? I got orders too and mine come from General LaSalle, the base commander here. Don't pop a cork. You'll get a hearing...before they string you up." He chuckled at his own joke, and disappeared.

A few minutes later, Kitchens heard a whispered voice. It was Cartwright, in an adjoining cell.

"Hey, Army copper, what the hell's up already? I thought these were your boys over here."

"Knock it off," Kitchens hissed. "I've got to get out of this rattrap and fast. You got a window over there--any way out but the door?"

Cartwright's voice was muffled. "Nothing but plywood splinters. What gives anyway?"

Kitchens was already asking himself the same question.

Twenty-five miles away from the Mishida airfield, just beyond the visual horizon on a bearing of 165 degrees, the Soviet destroyer Blagonravov had dropped anchor in the Sakishima Strait, just long enough for the assault team to board the rubber boat with all their gear and weapons. The boarding process took longer than usual, owing to the fact that an NKVD officer was also assigned to the team. Starshey Leytenant (Junior Lieutenant) Vasiliy Semyagin fumed impatiently, making no attempt to hide his disdain for Fyodor Trofimenko's fumbling efforts to make his way down the assault ladder and into the boat.

This clod belongs in an office, not on a naval Spetsnaz attack boat.

With effort and a few stumbles and slips, Trofimenko managed to make it down the netting and into the boat. The small engine was started and Semyagin circled his fingers, pointing toward a misty cove several miles ahead. It was the Go signal.

Move out. Landing zone Muscovy. All weapons safeties off. And keep your thick heads down.

Semyagin was anxious to land the assault team and get the mission underway. Special Detachment A, of the 44th Naval Spetsnaz Brigade, out of Nakhodka, had trained for weeks for just such a moment. Now, the boys would have a chance to show the commissars just what they could do. For the past five weeks, ever since Admiral Chernavin had told them the Americans were up to something big in the Far East, possibly an atomic strike, Special Detachment A had trained and trained on every tactical maneuver they might need: parachuting skills, scuba, demolitions, sabotage, surveillance, armed recon and small unit combat and ambush tactics.

The men were ready, honed to a fine edge, straining like sled dogs at their leashes. Now the moment of truth was at hand.

Semyagin viewed the NKVD officer as excess baggage, but there was little he could do about it. Comrade Trofimenko supposedly had critical intelligence about their targets. Indeed, only he and Semyagin knew precisely what their targets were: a small element of American bombers based on this bleak pile of rocks and an ordnance bunker reputed to be full of atomic bombs.

If Special Detachment A failed in its mission, Semyagin had been told, there was little point in returning to the base at Nakhodka. Admiral Chernavin had made that quite clear.

"Comrades, there won't be a Nakhodka to come home to. It'll all be radioactive rubble."

Semyagin was confident the Detachment would be victorious.

The assault boat had barely enough room for the entire detachment, plus the NKVD officer and the coxswain. Heavy ice fog had covered the seas north of Mishida for most of the morning, thankfully making their approach easier. Semyagin sat queasily on the forward bench, studying the crude map of the island, and the dark finger of pebbly beach that was their landing zone.

The plan of attack was simple enough. Special Detachment A was to close on the beach by 0900 hours local time, make a covert landing if possible, hide their craft and move out to a rally point in the hills overlooking the small valley where the airfield was located, check defenses and do a final reconnoiter of the base. By 1100 hours, H-hour as the Americans would call it, the Blagonravov would begin shelling the valley with her five- and eight- inch guns, creating enough diversion for the detachment to scramble down the other side of the hill and force the perimeter of the base.

Having breached the perimeter fence, the detachment would break apart into three-man assault squads and head for the bombers. Each squad had enough explosives, satchel charges, fragmentation grenades, and dynamite, to blow an American bomber to scrap metal pieces.

Once the bombers were put out of commission, their next objective was the ordnance bunker. Semyagin had circled this objective on the map. Rumor had it the map had come from covert recon by a Red Chinese agent, though Semyagin had a hard time believing the Chinese could do such a thing right under the Americans' noses. Once the bunker had been breached, they had explicit instructions on how to place more charges in and around the atom bombs, to ensure the weapons were destroyed without risking detonation of the devices.

This was the part of the assault that made the Starshey Leytenant nervous.

The boat rode up and over hissing swells as it steadily closed on the beach. Waves foamed and crashed over bow, slopping freezing seawater into ankle-deep pools inside. Through the freezing mist and sleet, dark hulks of mountains loomed ahead.

The surf grew rough and treacherous with crosscurrents as the helmsman piloted the boat across the waves at an angle, steering a roundabout course for the landing zone. In time, they bumped and scraped along coral outcrops as the surf pounded them toward landfall. When the water was waist deep, several soldiers hopped out and helped push the boat onshore, beaching it with straining grunts and groans.

The rest of Special Detachment A fell out and began assembling their gear. Semyagin waved his arms at the men. Quick, quick... move out...get this whale off the beach now....

They managed to drag the boat to a small rocky hollow, covering it partially with pebbles and beach sand. Not the best job he had ever seen of concealment, Semyagin thought as he mustered the detachment, but it would have to do.

The assault plan called for the detachment to move out from the landing zone and seek defensible cover for the rest of the day. Just after sundown, at 1930 hours local time, Blagonravov would begin shelling the airfield. It was Semyagin's responsibility to have his men in position for the assault by then.

The Starshey Leytenant did not know that the detachment's approach by sea and their landing on Mishida's isolated northwest shore had all been observed and noted by visual spotters. General LaSalle had ordered spotter's posts to be set up on Mishida's highest peaks the very day the atom bombs had arrived. Two sergeants of the 10th Air Police Company had watched the approach of the rubber boat, and made careful note of the detachment's landing zone and their weapons and equipment.

Even as Special Detachment A was climbing and crawling all over the icy hills of Mishida seeking cover for the day, the sergeants were back at the garrison command post, detailing what they had seen. The 10th Air Police Company spent the rest of the day firming up defense plans and checking their gear. They were well equipped to defend the airfield, with M-1s and M-3 carbines, BARs, several quad-50s on Jeeps, a bazooka and an A4 machine gun, enough fire power to hold off a few platoons if they needed to.

Sometime after 1400 hours that afternoon, Special Detachment A had located a shallow cave complex on a narrow ridge overlooking the south end of the airfield. Their movements concealed by fog and sleet showers, the unit hunkered down in the shelter of the cave and waited. Semyagin crawled from one squad to another with his map, checking maneuver plans and call signs, encouraging the men with sharp slaps on the back, making sure their gear hadn't become waterlogged or frozen in the wintry weather.

After a couple hours of this, Semyagin ordered rest for all, posting perimeter guards outside the cave to secure the area until nightfall.

Just before sundown, the first shots came.

Semyagin, startled awake from a drowsy half-sleep, shot to his feet, grabbing his rifle as he scrambled to the cave opening. Rifle shots...he told himself. A quick glance at his watch confirmed his fears. Two hours to go until Blagonravov opened up. What the hell--

A shriek pierced the air, followed by a deafening explosion. Dirt and rocks geysered into the air and rained down on the cave opening.

Mortars!

"Spread out! Take positions and cover yourselves!"

Semyagin crawled to the front of the cave, staying low as automatic weapons fire raked the side of the hill. Dense fog still blanketed the area yet whoever the enemy were, they had bracketed the unit and were zeroing in. Every mortar round and burst of machine gun fire was well placed, too well placed for Semyagin.

Somehow, they had been observed, perhaps right from the landing. In spite of the fog, the Americans knew they were there.

The volume of fire kept the Russians pinned in the cave. For the time being, Semyagin felt they had a defensible position. It would take more than a few mortar rounds to force them from the cave. The trouble was that Special Detachment A had a mission and the mission depended on following a schedule. In less than two hours, the Blagonravov would start shelling the island. That was their cover. If the detachment didn't close on the airfield at that time, their opportunity would be lost.

The ship might even abandon them on Mishida. And Semyagin knew they couldn't hold out forever.

"Starshey Leytenant," Trofimenko said, wincing as another mortar round sent rock chips flying into the cave, "how long until the ship begins shelling?"

"Not for another hour, comrade."

"What will we do until then?"

Semyagin stared straight ahead, at a pair of riflemen burrowed into man-made ditches at the foot of the cave opening. "We wait. When the shelling starts, we'll move out. Hopefully, that will keep the Americans occupied long enough for us to get down to the airfield."

At the precise moment of sundown, 1835 hours local time, Blagonravov's eight-inch guns began laying down a bombardment screen across the tops of Mishida's rocky hills. The little revetment of the cave entrance reverberated with staccato concussions as the shells peppered the hillsides.

Semyagin chanced a peek outside. In the waning light, the fog had lifted slightly. Reddish-orange bursts lit up the shadowy ridges around them. Once or twice, the Starshey Leytenant thought he saw figures moving, briefly silhouetted along the hilltops. Maybe the Americans were redeploying, seeking safer ground as the Soviet destroyer systematically raked one end of the island with a barrage of incendiary and high explosive rounds.

Now is our best chance.

"Move out! Single file...following that ridgeline over there—" Semyagin waved at a series of folds along the side of the mountain, draped like a frozen tapestry over the face of the rock. It led to a series of switchbacks, sloping down toward flatter ground and the perimeter fence of the airfield. One by one, the detachment slipped out of the cave and scurried, sliding and clawing at loose rock, as they scurried along the narrow declivity.

For ten minutes, Semyagin dared to hope their luck would hold. The Americans seemed preoccupied with the shellfire coming onto the island from offshore. Overhead, he heard the eggbeater sound of a helicopter—he had only seen pictures of the strange contraptions. Now the great clattering beast soared across the mountaintops in a blaze of red and white light, its huge rotors slashing the misty air like the devil's own scythe.

The detachment had made the flat ground just outside the concertina wire rolls of the perimeter fence when they came under a furious fusillade of small arms fire from above. Huddled in the lee of the slopes they had just negotiated, Semyagin knew their position was rapidly becoming hopeless.

They were exposed from above, in front and both sides. Volley after volley of automatic weapons fire gouged out small rockslides that came tumbling down on their position. Searchlights played across the slope, systematically sweeping every crevice and fold, until Semyagin himself got off enough rounds to put one of them out of action. The Americans didn't know exactly where they were, but they had a pretty good idea. He heard voices on the wind, moving closer.

"We're trapped!" Trofimenko said. "Pinned down—"

"Shut up!" Semyagin told him. "Fire your weapon—there! I heard something over there!" He indicated an indentation in the slope of the mountain, a fold where heavy fire had been coming from. To a sergeant beside him, he added, "Take two men and work your way back up the trail...see if you can get fire down from above. That may give the rest of us a chance to make a break for the fence—"

The sergeant was a blond farmboy from Moldavia. "At once, comrade Leytenant!" He rounded up a detail and they started out, scrambling and clawing their way up.

But the Russians were outnumbered and outgunned. Visibility was poor but the Americans had position and superior firepower. In the glow of the airfield's ramp lights, the sergeant's detail was dimly visible. One by one, the men were picked off. Each time, the man hit fell sliding back down the loose soil of the trail.

After half an hour, Semyagin and Trofimenko were the only ones left alive. Blagonravov had lifted her barrage, obviously expecting the detachment to be able to move out under cover of darkness and close on the airfield...the original plan.

Only there no longer was a Special Detachment A left to move out.

Semyagin had only two clips left for his AKM assault rifle. He rammed one home, then rolled over and got to one knee.

"I'm going to make a dash for that fence. Cover me with this—" he grabbed a dead comrade's carbine, loaded a fresh clip, then hoisted up a pair of satchel charges. "Maybe I can get to one of the planes."

"Leytenant—" Trofimenko handled the carbine clumsily. The thought of facing the Americans, the last man alive in a naval Spetsnaz detachment, pinned down on some godforsaken island in the middle of the Pacific, didn't appeal to him. Heroism was for the commissars and their propaganda posters. "Stay here...I have another idea."

Semyagin could hear voices, now only yards away, scraping along the profile of the mountain, just around the fold. Boots scraping, gear clanking....

"I hope it's a good one, my friend. We're about to be overrun and probably killed."

"We can still accomplish our mission. If we're clever. We give ourselves up. The Americans take us prisoner. Surely, they have a stockade somewhere. Once we're prisoners—" he liberated a small field knife from a dead comrade, unlaced his boots, and gingerly placed the blade in the bottom of one, then laced up again. "we wait a few hours, then work our way out. Complete the mission, from inside their base."

"You're mad. Chekists like you don't know cowdung about real combat. You think the Americans won't find that knife?"

Trofimenko shrugged. "Then we wait. Trust me, Leytenant, we won't be in the stockade for long."

"Oh, no? I suppose the Blagonravov will just send another detachment in. Didn't year hear what Admiral Chernavin said? If this mission fails, don't bother coming back. Comrade, wake up! We might as well make a dash for that fence. One of us may get inside. You take some satchel charges. I'll take some. Whoever gets through, if either of us does, get to the first plane and blow the landing gear. There are only five atom bombs. That might save one city, maybe one base. That's our mission. Nobody's coming to rescue us."

"The Chinese are."

Semyagin looked at Trofimenko. The NKVD officer was an effeminate snob, soft from years of opulent living in occupied Japan. The rigors of a combat mission had finally caused him to snap.

"Get ready to cover me, comrade. And stop fantasizing—"

"It's not a fantasy." Quickly, Trofimenko explained his collaboration with Jiang Chen Li. "The Chinese are forming an assault team, just like this one. If we give ourselves up, we can help them from inside, when they begin their assault."

"And just when will that be?"

Trofimenko shrugged. "It has to be soon. We've shared intelligence. Jiang knows what I know. If the Chinese plan to stop the atomic mission, they have to strike soon."

Semyagin shook his head. "I don't know why I should believe you. I'm a soldier. My job is to kill the enemy and accomplish the mission."

"And you're trained, as I am, to infiltrate the enemy and attack from his rear. That's all we're doing, comrade. Attacking from the rear. With you and me inside the compound, and the Chinese Sharp Swords attacking from beyond, the Americans will never get a plane off the ground."

In the end, Semyagin saw little option but to agree with the Chekist officer.

Trofimenko and Semyagin offered no resistance, when their position was overrun by a squad of carbine-wielding Air Police five minutes later. Their hands were tied and they were bundled into a Jeep, which pulled up alongside the airfield fence a few minutes later.

The stockade turned out to be a set of plywood and beam enclosures in the corner of a hangar. Semyagin and Trofimenko were put into separate cells. Marched down to the last cell of a row of five, the NKVD officer passed one that was occupied.

He was stunned to see none other than Major Lyle Kitchens in the third from the last cell.

What the hell?

Once the guards had left, locking a barred door at the end of the hall, the Russian whispered as loudly as he dared, up the line of cells.

"Major...Major Kitchens...is that you...?"

At first, there was no response. Finally, a hoarse voice croaked out.

"Yeah...Fred...it's me. What the heck are you doing here?"

They whispered back and forth at each other. Two other cells were occupied. Semyagin had been put into one. The other held the pilot, Major Cartwright, who had shuttled Kitchens over to Mishida.

Trofimenko explained the attempted Soviet assault on the airfield complex.

"We tried to board the Japanese freighter...Tetsuko's freighter. But your Navy ran us off. Then we landed a naval Spetsnaz team on the island. But we were outgunned. All but two were killed--"

Kitchens paced the eight by ten foot cell, subconsciously counting out the steps. "That's bad, Fred. Real bad. Gallant Flag's ready to fly. I saw the bombs. The planes are here. And we can't stop 'em."

"Surely, your own Army will come," the Russian said.

"The Army can't stop tripping over its own feet," Kitchens hated to admit that but it was true. He didn't add that maybe their best hope was Washington's annoyance when Kitchens didn't make his daily report. That might get the pot boiling. Bureaucracies didn't take kindly to missed reports. "Looks like we'll have to break out of this pigpen on our own."

A red-haired, freckled Air Police sergeant unlocked the barred door at the end of the corridor and stuck his head in.

"Y'all pipe down in there, will you? No talking! Or I'll stuff grease rags down your throats!" He slammed and re-locked the door.

This is just great, Kitchens thought.

"Major...?" It was Trofimenko, his whispered voice barely audible.

"What?"

"We won't have to wait for long."

"What do you mean by that?"

"The Chinese are also planning an assault on this base. Before he left, Jiang described it to me. Chinese special commandos. They're called the Sharp Swords."

"That's supposed to make me feel better? The Chinese are the enemy, for Chrissakes. I don't think they'll be getting the red carpet treatment if they show up."

The Russian was ever optimistic. "With any luck, our comrade will be here in time to get us out. And stop the planes from taking off."

"Your comrade." Kitchens was mildly hopeful at the prospect. It was more than a little ironic. Lyle Kitchens was embarrassed at the prospect of having to be rescued by a by a Red Chinese assault team to stop a renegade group of American generals from atom bombing China and starting World War III.

He stopped pacing the cell and sat dejectedly on the side of the mattress. To himself, he muttered, "The world has gone crazier than I can deal with now."

He wasn't sure any longer just who the real enemy was.

Sunday, 1-28-51

Tokyo

7:30 a.m.

General of the Army Douglas MacArthur chuckled at the Sad Sack cartoon in Stars and Stripes and continued perusing the newspaper when he heard a sharp rap at his office door.

"Come." The Supreme Commander peered over the top of the newspaper as a sergeant brought in a classified pouch, which he handed over to the general.

"Top Priority dispatch, sir. Just came in on the wire. From Washington."

MacArthur thanked the courier and dismissed him. He had come early to his spartan office on the sixth floor of the Dai Ichi Building this chilly Sunday morning, knowing that important decisions were going to be made today. He had had a restless, sleepless night, constantly awakening Jean as he tossed and turned in their bed at the Imperial Hotel suite.

Today, history will record the first battle with Communism was joined, he reminded himself, as he tore open the red-bordered envelope.

Critical decisions regarding the war would have to be made today. Indeed, whether to authorize the launch of the Gallant Flag mission, and set in motion a series of unstoppable events that could ultimately consume them all was the issue. Douglas MacArthur was fully aware of the fateful consequences of today's decisions.

Yet, no victory was ever gained without risk. Hadn't Inchon shown that? Why was Washington so blind to the realities of this new war? Korea could never be wrestled away from the Communists while the Reds had protected sanctuary in China and Russia. No, history was at a great hinge today, and Douglas MacArthur knew without doubt that he was the pin around which all would move.

We have in our hands the power to forever alter the balance of power in the world, the force needed to deal the Communists a crushing blow, a blow from which they can never recover.

To Douglas MacArthur, it was simply inconceivable that intelligent and determined men in Washington would not seize the opportunity that History had given them.

Intrigued by the cable, SCAP opened the pouch and slit the envelope in half, neatly extracting the contents. As he read, his lips sagged in dismay and all the blood drained from his face.

"By direction of the President, you are hereby ordered to--"

He re-read the cable four times, unwilling to believe this could be happening. The cable had been sent by Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. It was a summons, pure and simple. He was to leave Tokyo on Tuesday morning and fly halfway across the Pacific, for a midday meeting with Harry Truman in Hawaii. A reprise of their meeting last fall at Wake Island.

The ostensible purpose of the summons was stated clearly enough: To discuss Far East and Korean strategy in all respects and come up with options for turning the tide of the war, winning the war, or failing that, extracting UN forces from the Korean peninsula with a minimum of casualties.

MacArthur read again, seeing more meaning between the lines. Omar Bradley was a master of the terse statement, yet SCAP suspected there was a wealth of subterfuge in the few words Bradley had committed to the cable. It was transparent that Harry Truman, the spineless haberdasher from Kansas City, had ulterior motives in calling a personal meeting at this critical time.

Perhaps, MacArthur thought, the President would even relieve him of command in the Far East.

SCAP began pacing his small office, sucking on an unlit corncob pipe, hands folded behind him. He was in a quandary. What should he do?

The decision on Gallant Flag was at hand. Was the mission really needed? Matt Ridgeway had finally blunted the Reds' latest offensive, at horrendous cost, in a valiant stand outside Wonju. Now Eighth Army had the Reds backpedaling toward the 38th Parallel. And Rosie O'Donnell's bombers and fighters had the skies all to themselves, save for the occasional scuffle up North with the damnable MiGs. Something would have to be done about them.

MacArthur stopped at the window and peered out through morning mists at the moats, the low black walls and greensward of the Imperial Palace. From the plaza facing the Hibiya-dori, there were two major gates, each massive, at least fifteen feet tall and twenty feet wide. Each gate was covered with a tile roof, done in the ancient style. Each gate was approached by a bridge across the languid waters of the inner moat. Once drawbridges, these were now permanent and open to automobile and foot traffic. They were called the Seimon gate and the Sakishita gate. MacArthur had often watched the traffic flow in and out of the gates for hours on end, fascinated with the pulsing flow of Japanese imperial life.

Hirohito was the eternal pivot of this sometimes frenetic traffic in and around the Palace complex. Hirohito's life had been filled with hard and historic decisions. Yet the Japanese Emperor was a study in inner calm, outward placidity and steely resolve. MacArthur had been mightily impressed with the man, who had on his own decided to do what no Emperor had done in hundreds of years...meet with the gaijin conqueror on his own grounds. Offer himself up to the mercy of a victorious foreign general, come what may.

That had taken real guts.

The decision on Gallant Flag was there to be made. The planes and the crews and the bombs were ready. The targets had been picked and General Craft had assured him the pilots' target folders were updated with the latest intelligence G2 could provide.

If he approved and the mission launched before sunrise on Monday, 29 January, he would need to remain at the Dai Ichi for a post-strike assessment and to make command decisions regarding UN operations throughout the theater, to counter any moves the Russians and the Chinese might make. Ridgeway knew nothing about Gallant Flag.

Or should the strike be postponed while he met with Truman in Hawaii? If the strike were postponed and something were to happen to him, then the opportunity to deal a mortal blow to Communism in the Far East would be lost.

History would never forgive him.

MacArthur started pacing again. He needed counsel. Suspecting a setup, either by Truman or his enemies on the Joint Chiefs, he ordered his aide Colonel Bunker to place a call to General Paul Craft, summoning him from his quarters in the Natani Hotel nearby.

Craft arrived in half an hour, smelling of aftershave and soap. By then, MacArthur had already made up his mind. He told Craft about the summons.

"The President wants to meet with me, Paul." MacArthur sat down behind his desk, steepled his hands and examined them. "Two days from now, in Hawaii. I can't leave my responsibilities here but--" he opened a desk drawer and pulled out a writing tablet. "--I can't directly disobey the Commander-in-Chief either." SCAP began writing longhand on the tablet; MacArthur wrote all his memoranda and orders out on tablets, before they were transcribed onto official Army letterhead. He scribbled for a few moments, then read over the words, satisfied.

"I'm delegating provisional authority to you to approve the launch of Gallant Flag."

Craft was stunned. "I appreciate the General's confidence, sir, but...I'm not sure that--"

"Nonsense. I'm sure. As soon as the mission, the weather and all other aspects are ready, the strike will be authorized. But not later than 5 February. Targets are as approved before." MacArthur handed the written note to Craft to read. "This is just a precaution...in case something happens to me."

Craft scanned the writing, his heart beating hard. To have approval authority handed to him was unprecedented, and probably illegal. MacArthur would normally have delegated such authority to someone like George Stratemeyer, of Far Eastern Air Forces, or Ridgeway, commander of the Eighth Army. Somebody operational. Except, of course, that neither man knew a whit about Gallant Flag.

"Give me a status report, Paul." MacArthur leaned back in his wooden chair, folding his hands over his stomach. His teeth clenched the unlit corncob pipe, gnawing on the stem. He seemed to be staring through Craft, through the walls, at some faraway scene known only to him.

Craft explained current operations at Mishida. "Right now, sir, the Mark VI bombs are all in place. They're being loaded aboard the aircraft even as we speak." He related the overnight attempt by the Navy destroyer Knox to board Orient Star and its subsequent collision at sea with a small task force of Soviet ships. "No doubt looking for the same thing, General. Of course, the bombs had already been taken to the airfield. But the collision's bad. It makes things visible, brings in investigators and questions about what's going on at Mishida. That could be bad."

MacArthur had closed his eyes, slowly shaking his head. "Paul, we must go in the next two to three days, or the opportunity will be lost. I read G2 reports last night that the Red Chinese are massing front line troops north of Seoul for a counterattack against Eighth Army. If we don't choke off the Reds' supplies at the source, we're looking at massive casualties, even if the UN can hold."

Craft agreed, continuing with his status report. "The bombs are in good order, General. One possible hitch was the arrest of Dr. Albert Ranier at Eniwetok a few days ago. He was to come to Mishida and give the bombs a final once-over. But by stroke of good luck, that Army investigator--"

"Kitchens?"

"Yes, sir, that's the one, sprung Ranier from the Navy brig and brought him along to Mishida, intending to close down the operation."

MacArthur frowned. "Kitchens could be dangerous. He's got authority from General Collins and the Secretary of Defense. Handle him carefully."

Craft gave the General back his written note. "Clayton LaSalle and the base commander have the situation under control. Kitchens was rounded up right away. Administrative detention."

"Is that wise?"

Craft was adamant. "The Major violated a general lockdown on all flight operations. He conned some pilot at Kadena into dropping him off in one of their liaison L2's. Played right into our hands. We can hold him for willfully disobeying the lockdown order, suborning a local pilot, and several other charges as well. It's all perfectly legal, General. The base commander's within his rights on this one."

"Still, caution is advisable. Kitchens has powerful allies in Washington." Where I do not, he didn't have to add. "This Ranier fellow...he's the atomic physicist you've been working with in the States?"

"Yes, sir, out of Los Alamos. He's the one who helped get the bombs made, added to the Greenhouse tests and then removed from the shot series. Without him, Gallant Flag would be dead in the water."

"Courageous man. A patriot. If only there were more like him."

"General, Dr. Ranier should be inspecting and testing the bombs in the Mishida ordnance bunker all day today. Sometime after midnight tonight, they'll be loaded aboard the B-29s."

"And the crews?" MacArthur asked.

Craft smiled. "Eager to go and proud to participate. They want to bloody some Red noses but good."

MacArthur nodded gravely. "Glad to hear it. Show me the mission details."

Craft opened his own briefcase and spread out an aeronautical map of the Far East. "Sir, General LaSalle has assigned the code name Flagpole to the mission, for radio communication. Final approval should be sent by issuing the command to 'Raise all flags.'

MacArthur traced the plotted routes of the aircraft. "Launch from Mishida...here?"

"Yes, sir. Provisional launch time, pending your final approval, would be at 0200 hours Monday morning. The five aircraft take off, each carrying one Mark VI. They fly this heading, at low altitudes, below five thousand feet to avoid radar tracking from Itazuke. That base in the south of Kyushu covers most approach corridors into Korea; it's used by just about all the B-29 missions up North. We want to stay out of their sight as long as we can."

"This point is circled...what is this?" MacArthur tapped a large circle in the middle of the Sea of Japan.

"Breakoff point, sir. Latitude 35 degrees North, Longitude 124 degrees East...about two hundred and fifty miles southwest of Inchon. Here, the bombers will steer onto separate courses, direct headings for their targets at Tsingtao, Port Arthur, Harbin, Shenyang, and Peking. They begin a slow climb up to bomb-drop altitude, about 30,000 feet. That slow climb is designed to keep them below Chinese and Russian radar as long as possible, at least until they're over the mainland."

"Inchon..." MacArthur murmured. He remembered what the Joint Chiefs had said about the plan to invade behind the North Korean lines. Too risky...the tides are too variable...we can't get Marines and fire support close enough...they'll be butchered once ashore...there's no beach... Every objection turned out to be wrong, just as he had assured them. Inchon had been a stupendous gamble, no doubt about it, but the very audacity of the operation had stunned the enemy and given Walton Walker's beleaguered troops in Pusan hope. Inchon had been a stupendous victory too.

"Gallant Flag will be the new Inchon," MacArthur decided. "A whole new war...one the enemy can never hope to win. Paul, mark my words...our boys will be home by Easter, eating ham and sweet potatoes. I'm sure of it."

"Sir, all we are missing is your approval for takeoff and final arming of the bombs. LaSalle wants to do that while the aircraft are in flight. The aircraft can still be recalled right up to the breakoff point. We've given the separation point its own code name."

"And that is?"

"Point Overlord, sir. To commemorate our greatest victory."

MacArthur smiled faintly. Who said the greatest victory had to be in Europe?

"There isn't going to be any recall, Paul." The Supreme Commander made up his mind, and sat up straight in his chair. He studied the office, as if taking in the details of this exact moment, noting and memorizing everything. With his fingers, he traced out each bomber's route from Point Overlord to target: Harbin, Shenyang, Port Arthur, Tsingtao. Finally, his index finger ended up at the Red Chinese capital...Peking.

Truman may have me court-martialed. But History will show that I was right. MacArthur abruptly stood up. Now I know how he felt back in the summer of '45, deciding on Hiroshima.

Grim, yet determined, MacArthur slid the written note delegating provisional authority back over to Craft. In a deep, sonorous voice, SCAP said:

"Flagpole is approved, Paul. Launch tonight. 0200 hours."

Sunday, 1-28-51

Mishida Island

9:25 p.m.

The bomb-loading pit at the end of the runway was bathed in brilliant floodlights as ordnance technicians swarmed around the first Mark VI to be trucked over from the bunker, the first atom bomb to prepared for hoisting up into the bomb bay of Flagpole Leader.

General Clayton LaSalle watched critically as the B-29 was gingerly towed by a tractor over the ten-foot depression in the ramp, where the dull gray cylinder squatted, waiting to be lifted. Flagpole Leader was a middle-aged Superfort, a 20th Air Force veteran of fifteen missions over the Japanese Empire's fire-ravaged cities and a handful of missions pulverizing Red positions up North in Korea. Her nose was colorfully stenciled with a scantily clad pinup girl who bore a vague resemblance to Rita Hayworth, except for the lightning bolts clamped between her teeth. Bouncin' Betty was going to be LaSalle's ride to glory and he had a special interest in seeing the huge fission weapon loaded properly.

This baby's headed for Peking and if our aim's any good, right down Mao Tse-tung's old kisser.

The winching operation was slow and tedious. As LaSalle watched, a staff sergeant came running up, out of breath.

"General...radar's tracking a fleet right off our shore! Northeast shore...couple of miles out, four, maybe five ships. It's a Navy task force and they're hailing us now!"

LaSalle's blood suddenly ran cold. "What are they saying, Sergeant?"

The sergeant read from handscribbling on a scrap of paper. "Cease all flight operations at once. We are landing a Marine force to secure the airfield.'"

LaSalle scowled, handed the paper back to the sergeant. "Tell Hickam to get the AAA batteries ready. Get his men deployed...mortars, recoilless, everything they've got. This looks like the friggin' cavalry."

"Yes, sir..." the sergeant dashed off on a dead run back to the main hangar complex.

"C'mon, c'mon, can't you hurry this up!" LaSalle bellowed. "We've got unwelcome company."

The ordnance technicians were sweating and straining to steady the bomb as it swayed on its braces.

"Sorry, sir, we're trying to line up this damn thing with the shackles but she keeps twisting..."

LaSalle knew they had to get going. The base Air Police couldn't hope to hold off a Marine landing force for long. And the destroyers would be in gunnery range soon, if they weren't already. He needed to get a better tactical picture.

"Get this thing winched up and locked down in the next few minutes." LaSalle jumped into a Jeep and sped off toward the Operations building. Loading the five aircraft of Gallant Flag would take at least three or more hours. If the Navy and the Marines weren't going to give them that much time, Colonel Hickam and his Air Police garrison would just have to bloody a few noses out there and make them a little cautious about landing.

Within the last hour, Clayton LaSalle had received a fateful wire from Tokyo, one he had been waiting on for a very long time.

The wire had been simple and direct: Raise all flags.

LaSalle hadn't wasted a minute since then, getting the bombs trucked out to the loading pit and the five B-29's powered up enough to be towed out of their hangars, lined up on the ramp and staged for the ten-minute tow over to the hoisting station. He'd put Albert Ranier to work hurriedly checking the bombs out at the ordnance bunker, even as they were being winched onto flatbed trailers. Ranier checked each bomb electrically: detonation circuit, delay circuits, arming and fusing circuits, all relays, continuity from capacitors and batteries, the works. He gave a close visual inspection of the breech plugs as well, using specially machined calipers to measure their dimensions, then verifying that they would indeed fit the opening in the bomb casing when the time came to finally arm the device. Half an hour with each bomb, and Ranier pronounced himself satisfied.

His own children were ready to graduate and the Czech physicist watched each bomb as it was loaded aboard the trailer, his face a mixture of pride and sadness. Like giving away five daughters, LaSalle figured.

He had originally planned to bypass the bunker checkout and give the bombs a once-over at the loading pit but Ranier had vetoed that idea. "These are sensitive devices," the physicist insisted. "Electrically complex...I need my equipment to verify all circuits are working."

Sensitive devices, my ass, LaSalle thought. They're nine-thousand pound brutes. But he relented and held off trucking the devices away, even though it delayed loading by several hours. They couldn't afford to wait much longer. With the Navy bearing down on the island and increasingly strident inquiries coming in from FEAF in Japan, there was no time to waste.

The plan had been to load the bombs by 1200 hours that afternoon, after checking them out on the ramp, then brief the crews by 1400 hours and let the boys get a little shut-eye before the big event that night. The plan was to launch that evening between midnight and 0100 hours, weather and SCAP approval permitting. The weather was nominal and they had approval from MacArthur now.

But he hadn't counted on the Russians landing a team of saboteurs.

They had been lucky the Red assault team had been easily overcome by the island's Air Police garrison. Even luckier, perhaps, that one of the prisoners was probably a spy wanted throughout Japan. That could prove useful. But the delays hurt. Bomb loading hadn't begun until after one o'clock that afternoon.

It was not the kind of procedure you wanted to try in the dark.

LaSalle watched as the tow truck eased Bouncin' Betty over the loading pit. LaSalle had taken the B-29 up for a check ride late Saturday afternoon, ignoring General Stratemeyer's grounding order. As long as he stayed below a thousand feet, Kadena tower wouldn't see him. He just wanted to get a feel for how she handled with the simulated weight of an atom bomb in her belly.

As he had told Don Jacobs afterward, "like a pregnant cow." But she would have to do.

The weather was forecast to be good. A colleague from the 307th Met office at Kadena had wired him the details on Manchuria, northern China and Korea. Peking looked good, with some high, thin cloud cover scattered at 15,000 feet. Shenyang and Harbin were okay, as a front was moving down from Siberia, presaging another arctic blast. Port Arthur and Tsingtao were marginal, due to snow conditions.

As Bouncin' Betty was gingerly positioned over the loading pit and the device made ready for hoisting, Major Don Jacobs drove up in a borrowed Jeep. The major was sandy-haired, a California farm boy from the Central Valley, muscular and clear-eyed. Jacobs would be piloting Hellzapoppin', radio call sign Flagpole One. His target would Shenyang, the big supply center in southern Manchuria. A critical target.

Jacobs stood beside the General for a few moments, eyeing the B-29's ground maneuvers with a critical face. "Ever see two cows making love, General?"

"Can't say that I have, Major."

Jacobs nodded sagely. "It's just about as ticklish as this operation. Any problems?"

LaSalle said nothing as the first Mark VI was winched up into Betty's bomb bay and made fast to the bomb rack. Sway braces were swung into place and a small detail of technicians crawled all around the scaffolding inside, making electrical connections.

"None so far." He indicated Albert Ranier, now poring over an open circuit panel on the next bomb, secured to a nearby truck. "The good doctor has pronounced all our babies healthy and ready to go."

Jacobs eased forward, to peer up into the bomb bay, noting a harness of cable draped over the device. "We're going to arm these bastards in the air?"

LaSalle nodded. "I don't want to take out half of Okinawa if one of us crashes on takeoff. You've seen the breech plug?"

"Back at the ordnance bunker. One of the techs showed it to me."

LaSalle motioned Jacobs over to the next bomb, now being readied for winching down into loading position in the pit. "See that opening on the side? That's where your plug goes. It's pure plutonium...makes the thing go critical when the detonators fire. You've read the loading and arming procedure?"

"Only about a hundred times, General. Sounds to me like my weaponeer is going to need the hands of a brain surgeon to do it."

"And be able to climb around the scaffolding up there like a monkey too, while the plane is in flight. Ranier tells me the plug's a real tight fit, by design. It's got to fit in just so. Trouble is, sometimes the plutonium expands just a little. That makes fitting it

into the plug hole a lot of fun."

"So what do we do if it won't fit?"

LaSalle looked over at the Californian. "Make it fit, Major."

Jacobs swallowed, audibly enough to be heard several feet away.

"General, I was studying the maps this morning, plotting power and distance curves, like you said yesterday. My target's way the hell up north, something like twenty-two hundred miles up and back if everything works out. Tony's going even further, to Harbin." Major Tony Scopes, out of the 19th Bomb Group at Guam's Andersen Field, was Flagpole Three, flying Ace's Wild. "General, the '29 can fly on fumes upwards of thirty two, maybe thirty three hundred miles, but we don't have a lot of margin with these big payloads. We did the math last night. Getting back...coming back to Mishida is going to be tough. If the winds are against us...or we have to make more than a couple of bombs runs--"

"I know what you're saying, Major." LaSalle had done the math himself. He was convinced the Superforts could handle the Mark VI load even at these ranges. True, Fat Man and Little Boy were a hair lighter. But if Paul Tibbets and Chuck Sweeney could do it in August '45, so could they.

"Major, Paul Tibbets used to talk about a technique that was real controversial among B-29 pilots. It was called 'flying the step.' He and Sweeney both demonstrated it. In theory, any competent pilot could do it and you only wanted to do it when fuel and range were a critical issue."

"I heard some scuttlebutt about that. Sounded more like a wing and a prayer to me."

"It's a pretty simple trick." LaSalle fashioned an imaginary plane with his hands. "You're on the homeward leg. You're running out of fuel, but you've still got altitude, say 30,000 feet. Do this: keep your power settings steady and put the aircraft into a gradual descent, not more than a few degrees. The plane picks up a fraction more airspeed at the cost of some altitude, without using any more fuel or power. Then you level off and go through the cycle again. You keep that increase in airspeed and maybe even add to it by starting another gradual descent. Sort of like flying down a staircase, step by step."

"If you have the altitude," Jacobs observed. "After what happened on our little recon hops up North last month, fighting off MiGs and such, I'm not sure how much altitude I'll have coming out of the target area. If we have to drop down on the deck to shake off MiGs, then climb back up--" Jacobs shrugged. "Uses a hell of a lot of fuel, General."

LaSalle couldn't argue that point. "It's doable, Major. I've done the same calculations. Margins are tight but the target's juicy and the Old Man wants it obliterated."

Jacobs knew when to shut up. "No argument from my crew. The boys are rarin' to go kill Reds. I just wish we could have done this last summer, when the bastards were knocking on the gates of Pusan."

"It's the Pearl Harbor syndrome, Major Jacobs. Just like December '41. We have to get kicked in the teeth by hordes of little yellow gooks before we get off our butts and fight." He jammed his hands in his flight jacket, shutting out the chill wind blowing across the tarmac. "With any luck, Gallant Flag will end this fight for good."

They witnessed loading operations for the next several hours. One by one, Mark VI bombs were trucked the two-mile distance from the ordnance bunker out to the loading pit at the end of Runway 08. After each bomb was lowered into the pit, a tow truck rolled another B-29 into position, its bomb bay directly over the pit. Under a sliver of a moon and intermittent sleet showers mixed with steady cold winds off the Pacific, LaSalle and Jacobs followed each bomb as it was given a final check by Albert Ranier and a detail of electricians and ordnance techs, verifying battery power and all connections. Under Ranier's guidance, the first steps of the arming process were completed, as the circuits from the batteries aboard each bomb were closed, allowing the batteries to fully charge banks of capacitors. When the detonation signal came, the capacitors would discharge into the explosive lens ring around the plutonium sphere, initiating the detonation sequence.

Each bomber was towed forward and loaded in turn: Bouncin' Betty, Hellzapoppin', Eight-Ball, Aces Wild and Victorious Vicki.

One by one, each bomber was maneuvered over the pit and its bomb hoisted up, where riggers made fast the shackles and the doors were cycled closed to check clearance. Once the bombers had been towed back to the ramp beside the hangar complex, the final plutonium breech plugs would be loaded aboard, stored in lead containers by the crawl tunnel door, forward of the bomb bay.

The plugs would be inserted in flight, fully arming the bomb once Point Overlord had successfully been reached.

It was just after midnight when the last of the bombs had been loaded. Eight-Ball, piloted by Major Chester "Kit" Carson, radio call sign Flagpole Two, was delayed over an hour, when Ranier discovered a loose connection had to be replaced and re-mounted on the arming circuit panel. Even as the replacement was being screwed in, a last minute check of the fusing batteries revealed that one of the boxes was dead and out of juice. LaSalle paced nervously as the whole airfield was scoured for a replacement battery. Eventually, one was turned up back in the ordnance bunker and Jeeped out to the loading pit.

While this was going on, Major Hickam of the Air Police garrison, came up in his own Jeep.

Hickam was grim. "General, there are two Air Force C-54's inbound from Yokota circling the island right now. Both are requesting permission to land. One of them's got General Stratemeyer onboard."

"Stratemeyer?" LaSalle sucked in a deep breath. He hadn't figured on having the Commander in Chief of Far Eastern Air Forces breathing down his neck at this late hour.

"What does he want?"

"He won't say precisely, sir." Hickam was more than a little unnerved himself. "We've been trying to put them off with every excuse we can think of--one of the sergeants even suggested killing the ramp lighting, telling 'em we've had a power failure." Hickam shrugged. "But the pilot's pretty insistent. We're running out of excuses."

LaSalle was thinking fast. "No way can we let that plane land, Major. There just might be a few platoons of soldiers on those planes, with orders to take over the base. Where's that Navy task force now?"

Hickam called back to the tower on the Jeep radio and got an answer. "Two miles off our northeastern shore. Probably full of Marines, waiting for dawn, too."

"My thinking exactly," LaSalle said. "A coordinated assault on the island. Trying to catch us with our pants down, still loading and gassing up." LaSalle assured Hickam they hadn't come this far only to have Stratemeyer or the Navy spoil the party. He made a quick decision.

"Tell the tower to categorically refuse permission to land those C-54s."

"On what grounds, General? The sergeant's been talking directly with Stratemeyer and he's a little anxious about his future in the Air Force."

"Hell, tell 'em we're performing hazardous ordnance loading at this time. Mission up North tomorrow. That's the basic truth anyway. Tell them that. They'll have to divert to Kadena and wait until we're through."

Hickam saluted. "Yes, sir." He hopped back in his Jeep and sped off.

Fifteen minutes later, LaSalle had begun to breathe a little easier as the Mark VI's fusing battery was replaced and wired in. Eight-Ball was good to go and her bomb bay doors were finally cycled shut. The tow truck began maneuvering the 135,000-pound bomber slowly back down the taxiway toward the bright lights of the hangar.

LaSalle walked to his Jeep but was intercepted by the squealing tires of another Jeep skidding on the tarmac behind him. It was Hickam again, running up, out of breath.

"Good news, sir! They bought it. Both planes are diverting to Kadena. The sergeant said Stratemeyer came on the line and cussed them up a blue streak too."

LaSalle sat down in the Jeep's front seat, gripping and releasing the steering wheel, trying to squeeze the tension out of his neck and shoulders. God, hold them off just long to get me airborne, that's all I ask.

"Glad to hear it, Major. We're due for some better luck. It'll take them a few hours to get over here from Kadena anyway. By the time our visitors come calling, Gallant Flag will be airborne and long gone." He didn't have to mention that Mishida's very isolation worked in their favor as well. The island base was reachable only by sea or air.

He figured the Navy would land their Marines anyway, regardless of tower permission.

LaSalle realized ruefully, it won't be the first time Mishida's been invaded by American troops.

With the bombs now successfully loaded and the B-29s on their way back to revetted parking positions along the ramp, LaSalle had one last detail to attend to. He told Hickam to make sure the guard force on the ramp was beefed-up for the next few hours. "I don't expect the Marines to come until after daybreak, but add men to the detail anyway. And see they're properly armed. It's just possible we may have to takeoff from here under fire."

"I'll see to it immediately, sir."

LaSalle checked his watch. Nearly 0100 hours. Time for the final mission briefing.

Clayton LaSalle drove back down the main runway in the darkness, his eyes sweeping in the scene. In less than two hours, if all went well, a flight of five B-29 bombers would come barreling down this same runway, armed with the Devil's own devices, dealing death to the Reds by the millions. He was proud and a little anxious, as he had been before every mission he'd ever flown for LeMay in the good old days of the 20th. The same tickle on the back of his neck, the same dryness in his throat, as if his own body were already somehow on the high-oxygen air bottles used for long-distance flights. He could taste it, the same parched coppery flavor at the back of his throat.

God help me but I love this.

LaSalle headed back to the hangar, not realizing that less than three miles away, in the darkened command center of the U.S.S. Sicily (CVE-118), Admiral Ray Harkins had just given permission for his embarked battalion landing team of U.S. Third Marines to finish gearing up for a sunrise amphibious assault on the airfield complex.
CHAPTER 27

Sunday, January 28, 1951

Near Mishida Island

11:50 p.m.

The first elements of the Third Marines' landing force scaled Sicily's assault ropes and headed shoreward in their amphtracs just before midnight. The objective was a narrow spit of rocky beach along the island's northwest ramparts—known in the landing force planning sessions as Navajo Beach—an altogether forbidding swath of black volcanic tuff in the lee of severe cliffs that ran down almost to the water's edge. The mission was simple enough—at least, Captain Jim Wright, the landing force commander thought so: Land a company-sized force of Third Marines on Navajo Beach, traverse the rugged cliffs ringing the northern half of the island and close on the airfield that was the cause of all the fuss. Aerial and other forms of intelligence said the complex was guarded by a lightly armed force of Air Police.

Jim Wright hoped that was true. It was bad enough for the Marines to be asked to conduct a live-fire assault against fellow Americans.

As the amphtracs churned through heavy seas toward their objective—only the seaward cliffs were dimly visible in the wan moonlight—Wright ran over the stages of the assault in his mind, and the timetable to achieve them. Admiral Harkins and Colonel Vought had emphasized speed over everything else. Wright knew from the briefings that a renegade force of American pilots had somehow seized some atom bombs and were planning on conducting an unauthorized strike on North Korea or China. In the back of his mind, he thought the story unlikely. It was more probable that the renegade atom bomb crap was just a cover story for something else...and not a particularly convincing one at that. Nobody in his right mind would try such a cockamamie stunt.

In any case, speed of assault was vital. The plan called for the Marine landing force to secure the airfield not more than two hours after the landing, and their primary objective on breaching the perimeter fence was to secure the runway, cratering it if necessary with mortars and special satchel charges they had brought along. Wright was then to detach several fire teams each to cover the B-29 bombers parked at the ramp. Intel said there were at least five. With the runway out of commission and the bombers secured, the landing force would then proceed to extend control to the rest of the complex...the hangars and operations buildings and the ordnance bunker said to be nearby. The assault force would have to capture and hold the airfield complex until dawn, at which time Sicily would launch a squadron of her Corsairs to provide covering fire support.

Captain Jim Wright held on as the coxswain beached the amphtrac with a teeth-jarring crunch. The ramp dropped down and the force commander shouldered his M-1 and yelled over the crashing surf:

"Fall out! Head for the cliffs and keep down!"

All three amphtracs beached within thirty seconds of each other and the Marines poured out on the run and sprinted under heavy loads the fifty feet or so to the bottom of the cliffs.

Unknown to Wright and the rest of his Marines, they were not alone that evening on the shores of Mishida Island. Less than six miles away, about five thousand yards off Mishida's rocky southwestern shores, a vintage Soviet Zulu-class submarine had just surfaced in the heaving swells and dispatched an assault boat full of People's Liberation Army commandos.

The assault boat was vigorously rowed through the pounding surf toward a narrow ledge of beach and dragged up onto higher ground, before being hauled into a declivity between massive berms of hard basaltic rock. The Sharp Swords gathered up their gear and began a quick reconnaissance of the area.

Fifteen men in all, the unit was in reality composed of elite and carefully selected members of the 1st Battalion, 347th Regiment, 116th Division of the 38th Field Army. Thirteenth Army Group, commanded by General Zeng Zesheng, was nominally in charge of the unit. The assault commander was none other than Major Jiang Chen Li.

Their mission: the same as the Third Marines. Close on the pirate American airfield in the central valley of the island and sabotage the atomic strike mission.

The Red Chinese were fully aware of the presence of the Marines and the Navy task force standing offshore to the north. Their plan was to destroy the American bombers before dawn, before the Americans could bring the full weight of their firepower to bear. Jiang and his squad commanders had assumed the Marines were there to head them off and defend the airfield.

Captain Wright waited ten minutes for his scout teams to return.

"This is the right beach, sir," said Sergeant Rod Givens, pointing back toward a narrow path angling up into the hills. "That path's the one our aerial photos got two days ago. It switches back and forth until about halfway up that mountain."

"And the cut's right where G2 said it would be," added Corporal Mark Martin. He made a visual of the path with his hands. "Real narrow, pretty tight squeeze. We ought to secure the ridge overhead, before we take it."

"Agreed," said Wright. "I don't want any gooks pouring fire down on our heads. Sergeant, set up a flanking squad to cover us in that pass. We'll have to go through single-file, so we'll be spread out. I'll get Sergeant Preston to cover our butts while we move through."

"Yes, sir." Both men sprinted away, while Wright gathered the troops to move out.

The trek through Mishida's coastal range took about an hour. The pass was dark, slippery with ice and wind gusts played havoc with visibility, not that Mishida offered much to see anyway.

Not my idea of a tropical vacation spot, Wright told himself, as he negotiated the rocky decline coming out of the pass. Why couldn't these jokers have built their damn airfield on Tahiti? They had made it through the pass with only minor injuries—a pair of sprained ankles and some cuts from a small rockslide—when the pass widened out and the island's main valley opened up before them, ablaze with light.

Wright motioned his men back against the cliffside, aware they might be silhouetting themselves. He let his eyes take in the sight, seeking a way down and some obvious axis for the assault to follow. On first sight, there were none.

Somehow, they had to approach the airfield, breech the perimeter fence, seize the single runway and secure the B-29s parked along the ramp, all in less than two hours. It was a tactical nightmare. Airbases always were...he'd found that out slugging it out with Japanese sappers on Saipan and Guam in late '44 and '45. Wright could see nothing but open, relatively well-lit grassland and tarmac below them. Perfect fields of fire, depending on what the base guard force had. Nothing to give cover, nothing to make up intermediate objectives along the way. His orders were to seize the airfield and establish complete control by 0500 hours Monday morning, shutting down any possibility of air operations until the Air Force could land its own contingent. General Stratemeyer had a sizeable force of Air Police troops with him but they had been forced to divert to Kadena on Okinawa Island...thirty minutes away by air. It would be up the U.S. Marines to take the base, minimizing casualties—the 'enemy' was after all American—minimizing damage to the field and its structures and securing the aircraft and the bombs.

Somehow the Marines always wound up doing everybody else's dirty laundry.

Easier said than done, Wright thought ruefully. It was a cinch the Marines had more men and firepower than any possibly hostile garrison force on the base. Colonel

Vought had even knocked around the idea of giving an ultimatum to the base force, giving them a chance to surrender before the assault started. Not a good idea, tactically, Wright had pointed out. And there wasn't time anyway. Washington had vetoed the idea in favor of securing the strike force as quickly as possible.

Wright hand signaled his forward elements to begin gingerly picking their way down the mountainside, staying flush with the terrain as long as possible, for cover and concealment.

Their element of surprise lasted about ten minutes.

Wright wasn't sure exactly how their movements were spotted. In the end, it really didn't matter. Exposure was problematic; the best you could hope for was to make it down to the flat ground by the fence before the defenders opened up.

They didn't quite make it.

The first rounds were mortars...81-millimeter by the size of the explosions that gouged out great seams of rock and soil over their heads.

"Get down!" someone yelled, as if the rest of the unit hadn't figured that out already. The Marines flattened themselves against the rock, slipping, sliding and falling the rest of the way to the ground, while all about them more rounds struck, starting more rockslides. By the time Wright had reached the flat ground, small-arms fire—carbines and M-1s, had started peppering the hills behind them.

"Spread out!" he shouted. He shoved Martin and Preston left, handsignalling them to take a squad and follow the base of the mountain, try to get away from the fire and flank their adversaries. The men scuttled off, a fire team crawling on hands and knees behind them.

For ten minutes, the Marines and the base defenders traded exchanges at fairly long range. The mortars were the worst. The rounds came in at the rate of a round every minute, well registered and devastatingly effective. By the time, Preston and Martin had positioned themselves to give another angle of fire, Wright had lost two men to shrapnel and flying rock injuries. He'd taken abrasive cuts on his neck and face himself.

Somehow, they had to get through that fence and closer.

Be nice to have some airborne troopers about now, he thought, hunkering down. An 81-millimeter round went off directly overhead, momentarily deafening him, and he covered his face as debris and rock chips rained down.

There has to be another way. He chanced a peek and studied the terrain for a few moments.

Then he saw it. A small structure at the end of the runway—maybe two hundred yards away. What the hell was it? Approach transmitter? Runway light? It was a smattering of crates and a conical central tower, maybe six feet tall. To Wright, it really didn't matter what the device was. His eyes saw only one thing: cover.

"Lucas, Smith, get over here!" he hissed. The two corporals slid over, ducking as BAR rounds stitched out a seam of dirt right behind them.

"What's up, Captain?"

"See that little tower over there?"

Both men nodded.

"Lucas, take three men and see if you can get in position. I've got Preston and Martin out beyond, along the base of that cliff. That'll give us a better angle on the enemy's main axis of fire."

Lucas was nearly bald, built like a wrestler. "Yes, sir." He scampered past Wright to gather up some men.

"Smith, you go the other way—"Wright waved back at the pass they had just exited.

"To the cliff, sir?"

"Right. I know it's exposed as hell, but I want you to take three men and see if you can find a path along the face of that cliff. You've got hollows and rocks to use for cover. See if you can find another path down to the field—" he pointed around to where the cliffs flattened out near the end of the taxiway—"over there. If there is one, we can make our assault from three different directions, flank the bastards and maybe slip in behind him. I make most of these damn mortar rounds as coming from somewhere beside that hangar in the middle." He poked Smith in the ribs. "Okay...get going!"

Smith looked a little dubious but moved out. Soon enough, he had formed up a small recon detail and headed back up into the foothills.

Smith and his men followed a winding path across the face of the cliff, ducking when mortar rounds came a little too close. Luckily, their movements seemed to be lost to the enemy gunners. Good thing, Smith muttered to himself, 'cause our fannies are really hanging out up here....

They clawed and scratched and scrambled and ducked for the better part of fifteen minutes, Smith, two other riflemen and a machine gunner bearing an M-3 and tripod on his back. Slipping and sliding across steep defiles and narrow ledges, they made their way laboriously along the cliff-face toward the end of the taxiway, a distance of maybe four hundred yards. There was only a single steep gap in the path ahead still to negotiate when Corporal Benson, who had taken over point only a minute before, gave a sharp shout and nearly pitched headlong into the ravine.

Benson squeezed off several rounds of his BAR and scrambled backward like he'd seen a company of ghosts.

It was worse than that. Corporal Stu Benson, of Albany, New York, had run straight into advance elements of the Red Chinese Sharp Swords.

Never in his wildest dreams, did Benson or Smith or any of the recon team imagine they would run into Red Chinese soldiers in the hills of an isolated, god-forsaken Okinawan island in the middle of the night.

A fierce firefight broke out.

A mile away, in the nearby cells of the base stockade, Lyle Kitchens and Fyodor Trofimenko heard the sounds of gunfire.

"Jesus, that was a mortar," Kitchens muttered to himself. He placed his ears against the cinder block outer wall, trying to get a feel for what was happening. No doubt about it: mortar rounds, recoilless rifles and the staccato pop of automatic weapons fire could be heard through the block wall.

Someone was assaulting the base.

He heard a voice from down the corridor. It was the Russian, a loud whisper. issuing up from his cell.

"Major...Major...what is happening? I hear explosions...."

Kitchens winced as another detonation shook the hangar. That was no mortar round...more like a pack howitzer. What the hell was going on?

"Must be the Marines assaulting the island..." he whispered back. With the gunfire around the hangar, there wasn't much need to whisper. They hadn't seen 'Tiny,' Kitchens' nickname for the guard, in several hours. "It's probably two, maybe three in the morning."

"Or the Chinese..." Trofimenko whispered back.

Kitchens hadn't thought of that. "Jiang's really organizing an assault on this place?"

"I'm sure of it. That's why he came to Okinawa. Reconnaissance was first, making a case against your criminal traitors was last."

We all have our orders, Kitchens thought.

Which scenario was worse? Americans fighting Americans, for control of the island? Or a commando raid by Red Chinese sappers?

For Lyle Kitchens, each round exploding made the dilemma all the more perplexing. If Jiang succeeded, and the Chinese were able to overpower the airfield garrison before the Marines and the Air Force could arrive, what would become of he and Trofimenko? If they were sprung from the stockade by the Chinese assault force, should he then turn on the Chinese and direct American troops against them? Jiang was supposedly a partner in the investigation. Or was he?

Or should he side with the Chinese against the traitorous Gallant Flag Americans? He had a sworn duty to stop the strike mission from ever flying. But he also had a sworn duty to defend his country against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

And which Americans on this wind-blasted god-forsaken island were Gallant Flag traitors and conspirators anyway?

As the sound of the gunfire exchange came nearer and more intense, Lyle Kitchens found himself almost wishing he wouldn't have to make this kind of decision.

Sunday, 1-28-51

Mishida Island

4:30 a.m.

Jiang Chen Li and the Sharp Swords had been pinned down for the better part of an hour, engaged in a running duel across the southern ridgeline with forward elements of the U.S. Marines. For the Mishida assault, the Swords had been augmented with several expert marksman of the 38th Field Army's First Platoon, 78th Amphibious Regiment, and Lieutenant Wei Xiao Dong led them. Wei and Jiang huddled in a narrow crevice, covering themselves from grenade fragments, as they debated tactical options.

There weren't many.

The tactical situation was confusing and fluid, but the Chinese knew they were outmanned and outgunned by the Americans. The unit had been caught by the Marines' forward probe, finding themselves scattered around the ridgeline, holed in every hollow, crevice and warren they could find, as the Marines poured grenades and small-arms fire into the night. Green tracer rounds lit up the sky, punctuated by an occasional 'Willie Pete' round, white phosphorous flares popping off overhead, in an effort to illuminate the darkened slopes of the hill.

"We can't stay here long," Jiang hissed. "The may-guo-ren will cut us to shreds. Can't you get around them, Wei?"

Lieutenant Wei flinched as a grenade gouged out a shower of rock and dirt, raining debris onto their heads. Both men hunkered down, waiting a few moments for another hit. None came. Wei cautiously raised his head up.

"My men are holding off the left flank as it is, Major. I can't spare anybody."

"There has to be a cut or a path behind us. Maybe we can backtrack over the top of the hill, and maneuver north, go around the bastards."

"I'll send a scout out. But it'll weaken us on the left."

"If we don't move soon," Jiang told him, "there won't be anybody left to defend. Get moving."

Wei scampered off to form up a recon detail. For the last hour, the Chinese had been pinned down in and around a narrow but very steep gully as more Marines surged around them, taking the high ground, pumping fire from every direction at the hapless Chinese.

To avoid complete envelopment, Wei sent a pair of scouts back up the neck of the gully, waiting for a lull in the flares and WP rounds, to try and find a weak spot in the ever-tightening net the Marines were trying to draw around them. Half an hour later, Wei slithered back down to Jiang's position with some decent news.

"Up in that direction," Wei was pointing to a steep face of the slope, "there are furrows that can be used for cover. They run all the way back up to the ridgeline. There's a cut up there...actually higher than the enemy is right now. It's the only way back. But we have to hurry. The enemy's landing more men and equipment on the northwest beach even now."

Jiang needed no further encouragement. Under a furious volley of machine gun and automatic weapons fire, one by one, the Sharp Swords disengaged from the gully and worked their way back up the hillside, burrowing into every fold and crag they could find. At the top of the ridge, as Wei had promised, a narrow defile presented them a way through, though they could easily hear voices and feet scrambling against loose soil less than fifty yards away.

With any luck, Jiang told himself, they could hug the opposite side of the ridge, and work their way north to another axis of assault on the airfield, completely eluding the Marines' noose.

Moment's later, Jiang's tactical maneuver was interrupted by shots. A cry of pain filled the night...one of the Swords had been hit. It sounded like 'Big Ears' Wong. His body went crashing heavily down the slope of the hill.

They were quickly pinned down again, this time by a Marine fire team, on perimeter patrol and detached from the main body of the assault.

For ten minutes, the firefight lit up the night sky with tracers, grenade explosions and automatic weapons fire. Jiang shouted to his left, trying to get 'Fat Belly' Wu's attention: "Hwan dsuo bian! Move left! Back up and go around--!"

He heard feet scrambling in the black volcanic soil as several Swords backpedaled and tried to get outside the Marines' field of fire. In the dim light, Wu and two others were on the move.

The first time he had come to Mishida as a construction worker, Jiang had made careful note of what kind of weapons the Air Police garrison carried: mostly small arms like .38 caliber revolvers, a few M-1s and M-3s, BARs and a Jeep-mounted quad-50, nominally for anti-aircraft fire, but able to elevate down to nearly horizontal. Later snooping added a few more items, such as a .30-caliber light machine gun and several bazookas. Not enough punch to hold off a determined assault, but enough to give you pause. The Sharp Swords had trained at the Tsingtao naval base for assault operations against this kind of firepower.

Nobody had planned on meeting fully-equipped combat troops from the U.S. Marines during the raid.

Even as he waited for a signal from Wu, several Swords were hit. Li and Soong took shrapnel wounds in their face and neck, but still managed to squeeze off enough rounds to hold up their end of the line.

Jiang knew they couldn't stay here. The Marines had them pinned down in a series of shallow folds on the side of the hill. They had both a height advantage, being at a slightly higher elevation, and better firepower. The end of the game was only a matter of time, unless--

Jiang heard a crow cawing behind him--it was Wu's signal. Putting fire on the enemy from another angle was their only hope. Just enough to get their attention, distract the shooters...a few seconds was all they needed.

A burp gun opened up, the brrrrraaaap sound ripping the air between grenade explosions. Shouts in the dark, erratic firing and the sound of feet scrambling...Jiang raised his head slightly. The volume of fire had slackened, just for a moment.

"GO!" he yelled, grabbing his rifle. He crawled over the edge of the crevice, got off several rounds and stumbled forward in the smoking dark of the hillside. "GO! GO!" He nearly ran up the back of Corporal Kung, himself slipping and sliding along the loose soil. 'Little' Li was right next to him, spraying the ground ahead with burp gun fire. Jiang pumped more fire in the direction of the enemy.

The Sharp Swords made a charge through smoke, rain and tracer fire, angling at the Marines' position from two directions. Jiang, Li, Kung and the others lay down a withering curtain of fire, as they scrambled across crevices and gullies toward the nest of Marines. From somewhere above and behind them, Wu and his men did the same.

In the final ten yards, Li was cut down by an enemy burst of machine gun fire, but the Chinese fell on their positions with the ferocity of desperate men. Bayonets and rifle butts flashed in the night, a steady whump of small-bore shells still raining down from beyond the ridgeline. WP rounds squeaked and popped off overhead, giving brief illumination to the melee.

Jiang rammed his bayonet into the belly of a Marine who rose ghostlike out of the ground and drove the American back, back, back....until they both stumbled into a cleft. The fissure swallowed them both...somehow, Jiang wound up underneath the heavy Marine, his field knife rammed in the enemy's chest up to its hilt.

Jiang rested a few seconds, getting his breath, then shoved the American off. His body rolled down the hill.

The charge was over in less than a minute. Cautiously, Jiang stood up, crouching. Men groaned. Li was dead, Zhang mortally wounded. Wu came crunching out of the dark, with a big grin on his face.

Before them, half a dozen American Marines lay dead.

"We did it, Major! We did it!" Wu was practically delirious. In training, he had always been the clown. Jiang hugged him, motioned for the rest to gather around. "See to Li. And Zhang," he croaked out, his throat dry with dust and gunpowder fumes.

A quick diagnosis found Zhang had died too, mortally wounded in the face and neck. Soong grabbed his weapon and Li's, carried them back, along with ammo cases and rations. Jiang stood in the middle of the carnage for a few seconds, trying to get his bearings. He groped a nearby Marine, found a canteen and took a deep draw of the water.

The ridgeline above them was lit up with artillery flashes. The American ships offshore were laying down a deafening barrage of shellfire onto the airfield and surrounding hills, walking the rounds sector by sector around the perimeter, 'sanitizing' the ground for another assault. Stupid may-gou. They expended ammunition like rice pellets.

"We won't have long," Jiang concluded. "We've got to get inside that fence, get to those aircraft. Where are our charges?"

Behind him, Corporals Yang and Zuiho hauled up several satchels full of explosives. "Right here, Major. Ready to go."

Wu had an idea. He bent down, worked off one of the Marine's field jackets. "We could try a trick. Dress a few of us like Marines."

"It could work, Major. It's dark, they're under fire--"

Jiang thought the idea preposterous. But he motioned the men to seek out gear and helmets they could use. Quickly, Chinese fur caps and canvas sneakers and mustard trousers were exchanged for shoe-pacs, field jackets and web belts. In five minutes, four of the Swords had transformed themselves into a ragged band of ersatz Marines.

"Let's go," Jiang said. They moved out, angling down the slope, keeping low so as not to be silhouetted. White phosphorous rounds burst overhead, lending a few moments of pale, ghostly light to the hill, followed by more shellfire on the airfield itself. Tracer fire made spider webs of light in the sky. It was incredible, Jiang thought. Americans fighting Americans. The more confusing, the better. In the chaos of the Marine assault, it might just be possible for Jiang's men to infiltrate and reach their targets.

Two Air Police jeeps had pulled up to a small fire just inside the fence. Jiang's men crept down the hillside, keeping cover as long as they could. Fifty yards from the Jeeps--one of them sported the anti-aircraft quad-50 weapon--Jiang handmotioned for his ersatz Marines to go forward. Of them, only Sergeant Gu Wentu spoke passable English...in this case, with a slight Texas twang. He'd picked up the accent after several years of college in Austin. Jiang kept the rest of the squad low and deep in the shadows, hoping a flare round wouldn't suddenly go off overhead.

Air Police troops milled around the Jeeps, sporadically kicking dirt at the small fire, uneasily glancing up at the hillside.

One of them spotted movement, shadows forming across the fence. Instantly, he raised his carbine.

"Hey...hey! Who's there?"

In less than a second, the rest of the detail had dropped behind their Jeeps, weapons trained.

Sergeant Gu came forward, hands out. "Don't shoot, guys..." He eased forward further, two more Swords in Marine camou right behind him. "Don't shoot...we're Americans. Third Marines." He came right up to the fence. "We have wounded."

"Oh, yeah?" An Air Police sergeant in olive and khaki utility uniform and white helmet came out from behind the Jeep. "What's your name, mister? What unit?"

Gu had to think quick. "Third Marines. First Battalion...uh, Bravo Company. Look...we've got badly wounded."

"I said name, mister!"

Gu paused at the sound of the sergeant's voice. He heard bolts being thrown, a row of M-1s were now aimed at his head. "Riley. Pete Riley, Bravo Company...can you give me a hand here...."

The sergeant waved at someone behind him and a set of steps was produced. The sergeant and three other Americans brought it up to the fence, positioned the stool to help the wounded climb over.

Gu was careful to keep his own face out of the light. Zengdo was first, wearing the bloodied jacket of a dead Marine, still slick and wet. The Air Police helped him over, even handing him back his M-3 carbine when he stepped down. Two other Swords were transferred this same way. In the dark and the concussions of shellfire, no one seemed to notice.

Until Gu himself began to hoist himself over the fence. An Air Police trooper looked puzzled, seeing Gu's face in the reddened glow of the fire for the first time.

"Hey...hey you're not--" But before he could finish the sentence, Zengdo cut him down with a burst from the carbine.

The exchange was quick but deadly, the sound lost in the greater racket of explosions and the staccato crackle of small arms fire. Zengdo had gotten off the first rounds, but he was quickly cut down by Air Police fire from the second Jeep. Jiang yelled and the rest of the Swords shot out from cover and fell on the skirmish with weapons blazing. In the melee, they hit two of their own.

Surprise and quick reactions made the difference. In less than two minutes, the Swords had dispatched the Air Police detail and commandeered the two Jeeps. Now, they were in business...inside Mishida Field.

They didn't have a moment to waste.

Driving a zigzag course to avoid incoming eight-inch rounds from the ship bombardment, Jiang and the Sharp Swords headed across the tarmac for the main compound. Several fires were already burning along the row of B-29s. Jiang saw that one hangar was already burning, its trusswork roof--the same one had helped weld joists for--alive with flames and dense black smoke.

If that fire reaches the bunker--Jiang didn't want to think about the possibility.

Backlit by the glow of flames and explosions, he steered his Jeep for the line of bombers.

Knots of Air Police were scampering around the ramp, seeking cover, exchanging fire with forward elements of the Marines, some of whom had also breached the fence and were advancing under heavy fire toward the compound. Jiang's Jeep drew curious stares but no one reacted. The garrison was too busy fighting off the Marine assault to pay much attention to a pair of Jeeps circling the ramp.

A quick reconnoiter confirmed his suspicions. Each Bomber was surrounded by a detail of Air Police, armed with carbines, BARs, mortars and machine guns. Getting close enough to place satchel charges wasn't going to be easy. And with the Marines steadily closing on the hangar complex, there wasn't time to engage in firefights at each aircraft.

A mortar round detonated right beside the Jeep and Jiang momentarily lost control, as the vehicle upended on two wheels. Several Swords were thrown clear, hitting the ramp hard and rolling. Jiang righted the vehicle and skidded to a stop.

The rest of the Swords disembarked and went back to see about their men.

Injuries were slight--cuts and abrasions, though Wu might have suffered a dislocated shoulder and bruised ribs. He was in great pain but anxious to complete the mission.

Jiang had seen two of the B-29s at fairly close range on the wild ride in. Both had open bomb bay doors. Remembering what he had witnessed as they sped by, he realized a large dull black object had been protruding from one of the bays. The thought stung him.

It was one of the atom bombs! The planes were already loaded with the bombs!

Jiang needed a way to disable as many of the planes as possible. Even now, as he helped Wu limp back to the Jeep, ground crews were swarming around several of them. One bomber had even started its props rotating. Another was being hitched up to a tow truck.

The criminals were trying to get the planes away from the assault force, now closing rapidly on the hangars.

Jiang turned the Jeep motor over and it finally caught. Overhead, several mortar rounds shrieked, detonating just behind them in a bright red ball of flame and smoke. Jiang floored the pedal and the Jeep skidded accelerating along the ramp.

"Get your weapons ready!" he yelled to the rest of the unit. Swerving past debris and shrapnel, he drove a zigzag course through a maze of trucks and carts and running men. "Shoot the tires out--!"

The Sharp Swords circled the gathering of planes, weaving in and out of small arms fire and grenade explosions and burning crates, while shooters in the back of the Jeeps fired at the assembled crewmen below the planes, aiming for the tires. Air Police details fired back and soon a running gun battle developed, each detail pouring fire out at the two Jeeps as they swung crazily from plane to plane.

Behind the firefight, a incoming barrage of naval shells hit the main hangar. With a deafening explosion, part of the roof collapsed and a concussive shock wave flattened everything within a hundred yards.

Deep inside the hangar, Lyle Kitchens and Fyodor Trofimenko felt the impact of the shells before they heard it. A searing blast wave washed down the corridor, blasting open holes in the cinder block wall at the end. Thick black smoke billowed in, choking everything.

Kitchens' eyes stung and he gagged. He tore off a piece of bedsheet and soaked it in the water bowl, then covered his eyes and nose, retching, as he slammed his body against the cell bars.

"Hey! HEY!!" He unscrewed a water faucet and clanged it against the bars. They had to get the hell out and fast. He could hear the flames, feel the heat, driving closer to the cells. "Hey, Sergeant--!"

The Air Police sergeant re-appeared, pale and disheveled, eyes blazing. "Pipe down back there--"

"Hey, Sarge, get us out of this hellhole! We're gonna fry back here!"

"Sit tight, bozo...we're fighting fires, already! Keep your shirt on!"

"If it gets any hotter, I'll get a suntan. Let us out...we can help with the fires!"

Sarge was about to reply, but a commotion distracted him. He turned and ran back up the hall.

"--'em out. We need all hands--"

Kitchens caught a snatch of talk, then Sarge raced back down the hall, this time with a circlet of keys. He snarled as he unlocked Kitchens' cell door.

"Your lucky day, bastards...Lieutenant wants help with the fires."

He yanked the door open and Kitchens pushed out. "Him too." He grabbed Sarge by the neck, and steered him to Trofimenko's cell. The Russian was holding onto the bars. He was grateful when the door opened.

"Come on, Fred. Let's be firemen!" The American Army major and the Russian spy jogged up the hall with Sarge, and quickly sized up the situation.

Outside the warren of plywood and cinder block offices and cells, the vast hangar space was thick with smoke. Fire crackled along the girders overhead; already the roof had buckled open to the sky. Green tracer fire spiderwebbed the sky overhead. Outside, it was still dark, but a red glow indicated something was burning outside, something big.

Got to remember what's out there, Kitchens realized. Atom bombs and blazing fires weren't something you wanted to mix together.

A firefighting detail had been cobbled together from ground crewman and office staff, hauling hoses from a water truck outside. Fire licked along the outer walls of the hangar as well as the roof, threatening the whole structure with collapse. Men darted in and out of view, obscured by dense, choking black smoke.

Kitchens and Trofimenko quickly lost Sarge. They decided to pitch in with a nearby detail, trying to smother a series of small fires erupting around the offices. Hoses and barrels lay everywhere and shouts filled the air, between explosions and the crackle of weapons outside.

For five minutes, the American and the Russian methodically went about pitching waste baskets and small cans and barrels of dirt and water on every fire that flickered and burst into flame. The wall fire beyond them roared higher, impervious to any efforts at control. Small streams of water had no effect. Pressure had been lost; probably tanks or mains had been ruptured in the Marines' assault.

It was hopeless. And the real threat was still to come. There were bunkers of aviation fuel nearby as well as the ordnance bunker. Kitchens wondered where the atom bombs were.

"Come on," he motioned to Trofimenko. The Russian's face was red from heat, shiny from sweat. His black hair was thick with ash and soot. "Let's scram...find the bombs! We got to stop the planes!"

They slipped out of the burning hangar, through smoke and chaos and ran ducking low toward an unmanned Jeep alongside the water truck. The motor was still running.

As they climbed in, Trofimenko pointed through the smoke and flame at an incredible sight. Two bombers had been parked on the edge of ramp, less than five hundred yards away. A pair of Jeeps full of shooters was systematically circling in and around knots of ground crewmen and Air Police guards, firing off automatic weapons, exchanging fire with the crews.

"What the hell--?" Kitchens dropped the Jeep into gear and sped off toward skirmish. He drove a wild, bumpy course through piles of burning oil and debris, watching in horror as the attacking Jeeps circled around for another pass. There were riflemen perched in the rear seats, gunning for the plane's tires, the ground crews, the engines. Beyond the perimeter of crouching Air Police troops, the forward cockpit ladder was down and several men were scrambling up--probably the flight crew.

Kitchens headed straight for the nearest Jeep as it circled a line of ordnance carts and tow trucks. He clipped the Jeep on the rear bumper, careening sideways, skidding as he fought to right his own vehicle. The impact knocked the attacking Jeep off course. Just as Kitchens swung the steering wheel around and slammed on the brakes, the Jeep he had hit fishtailed on an oil slick, its rear marksmen still firing away, and plowed headlong into the detail of Air Police guarding the plane. Bodies flew everywhere. The Jeep overturned and skidded up to the nose landing gear bogey, impacting the struts at thirty miles an hour. The impact collapsed the nose wheel and strut and instantly, the 135,000 pound aircraft pitched forward on its bulbous nose.

Kitchens steered through bodies toward the overturned Jeep. The second Jeep had circled around the other side of the aircraft, firing at defenders on that side. He slammed on the brakes and leaped out even before his own Jeep had fully stopped. Trofimenko did the same.

It was the Russian who recognized the fallen Jeep driver.

"Jiang! Jiang Chen Li!" The Russian ran up to the Red Chinese officer and cradled his bleeding head.

Kitchens came up. It was Jiang. The Red had suffered head and neck injuries. Other Red Chinese soldiers groaned, picking themselves up from the tarmac. Two of them staggered to their feet, and together, jogged up toward the center of the plane, with satchel charges, dodging rifle fire and wounded men. They dropped to the tarmac and placed their charges at the portside landing gear, then turning to retreat, they were picked off by Air Police troops, still hunkered down behind the line of carts. Both men fell to the ramp, dead as they hit the concrete. 'Fat Belly' Li squeezed the handle on the detonator box with his dying breath.

A terrific explosion sent a deafening concussion and a wall of flame across the ramp. Almost simultaneously, the huge bomber collapsed completely to the ground, instantly crushing everyone still beneath her. The aircraft settled with a rending shriek of metal to the concrete ramp and smoldered for a few moments, then buckled with a series of smaller explosions underneath.

"Come on!" Kitchens yelled. "Those wings are full of fuel!" He didn't know how Jiang had come to be here at Mishida but it didn't matter now. Trofimenko hauled Jiang to his feet, cradling his bloody head and the two of them limped for the second Jeep, now swinging around the smoking nose of the bomber. It spied them and screeched to a halt just beyond the dense cloud of smoke.

Jiang, Trofimenko and Kitchens piled into the back, squeezing in with a collection of the oddest-looking soldiers Kitchens had ever seen. They were Red Chinese troops--not doubt about it. But they wore the field jackets and helmets of U.S. Marines, contrasting with their own cotton trousers and canvas sneakers.

Trofimenko slapped the Jeep driver on the helmet. "Comrade, for the love of Marx and Lenin, drive! Drive like hell!"

The Jeep burst out of the thick smoke and plowed across the taxiway and runway like a banshee, bumping over bomb craters, wobbling with the weight of too many bodies onboard. They were halfway to the perimeter fence, when Jiang, still woozy and dazed, sat up. He had seen movement at the end of the runway.

"Look!" he croaked out weakly, pointing. In the dim light of flickering fires, a fully fueled and loaded B-29 had nearly reached the end of the taxiway and was slowly turning onto the runway. "He's taking off!"

Jiang's driver, Corporal Wei Xian, steered the Jeep right up the runway, heading straight for the nose of the bomber. Squeezed into the rear seat, Kitchens saw a series of white phosphorous rounds pop off overhead, momentarily illuminating the ridgeline overlooking the runway. His eyes widened. The mountain was alive with movement, hundreds of men scrambling over the top. Marines!

Even before he could voice the thought, mortar rounds and BAR fire swept the ground around them. Several rounds struck the Jeep's right side tires, front and rear, nearly toppling the speeding vehicle. Corporal Wei struggled with the wheel, trying to keep them upright, but the drag of the shredded tires pulled them to the right. More rounds spanged off the sides and front deck, and a Sword riding with Wei up front was hit, crying out and pitching out of the careening vehicle.

Wei fought to keep the Jeep on course toward the bomber but it was no use. Explosions ripped the air around them, and Marines poured fire onto the runway. Kitchens was sure they figured the Jeep as part of the conspiracy.

Despite Wei, the Jeep careened toward the perimeter fence and plowed through the barrier, finally overturning right at the base of the mountain. Wheels were still spinning when Kitchens came to, dazed, his neck sore. He struggled to his feet, then pitched headlong to the dirt as they came under fire.

Not me, you blockheads. He started to raise up and wave, but thought better of it. Stuck in a Jeep full of Red spies and soldiers, he had just participated in a Chinese assault on an American airfield.

There was no way to explain it. And the Marines running this assault weren't inclined to listen anyway.

"Come on!" Trofimenko hoisted the Army major up by the arms and the two of them limped after the rest of the Sharp Swords, now down to Jiang, Wei and another soldier. The group hustled off into the dark, before the Jeep could be overrun by Marines, and made the hill with no further incident. With a halt in flares overhead, the darkness made spotting them harder. Behind them, fires and explosions rolled across the airfield. A vast flaming pyre that had once been the main hangar complex leapt skyward, reddening the underside of low hanging clouds. Now, the wind had picked up. Soot and ash and burning cinders rode the breeze, igniting small blazes on the hillsides.

Kitchens climbed rough terrain, up and down folds and crevices and gullies for what seemed like hours, dazed, incoherent, not fully aware of anything but his footing. Step, breathe, step, breathe, step, breathe. An elemental routine kept him alive and he focused on that alone, momentarily blotting out the enormity of what had happened.

He climbed and scrambled and lay low, when they told him to, then pitched forward and stumbled and slid, falling until after what seemed like days, they had crested Mishida's central ridge and made the landing beach. The sharp smell of salt air and the roar of crashing surf on rocks brought gathering coherence to his mind. That and a welcome swig of water from a canteen. He looked oddly at the canteen. Wei Xian had handed it to him. Yet it was a Marine canteen, American made, in the hands of a Red Chinese soldier.

Slowly, it began to dawn on Lyle Kitchens what had happened.

On the horizon, even through fog and smoke from the airfield, they saw black humps slicing through the surf for a beach several hundred yards north.

"Your amphtracs," the Russian said. "More Marines, coming ashore."

Jiang agreed. "We've done them a lot of damage. Maybe now your Marines will finish the job."

"What's happening?" Kitchens asked. He stood, wobbly at first, and came down to the water's edge, splashing cold seawater on his soot-blackened, swollen face.

Overhead, the first purplish streaks of dawn colored the sky. Out of the fog a four-plane flight of black Corsairs, from a nearby carrier, roared low across the mountain top, heading for targets around the burning ruin of the airfield.

"We're catching a ride home," Trofimenko explained, indicating Jiang switching a small flashlight on and off, aiming the beam out to sea and checking his watch. He saw what he wanted, then pocketed the light and began gathering up some of their gear, what was left of it.

"Your comrades appear to be making a full assault on the base," Jiang added. "I hope they stop that plane on the runway. We damaged one, maybe two. With this--" he waved at the Corsairs and the landing craft in the distance, "our mission is done. We're going home."

Moments later, a small rubber assault boat materialized out of the fog. It was crewed by four men, in black dungarees and fur caps. Kitchens saw one of the men jump feet first into the water and drive the boat up onto the pebbly beach. His fur cap had a red star prominently displayed on the front.

Russians! Soviet sailors.

Trofimenko read his mind. "Jiang's ride home. He told me about it as we climbed down to the beach here." He pointed to the horizon. "The K-66. One of our glorious Soviet submarines, the Morskoi Flot. She slipped in right under the nose of your task force, as if they weren't even there. The Sharp Swords rode with her to this beach earlier this morning. Now she's giving us a ride home."

Kitchens was amazed. He watched Jiang and Wei assemble their gear, ditch the Marine jackets they had lifted and climb back into their own mustard-yellow coats and trousers. Jiang fixed a cap on his head. It too had the red star.

Now he had a decision to make.

Jiang hoisted some ammo belts and unused clips into the boat, then went back up the narrow spit of beach for the rest of his gear. Wei broke down a tripod and hauled several carbines after him.

"Major," he said to Kitchens, who stood staring at the incredible scene before him, "you must decide now. Are you coming with us? Or are you staying?"

Kitchens shuddered. This was the moment he had dreaded, ever since he had landed on Mishida and been imprisoned. Go or stay. What was there to decide, really?

He rationalized to himself that to stay would be madness; he'd probably be killed in the assault, if he wasn't picked up as part of the Gallant Flag conspiracy first. The truth was he had already helped a Red Chinese assault team damage one, maybe two B-29s. He'd participated in killing his own countrymen. All that was probably worth about five or ten court-martials, right there. Desertion? He was a case investigator assigned by no less than General Joe Collins, the Chief of Staff. His mission orders had even been amended to allow limited collaboration with a Russian spy and a Chinese officer. But this?

Would any Provost Marshal, any military tribunal in the world, see all this as part of that collaboration? Or would they see something else? Dereliction of duty. Maybe even desertion?

In times of war, desertion was a capital offense. They'd hang him from the highest lamppost in Tokyo, in all probability, after he'd been drawn and quartered first.

The truth was, he wasn't sure they'd completely put Gallant Flag out of business. What if one or more of the bombers got away? Where could they go? Kadena? Formosa? Guam, maybe. That meant some of the potential targets were still at risk.

Or was that all baloney? Hell, the Marines were practically in full control of the airfield now. But somehow, Lyle Kitchens had a feeling that wouldn't go away. Call it a cop's hunch, detective's intuition, call it whatever. He'd seen it dealing with Ranier and some of the others. Gallant Flag wasn't going to be easy to kill off, despite the Marines. The plotters could even have other aircraft elsewhere, though the evidence didn't support that.

Lyle Kitchens had an uneasy feeling that the assault on Mishida wasn't the end of the case. And if he had such a hunch and didn't follow up on it, wasn't that just as much dereliction of duty?

If he went to China with Jiang and Trofimenko, maybe he could help the Chinese beef up their defenses. Maybe the Chinese and Russians had facts they hadn't shared. Evidence they had kept to themselves. Despite the high-level assurances, Kitchens was sure neither Jiang nor Trofimenko had shared everything. Why would you expect otherwise? They were communists, for Chrissakes.

There were no good reasons to stay on Mishida, and several admittedly weak, reasons to go with Jiang and Trofimenko. After a little detective work on the mainland, Kitchens figured he'd be able to get back to his own forces. Maybe then, he could close the case on Gallant Flag and wrap up the investigation. Like any good detective, you followed leads wherever they went. His mission orders said as much. Don't assume anything. Let the facts guide you.

In this case, though, the facts seemed to be guiding him right into the hands of his country's mortal enemies.

"I'm ready," he told the Russian. He grabbed one side of the rubber boat alongside Wei and a stout Russian sailor who smelled of foul tobacco and bad teeth, and shoved the craft back into the driving surf, sinking up to his chest in the freezing water.

They pushed and fought the surf for a few minutes, until the coxswain could get them turned about, then the rest of the crew hopped aboard. The boat crested several swells and rode on rhythmic oar strokes beyond the surf line, into heavy seas building on the offshore rocks.

In half an hour, the slick black hulk of the K-66 hove into view. Scrambling aboard the Russian submarine, Kitchens looked back one last time from the pitching, rolling deck of the boat.

The horizon was lit up with fiery red clouds and black smoke. Beyond the hellish glow, dawn was just breaking over Mishida's top ridgeline.

What was going on back there? he wondered. Had any of the bombers made it off the island? What of the flight crews?

What of the atomic bombs?

Kitchens shuddered. The boat wallowed in the swells and he was violently sick, retching vomit over the side as a crewman dragged him back. He slumped into the crewman's arms and disappeared down the conning tower hatch, as cold seawater washed over the foredeck of the submarine. Already she was diving, an emergency dive. More Corsairs had been spotted on the portside horizon, heading for the island.

Forty seconds later, she was below the surface and underway at periscope depth, less than five miles from the U.S.S. Princeton and the rest of the Navy task force.

Major Lyle Kitchens fell heavily to the control room deck, still vomiting, then passed out. In his final moment of consciousness, he saw the captain of the K-66 staring down at him, and over his shoulder Jiang and Trofimenko, their faces straddling the periscope tube.

The entire scene seemed surreal, unimaginable. He was now aboard a Russian submarine with a Red Chinese assault team. He had just helped them assault an American airbase.

As the K-66 eased forward at five knots on battery power alone, its destination unknown, Lyle Kitchens spiraled into unconsciousness.

Sunday, 1-28-51

Tsingtao, Peoples Liberation Army naval base on the Yellow Sea

11:45 p.m.

The first thing Lyle Kitchens noticed about the Tsingtao naval base was the smell. Not quite garlic, not quite human feces, the odor assaulted his nostrils like a Marine fire team as soon as he headed down the gangway toward the wharf.

"Fred...what the hell is that smell?"

Trofimenko shook his head. He pointed down to the end of the wharf. A long line of corvettes and patrol boats were tied up at the docks. Beyond a huge crane at the end, more boats were scattered around a shallow anchorage--fishing craft of every description: junks, sampans, dhows, cutters and assorted lighterage for Tsingtao's inner harbor and the coastal waters. A lively fishmongers' market had sprung up on the docks.

"Local catch," the Russian surmised. He wrinkled his nose. "Chinese will eat anything and everything. If it moves, they'll catch it."

They descended the gangway and were met by a small group of PLA officers, all dressed in olive drab, high-necked tunics and canvas caps.

Major Jiang introduced them to Captain First Rank Wen Ho Chih, the base commander. Captain Wen shook hands with all. He was short, stocky with a bent nose and crooked smile. Wen and Jiang conversed for a few moments in guttural Mandarin, Jiang gesturing emphatically toward his comrades.

Kitchens studied the layout of the base. On the K-66's run up from Mishida, Jiang had informed him that Tsingtao was a fleet base for the People's Liberation Army Naval Forces, in fact, home to China's North Sea Fleet. 'Fleet' seemed to be a rather grandiose term for what in fact looked like a minor-league coast guard, a navy of small coastal craft and fast attack patrol boats for fending off pirates, smugglers and amphibious spies and saboteurs. Jiang had said as much.

The base was little more than several rows of wharfs and docks filled with the small hulls of these craft. Beyond a line of warehouses and low brick buildings, bare hills marched away into a distant haze, the hills crowded with line after line of tenements and shacks. Through distant gates, Kitchens could see surging throngs of people. Refugees from the Civil War, Trofimenko said. Still homeless and destitute... there seemed to be thousands of them.

Kitchens had known a Marine flier once assigned to this area. One of the 'China Marines', Captain Joe Eisner had been assigned to an F4U fighter squadron at a base near the city. Over scotch and beers one night in the States, Eisner had spun hour after hour of incredible tales about the poverty and the stench and the battalions of starving children in rags, clinging to the Marines everywhere they went. That had been in late '48, a year before Mao and the Communists had seized power in Peking. From the looks of things, not much had changed since then.

After heated discussion, Jiang turned back to Trofimenko and Kitchens.

"Comrades, it seems that you both will be taking a trip to the capital. By train. I am to escort you to the Longxi People's Liberation Army Base Number Six, near Peking."

Kitchens was less than enthused by the prospects. "Dinner and dancing at the Waldorf?"

Jiang looked sour. "A meeting, actually. With Xie Fang. A top commander in our army. He wants a talk with you. You will be debriefed by Xie and other senior commanders. About this criminal plot to drop atom bombs on our people."

"I'll bet he does." Kitchens eyed a small detail of rifle-toting soldiers that had suddenly appeared. My ceremonial guard. "When do I get a look at your air defenses? Your interceptors and AAA guns?"

Jiang scowled, leading them through knots of sailors and dockhands toward the gates. "That remains to be seen. Comrade Xie will decide."

Kitchens boarded a sealed military train, a long line of rusting green and white cars pulled by three engines belching black smoke. Red pennants and the crescent of stars that made up Red China's new flag snapped in the late evening breezes. The train pulled smartly away from a siding just beyond the port perimeter and sped northward into the night.

The train ride gave Kitchens time to sleep and think. He sat uncomfortably in a seat surrounded by PLA soldiers, teenagers all of them, with freshly starched uniforms and barely oiled AK rifles. The whole trip lasted four hours. The shades were drawn down and secured, though there was nothing to see in the blackness outside.

For four whole hours, Lyle Kitchens pondered his fate. Am I prisoner? Am I an advisor? Maybe a little of both. He owed his freedom to Jiang. He'd made his own decision to board the submarine. But somehow, he had wound up on the wrong side of the fence.

The outskirts of Peking slid into view in a cold gauzy haze of cooking fires and steam heaters. The air was thick with fine yellow dust, still and icy, and thousands of peasants in drab cotton jackets and trousers surged along narrow dusty paths paralleling the tracks. Rusty green slate and tin roofs stretched away from the railbed as far as the eye could see. In between the roofs, dingy warrens were choked with humanity, flowing like a great river, sloshing through the narrow ravines made by stone and mud and cinder block buildings clinging crazily at every imaginable angle.

China's capital had suffered inconceivable levels of devastation after years of Civil War and Japanese occupation. Virtually the entire outer district of the city was little more than mounds of rubble amid uncountable fires, with throbbing masses of people scavenging every mound for anything they could find to eat.

The train slowed for awhile, then passed through an open ground littered with hulks of tanks and artillery pieces, before turning up a siding inside the Longxi base. Long rows of Russian GaZ diesel trucks, mixed in with battered American deuce and a halfs were lined up along the rail platform. Thousands of troops milled on the platform, slowly forming up into details for missions elsewhere.

It was a scene Kitchens had seen many times back Stateside during the war. Crying wives and wailing children, and troops going off to war.

Only this time, the war was a frozen stalemate in a hellhole called Korea.

The train chugged to an uncertain halt and the men got off. By truck and Jeep, Kitchens and the rest were convoyed to a low cinder block building, festooned with red banners and huge mural-sized posters. The largest showed a squad of Red Chinese troops charging down a mountainside, guns blazing. Kitchens wondered what the caption said.

"Death to the Capitalist Running Dogs!" Jiang translated, seeing Kitchens' face.

Kitchens swallowed hard. Advisor, investigator or prisoner, he no longer had any doubt that he was deep in the belly of the enemy.

The cinder block building looked newly though hastily built, somewhat out of place amid the grubby 1920's-era structures around it.

Inside the building, Kitchens quickly realized he was in a major PLA command center. Officers with high-necked olive drab uniforms and shiny leather holsters scurried across parquet and marble floors, many carrying satchels of papers. He didn't know it at the time, but he had entered the Headquarters building of the PLA Thirteenth Army Group, the primary ground force supplying 'volunteers' for the Chicom units in Korea.

They were shown to a small conference room in the center of the building, dominated by a lacquered highly polished wooden table. The room opened onto a courtyard, Kitchens saw, though the space had definitely seen better days. It was littered with broken statuary and figurines, many dragons, gargoyles, and other creatures he couldn't identify.

Kitchens was escorted to a seat and kept standing, with Trofimenko and Jiang, while Generals Xie Fang, Chief of Staff of the Chinese Peoples Volunteers, and Li Tianyu, commanding general of 13th Army Group, filed in, surrounded by staff aides and lackeys. Xie was bald and bristly, his feline face twitching as the rest of the room settled down. At some unseen signal, the command leadership made a curt bow and sat down abruptly. Kitchens was pulled down into his own seat by one of the guards behind.

Xie assumed immediate authority over the gathering, directing his attention to Jiang.

"This is the American officer you wired about?"

"It is, Comrade Xie. Major Lyle Kitchens, United States Army."

Kitchens squashed a desire to rise and make a dramatic bow. Xie studied him like he was food for a kill. The Chinese general wore the same drab cotton tunic, same high neck with embroidered tabs and felt cap with red star. Kitchens had heard through the Army grapevine about the lack of obvious rank or status among Red troops. Scuttlebutt had it that everybody was called comrade. No majors or captains or sergeants in this man's army. You weren't Major Kitchens or Lieutenant Jones. Instead, you were simply Comrade Li or Platoon Commander Wong.

Xie addressed Kitchens directly. "You are a soldier of the capitalist, imperialist enemy." It was a statement not a question.

Kitchens decided to clarify with the basics again. "Major Lyle Kitchens, United States Army, Fifth Military Police Company."

Xie squinted up at the American. He cocked his head slightly. "Military police? You are investigating the criminals who try to bomb our cities?"

Kitchens said, "General...I'm assigned case investigator to Far Eastern Command, Tokyo. My orders are to develop evidence on a plot to steal atomic bombs and drop them without authorization."

"And to bring the pirates to justice...is that not also so, Major?"

Kitchens admitted his orders said as much. He wasn't sure if this was a debriefing or an interrogation. "Only certain people can authorize bombing missions."

Xie spat into a nearby cistern. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes--the box was decorated with fanciful dragons and symbols--and lit up from a match held by an aide. "People like Truman and MacArthur, perhaps."

"General, I made a decision to come with your own officer here--" he indicated Jiang. "The conspiracy has reached a critical point. I felt I could help you. My orders allow me to cooperate with Major Jiang here. Same with him--" he waved at Trofimenko. "All I can offer is the evidence I've uncovered, what's been developed so far. Our own people are even now trying to squash this thing. I don't know if they'll succeed."

At that point, Jiang interrupted with a burst of Mandarin. He explained what had happened at Mishida.

"Comrade Xie, there's a chance that one or more planes may have gotten away. All were loaded with their atomic bombs."

Xie was alarmed. He conferred hurriedly with Marshal Li and another aide. "Coming here? What is the course and speed of these planes? We will shoot them out of the skies."

Jiang explained further. "It is unknown whether any planes got away. The possibility exists. Major Kitchens here has knowledge of these planes, their capabilities, their tactics. This would be useful."

Kitchens shot him a dirty look. Don't give away the store, pal. I'm not a giving a lecture here.

Xie was intrigued. He sat back in his high-backed wooden seat, wreathed in cigarette smoke, regarding Kitchens with increased interest. "Indeed. This is so? Then, you must tell me of these planes, Major Kitchens. What is their strategy? What are their targets? Their altitudes, how they maneuver...tell me all of this. Your government has given you permission to speak with us, work with Comrade Jiang. Now speak with me."

Just friggin' great, Kitchens thought. He was walking a thin line between cooperation and collaboration and he knew it. Of course, the damage was already done. I should have stayed on that beach at Mishida. He glared at Jiang, then Trofimenko.

"Er...General, my orders are just to cooperate. On the business of this conspiracy, that's all."

"Nonsense," Xie said softly. "We know how Americans like to cooperate. We've had great deal of cooperation from your prisoners in our Manchurian camps now. Tell me what MacArthur is doing. What does he plan for us in Korea? This, you can tell us...I'm sure of it."

The questions persisted for awhile longer and Kitchens squirmed at the direction they were headed. Jiang, get me out of this. Say something--

He decided to change the subject, back to Gallant Flag. "General, there's a real possibility that one or more planes may have left Mishida...before the Marines moved in. We need to look at that possibility...where they may go, are the bombs with them."

Jiang cut in. "The bombs are loaded, Major, I'm sure of it. I saw no planes without their bombs."

Xie considered this. "The bandits on Formosa are a possibility...they would gladly give refuge to criminals and pirates."

"And there are other bases in Japan," Jiang added. "We still don't know the full extend of the conspiracy."

"Or whether our American friends are telling us everything," said Li Tianyu.

"Still," Xie noted, "from what comrade Jiang has said, intelligence indicates preparations for this criminal plot have been slowed down, disrupted greatly by the Sharp Swords."

"True," Li said, "but the basic threat remains. We've got to continue operations against the capitalists, keep the dogs on the run, in Korea, Okinawa, Japan, everywhere. As Mao says, 'a dog can't bite when it's chasing its tail.'"

Kitchens knew he would have to report such plans to his superiors, if he ever got back to Japan. "General, forgive me, but I think this needs saying: Mishida Island is part of Okinawa. And Okinawa is part of Japan. Japan is occupied American territory. if China or Russia try more assaults on Mishida, even on Formosa or Japanese territory, you're going up against the United States Army. The war in Korea's bad enough; if you do this, you'll only widen the war and make things worse."

Xie darkened. "Your General MacArthur is the one who makes threats against us. It's well known he's in bed with Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang bandits. Now he's even trying to drop atom bombs on our cities...making Peking and other Chinese cities suffer as Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. We have the right to defend ourselves..." Xie leaned forward, scowling, his chin jutting out, "and you may be certain that we will. The People's Republic will not permit foreign vultures to pick over the carcass of China. Those days are now history."

Kitchens shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He wasn't sure just what his status was. Best to keep the talk focused on facts, on the investigation. Marshall and Collins wouldn't take kindly to an Army CID major playing diplomat with Communist thugs.

"General, my orders allow me to offer whatever help I can in this investigation. Matters beyond Gallant Flag are out of my league."

Xie seemed to accept this. "You have information on the possible targets?"

Kitchens told them what he had found out. "Peking is on the list, for sure. Shenyang and we think Port Arthur as well. Five bombs were taken from Greenhouse."

"But the Swords destroyed one of the planes," Jiang said. "We blew the landing gear and she settled on the runway...lots of damage. It would take weeks to repair her."

"Maybe, maybe not," Kitchens said. "Don't underestimate Yankee ingenuity."

"And what of these bombs? What is their capability, their destructiveness?" asked Li. His folded hands were white with anger, barely suppressed. To Li Tianyu, a combat commander for the 13th Army Group, this banter was inexcusable. His own men were dying in the land of the garlic-eaters and more could die any moment. Given half a chance, he would take this American Army major by the neck and throttle the truth out of him.

Kitchens knew he was treading on shaky ground here. How much should I tell them? How much do I really know? He described the bombs in general details, based on public knowledge of the Greenhouse tests.

"The B-29s," asked Xie, warming to the subject, "what of their capabilities? What altitudes will they fly? What headings and speeds? Can they bomb at night, or in bad weather?"

Kitchens dodged Xie's real question, a question of mission tactics, by answering another. If he threw them enough scraps....

"The B-29 is a long-range bomber, General. It has a very great range and can fly high enough for the crew to need oxygen masks. Most of the missions over Japan, the ones run by Curtis LeMay and the Twentieth Air Force were initially at pretty high altitudes. Later, we found the bomber was better used for night-time incendiary attacks from under ten thousand feet."

Xie smirked. "Thank you for the history lesson, Major. You haven't answered my question."

"General, the truth is I don't know the precise answers." And I couldn't tell you if I did.

"Well, we shall see, we shall see." Xie snapped his fingers, ending the meeting abruptly. Kitchens and Trofimenko were firmly escorted out of the cinder block building to a waiting convoy. A dusty gray Packard led the caravan, surrounded by Jeeps and other cars. Kitchens was placed in the rear sear of the sedan, the Russian beside him but an unsmiling Chinese soldier situated himself between them.

They drove at high speed right through the center of the Chinese capital. Kitchens gaped at the vast columned expanse of the Great Hall of the People, filling many blocks of huge, cobblestoned Tien an Men Square, its severe lines softened in a gentle morning snowfall. Throngs of bicycles, pedicabs and carts crowded the street--Peking in its morning commute to work--all under the watchful eyes of a monumental poster of Mao Tse-tung, hung from the ornate east portal of the Gate of Heavenly Peace.

Trofimenko muttered across the rear seat, pointing to the portrait. "See that balcony, Major? That's where Mao proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic, a year and a half ago."

Kitchens was sinking deeper and deeper into despair, wishing he had stayed on Mishida, taken his chances with the Marines. "Times Square it ain't."

The convoy rolled past Meridien Gate and turned right, into the walled compound of the Forbidden City. They crossed over a winding stone bridge, clearing a moat of ice-flecked water and wound their way through narrow lanes of cypress trees and tile and alabaster pavilions once occupied by concubines of the Ming emperors.

At length, the Packard came to a stop outside a small building known as the Rain Flower Pavilion. Kitchens got out, gaped up through the snowflakes at leering tigers and dragons carved in ceramic on the pavilion eaves and was brusquely shown inside.

A small, candlelit room dominated the interior. The room was lined with tapestries and ornate statuary. A lacquered table was wedged against one of the columns and several men pored over papers on the table, under a gas lantern. Kitchens and Trofimenko were brought into the room.

Mao Tse-tung saw them first and stood up. He was shorter than Kitchens had imagined, stocky, with a doughy face splotched red from a cold. His eyes were black beads. They regarded Kitchens coolly, even warily, sizing up the torn shreds of his Army field jacket. He reached up and touched the major's oak leaf on Kitchens collar tab.

"A colonel, are you? This is a rank I'm not familiar with."

Kitchens stood completely still, at attention, as if for inspection. There was an aura about the Chairman, a power barely sheathed, but faintly seen in his eyes.

"No, sir. Major Lyle Kitchens. United States Army, 5th Military Police Company."

Mao's face lit up. He beamed with a smile. "I have quite a collection of these insignia. Stillwell used to bring me boxes of insignia, all ranks, every army who fought in, against, and for China. Yours...it's new to me. And how is the General? He is well?"

"I wouldn't know, sir. We don't...exactly, er, correspond."

"A pity. 'Vinegar Joe', some of you Americans called him. Here in China, we had other terms. He was a great patriot for our cause." Mao's face darkened, the smile faded back into the folds of his cheeks. "Until he met Chiang Kai-shek."

Mao wore a dark brown tunic, the same high neck, devoid of insignia save for the inevitable red star on his collar tabs. He shuffled over to Trofimenko, sized up the Russian. They exchanged pleasantries in halting Mandarin. Mao introduced the other men at the table...they had been reading reports from the Korean front, it turned out, and getting in a few games of bridge between them.

Chou En-lai was one of the men, Mao's urbane foreign minister and Zhu De, Commander of the People's Liberation Army. Zhu had a pig's face, wide nostrils supporting thin spectacles. He glared back at Kitchens.

Mao circled the room, systematically touching each vase and statue, pressing home the reason he had summoned the American major and the Russian spy.

"I have a simple request for you, Major. Go back to Japan. Tell MacArthur, even Truman himself if you can, that if even one American bomb falls on China, our armies will invade Formosa and strangle the rats that raped China and ran like cowards from the people's justice. If a single bomb lands on Chinese soil, a state of full-scale war will exist between China and America."

From alongside an elegant tapestry of a pastoral scene in Hunan Province, Mao seethed with fury, now lighting up his face. "Tell MacArthur that."

Before Kitchens could respond, Zhu De spoke up. "Perhaps, Major Kitchens would like to see what is in store for any American bombers that appear in Chinese skies?"

Mao and Zhu conferred quietly over the table for a moment. Mao stood up abruptly. "A demonstration for the Major."

And before he could say a word, Kitchens and Trofimenko were hustled out of the room and back to the waiting convoy. The Packard's motor was still running, belching great clouds of exhaust into the frigid air. Marshal Zhu and several officers rode with them.

Half an hour later, they pulled in through the gates of the An-shan Peoples Revolutionary Air Base, a few miles northeast of the capital. Zhu ordered the driver to head out onto the ramp; they were well escorted by vintage American Jeeps and Russian Moskva sedans, forming a flying wedge as the caravan turned down a flight line filled wingtip to wingtip with shiny aircraft.

"Our newest MiG interceptors," Zhu pointed out proudly. "Even as we speak, our courageous pilots are shooting your bombers out of the skies over North Korea. You are no match for our jets and the bravery of our fliers. And there...see beyond the runways--" Zhu pointed out the AAA gun emplacements lined up like burial mounds along the horizon. There seemed to be dozens of revetted and sandbagged 57- and 85-millimeter anti-aircraft sites. "A rude greeting for any American bombers foolish enough to enter our sacred airspace."

Kitchens swallowed hard. "Marshal, my job is to make sure that doesn't happen. We're on the same team on this matter."

Zhu was quite proud of his weapons. The caravan turned about at the end of the ramp and made its way back to the main hangar. "All major targets will be well defended. Now that we know where your B-29s are coming from, whether it be Okinawa or Formosa or Japan, we will easily intercept them over the ocean. Over the East China Sea. They'll be destroyed before they reach China." Zhu leaned over and put his porcine face in front of Kitchens. "I need only a little more information from you, Major. You said you are an investigator. You have facts, you know how get facts and make a picture of them. What does your investigator's nose say about all this?"

Kitchens stared straight ahead. "Only that you will defend yourselves from attack. As you should."

"Pah!" Zhu De sank back in his seat, folded his arms. "I need route and course information from you, Major. You must get that information for me. You are now an investigator for the People's Republic."

Kitchens didn't like the sound of that at all. Even Trofimenko was astonished at Zhu's boldness.

"I'm not a spy, General. Just a cop. An investigator, as you say. Even if I had such information, and I don't, I couldn't give it to you. That would be treason."

Zhu's voice dripped acid. "Comrade Kitchens, we have the same goal, do we not? To prevent war from spreading into global conflict? Is not the distinction you have made, between investigator and spy, already blurred by events? Both seek information. The investigator uses information to punish...the spy to assist others, to manage conflict. You must now set aside your prejudices and think of mankind here."

Yeah, while my bruised and beaten body is swinging from the nearest lamppost, pal.

Kitchens was fully aware of the reports trickling back to Far East Command about POWs, about the brainwashing in the camps in Manchuria and North Korea. He refused Zhu's request.

"I'm sorry, General. I can help you a certain way. In any other way...well, sir, we are at war. And you and I are enemies."

Zhu ordered the Packard brought to a halt in front of the hangar. A squad of armed soldiers surrounded the door.

"Do not make a hasty decision, comrade. If you will not help us by providing information, then you will help us by being our prisoner."

At the Marshal's hand signal, the Packard's doors were flung open and Kitchens was dragged roughly out. Wishing to heaven he was still back in Okinawa, better yet in Brussels chasing down supply scams for SACEUR, he put his hands up, surrendering.

His wrists were tied and he was marched briskly off to the hangar. Behind him, Fyodor Trofimenko could only watch in despair and worry.

Sunday, 1-28-51

Mishida Island

7:35 a.m.

"Flagpole Leader, this is Flagpole One." Lieutenant Colonel Don Jacobs' voice was worried. LaSalle could tell the tension in the man's voice. ""Ah...we've got Marines all over the runway...we're blocked from—"

LaSalle was behind Jacobs, riding Bouncin' Betty, halfway up the taxiway. "Goose your engines, Flagpole One! Step on it, now!" If they didn't get lined up, none of the Gallant Flag planes would get airborne.

Jacobs eased the four throttle levers forward, all the way to the stops, and the big 2200-horsepower Wright Cyclones roared in reply. Jacobs came off the brakes and the aircraft lumbered forward, bearing its nine-thousand pound atom bomb load.

"Fifty knots—" called out Major Kyle Hornsby, Jacobs' co-pilot. A pair of grenade explosions off their starboard wings rocked the aircraft, and Jacobs fought the wheel to keep them level and on course down the runway. "Sixty knots—"

Jesus, this was going to be close. If Hellzapoppin' couldn't make it, could any of them get away?

"Ninety knots—"

Ahead of them, through the haze of distant explosions, units of the Third Marines poured across the runway, well ahead of their takeoff point.

"Colonel, I'm not sure—"

Jacobs gritted his teeth. He had no choice but to haul the wheel back, well short of their takeoff speed. If they stayed on the runway any longer, Hellzapoppin would plow right into a fusillade of fire. He eased the column back and the aircraft staggered into the air, groaning and straining for every foot. Ahead of them, beyond the Marines, lay the northern ramparts of Mishida's central crest.

"Come on, baby...come on...you can do it—" Jacobs massaged the throttle levers, trying to will as much power as he could from the engines.

Hellzapoppin' cleared a line of Marine shooters by twenty feet. Jacobs banked slightly, aiming for a notch in the crest, quickly raising their landing gear, trimming the plane for maximum climb. The ship clawed skyward through the fog and smoke, fighting for every foot.

They missed the slopes by less than ten feet, then leveled out over the choppy swells of the East China Sea at an altitude of two hundred feet. Through the mist, the Navy task force lay off their port side, feeding more landing craft to Mishida's tiny beach.

Jacobs barely breathed the entire takeoff. "Got to get altitude—" he muttered to himself.

"Colonel—" it was Ridley, the waist gunner. "Colonel, we're hit! I see something—looks like fuel streaming out—"

Jacobs checked his gauges. Fuel flow was nominal...or maybe the leak hadn't registered yet. "I'm checking, Ridley. Hold on to your hat...we've got to get the hell out of here..."

Over the radio, he heard LaSalle's voice crackle. "Flagpole One, are you clear?"

Jacobs came back. "Flagpole One over the top and climbing." Black puffs dotted the sky below and beside them. Flak! "Picking up ack-ack from the Navy. I'm steering east, away from them. I'll circle back once I get some altitude."

"Negative that," LaSalle said sharply. "Head for alternate. Head for Luzhou. The rest of you do the same, once your airborne. Flagpole Two, how about it?"

Major 'Kit' Carson was piloting Eight-Ball, which had just turned onto Mishida's smoky runway. "Two ready. We're rolling—"

LaSalle watched from his own bird cage, as Carson gently steered the lumbering beast down the runway, dodging mortar rounds and small arms fire.

It'll be a damn miracle if we get any more of us out of here. They had already lost Aces Wild—Flagpole Three—to the commando assault. Her landing gear had been blown with satchel charges. The plane had settled to the concrete, atom bomb and all. Fortunately, the crew hadn't inserted the plutonium plug, otherwise Mishida might be a pile of radioactive dirt clods now.

Fully aware from midnight onward that Mishida would probably be overrun by the Marines, Clayton LaSalle had gotten on the phone to Paul Craft and the two of them had worked out a deal with the Chinese on Formosa. Through friends in the Kuomintang, LaSalle had gotten permission to fly his Gallant Flag bombers to an airfield called Luzhou, in a rugged valley east of Taipei, not far from the Heilungchun base at An-ping.

By the specific permission of His Excellency, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, LaSalle would be permitted to launch his mission from Luzhou. There was a risk in trying to make a landing at the airfield with Mark VI atom bombs onboard, through they would be unarmed. But if a plane should crash on landing, the possibility existed of an explosion that would scatter radioactive debris over miles of Formosa countryside.

Clayton LaSalle had thoughtfully not informed his Chinese hosts of this small detail.

One after another, the remaining bombers had lined up, then roared down Mishida's runway, each ship just clearing the Marines encamped at the end of the runway, and the rugged hills beyond. Incredibly, though the Marine commanders knew full well what and why they were attacking their own countrymen, snipers still fired at each bomber, oblivious of the danger of a crash landing and subsequent explosion.

Now, Clayton LaSalle's Bouncin Betty was the final bomber, sitting at the end of the runway, as the Air Force general ran his Wright Cyclones up to maximum power. LaSalle's throat was dry and through the smoke of mortar rounds, he could see several platoons of Marines warily making their way along the sides of the runway, cautiously approaching Flagpole Leader.

"Releasing brakes...." LaSalle muttered. His co-pilot, Major Mike Henderson, settled into his seat.

"We're rolling—"

From behind them, the top gunner let fly a volley of .50-caliber rounds. The Browning M2 ripped the air with a sweep of deadly fire. The Marines flattened themselves and took cover alongside the runway.

"Attaboy!—" Henderson smiled as Bouncin' Betty lurched forward and began picking up speed. "Give 'em hell!"

Flagpole Leader thundered down the runway, spraying machine gun fire from all turrets as she gained speed.

"Seventy knots, General!"

"Keep those bastards off my tail, Wesley!" LaSalle steered around a grenade explosion. A loud crack split the side windscreen and several spent rounds rattled around the cockpit. Along both sides of the runway, Marine sharpshooters peppered the huge bomber with small arms fire.

"Fuel leak, General—number six starboard—she's dropping fast!" That was Kinnard, the engineer.

"Switch tanks now!"

"I'm switching but she's still losing gas—"

"Ninety knots—"

Bouncin' Betty was heavy as a pregnant cow but LaSalle had run out of room. Ahead through the smoke and haze, Marines swarmed all over the runway. LaSalle pulled the wheel back and the Superfort shuddered with the concussion of a mortar round detonating right under her wings. She wobbled, hopping from one landing gear bogey to another, before LaSalle righted her. They staggered into the air, narrowly missing the Marine formation, now crawling all over the airfield.

Bouncin' Betty was airborne, barely, and headed right for the V-notch that Jacobs and the rest of the pilots had squeezed through. LaSalle pulled the lever for the landing gear but the right bogey clipped the topmost stretch of cliff and the bomber yawed violently to the right.

"Christ!" LaSalle banked left, jamming his foot on the left rudder, careful not to lower his wing too much, or they'd cartwheel into the sea just beyond the surfline. Somehow, he kept her stable and got the gear up, trimming the bomber for climb.

"Roddy, get back to the wheel well and check out that right gear. We hit something!"

The radioman pulled off his headset and crawled for the aft tunnel. "On my way, General—"

Then the flak started, as the task force destroyers opened up, peppering the sky with purple and black puffs. LaSalle eased them southward, out over the open sea, away from the Navy anchorage and the anti-aircraft fire died off after a few minutes.

Henderson was bent over the instrument panel, worry all over his face. "General, we're losing oil too. Number three engine." Both men craned to get a peak through the bird cage. Sure enough, Number Three was smoking a trail of sooty black into the sky.

"Great." LaSalle wiped sweat from his forehead, and compensated on the throttles while he dialed back Number Three. "Joe, what do you see back there?"

Kinnard's voice was dry. "A dying engine, General. Recommend you feather her and shut her down. I'll compensate the mixture, give you the settings for the others."

They were level at five hundred feet, practically close enough to taste the salt spray of the East China Sea and losing fuel and oil fast. LaSalle tried the wheel and found the plane sluggish. Maybe the altitude, he imagined. Or stabilizer damage from all the rounds she had taken. Plus possible landing gear damage.

Just friggin' great.

That should make landing this beast a lot of fun, he muttered to himself. He banked again, and put some distance between Bouncin' Betty and the bomb and smoke-scarred ruins of Mishida Island.

Ahead of him, several minutes away were the other three remaining aircraft of the Gallant Flag mission. LaSalle wished they had had time to fully fuel each aircraft. Then they could have flown on to their targets in China.

As it was, they'd be damn lucky to survive the landing at Luzhou. The flight to the airfield in the northern mountains of Formosa would take about two hours.

If they made it.

Monday, 1-29-51

Near Anshan, Manchuria, People's Republic of China

5:50 p.m.

The makeshift truck-seat-and-canvas raft bumped into a sandbar, startling Sergeant Lou Skiles awake. He sat up, nearly toppling overboard, shivering in the freezing, gusty winter snow squalls. All around them, a frozen landscape of bare limbs and checkerboard rice paddies was visible along the lower slopes of hills. They were in some kind of valley...a lake or reservoir.

The raft had run aground. And the Red militia that had attacked them was nowhere in sight.

Skiles shook Corporal Stan Benecky awake. "Corporal...Stan...wake up, you prick!"

Benecky moaned and fought off Skiles' hands. "Leave me alone, will ya?"

"Current must have carried us several miles--get up. We got to get out of here."

Benecky was groggy, wounded again, but the blood on his neck from grenade shrapnel had dried into a frozen mat, stuck to his hair. "Sarge, where the hell are we anyway?"

Skiles stepped gingerly out onto the frozen surface of the lake, testing the ice. He slipped, but managed to drag the raft further up, then helped Benecky half-fall out onto the ground.

"Beats me, Stan. Sure as hell ain't Grand Central Station."

Benecky lay motionless on the frozen lakeshore mud. "Oh yeah...then why the hell do I keep hearing trains?"

"'Cause you're friggin' loony--" but Skiles stopped. There was a train. He heard it too.

"You hear that?"

"I heard it. I just don't believe it." Skiles dragged and carried the corporal further up the shore, to the top of a low rise. Beyond, through fog and blowing snow, dark rail tracks crossed a raised levee between rice paddies. A low whistle drifted in on the wind, audible between gusts and bursts of snow showers.

It was life and warmth and the two Marines hobbled across the paddies and levees drawn to the tracks without even thinking. They hobbled for what seemed like hours, finally collapsing in a snowy ravine several hundred yards short, starving, racked with thirst, exhausted nearly to unconsciousness.

Skiles saw that his buddy was breathing hard. He was pale. "I'm sorry, man..."he croaked out. He was winded himself from the trek. He estimated they had made half a mile. It felt like a hundred. "I got you into this. Grabbing that truck was a mistake." He stared up at the swollen bellies of snow clouds scudding low across the wintry landscape. "Looks like this is the end of the road, pal."

Benecky had snuggled up to get warmer. He smiled. Skiles leaned over, got right in the corporal's windburned face and looked into his eyes. No question about it...the fire was going out. Benecky was going into shock, probably hallucinating.

"Lou, you there?"

"I'm here, pal."

Benecky reached out to grab something, anything. His hands found Skiles' collar. "You did right. We both did. Don't beat yourself up. I'd rather die here, like this, than in some friggin' cage like an animal."

"Me too."

The men hunkered down against the wind for what seemed like their last few hours together. The chugging of a distant train came again, this time closer, and Skiles raised up to look. The tracks were only half a mile away. The ground was flat, frozen paddy mostly.

Had he imagined it? They had both heard the train at first. Without thinking, Skiles wrestled Benecky to his feet and they covered the remaining distance in about half an hour. A culvert below the track bed made a good resting place.

The sound was nearer, quite near. Skiles could feel the ground vibrating.

Moments later, the train appeared, a black apparition in the fading light. A single headlamp gleamed through blowing snow. It was easing its way through drifts of snow along the track, moving slowly, cautiously.

Skiles lifted his head. By all appearances, the train seemed to be mostly passenger cars, long windows dimly lit, none of the Red star insignia they had seen on military trains. It was traveling only a few miles an hour, heading west.

They'd made a promise to that Chinese commando sergeant, Sergeant Wie, and Skiles remembered it now. The Dragon's Tail unit had been heading west when their trucks collided, heading west to scout military targets and installations in the Peking area.

The Marines were instinctively, unthinkingly drawn to the light and warmth of the train. As it rolled by, almost on top of them, Skiles had an idea. He muttered it to Benecky, not sure at all the delirious corporal really understood.

Skiles maneuvered them both to the very lip of the culvert, only a few feet from the edge of the track bed. Already they could see the last car approaching. Skiles studied the train's motion for a moment, calculating and timing the move. At the right moment, he hoisted Benecky up and the two of them leaped across the track, snagging a stair rail at the end of the car.

Benecky clung desperately to Skiles' right arm. Skiles hooked his left arm over the rail and the train dragged them across the gravel bed for several dozen yards.

With his last ounce of strength, Lou Skiles hoisted himself and Benecky up to the lowest step of the rear platform and hung on precariously until they could get their balance and better purchase. The train rocked from side to side, making balance hard. Both men huddled on the steps for a few moments, then scrambled and clawed their way up to the platform and flopped down to get their breath.

They had made it!

In the gathering blizzard and nightfall of the Manchurian winter, no one had seen them. The two Marines rested for awhile, listening for any sounds, inside or out, but heard nothing. Skiles rammed ammo clips into his burp gun, and loaded up the carbine for Benecky, firmly placing the weapon in the Corporal's stiff, frostbitten fingers.

Benecky staggered to his feet and managed a wan smile. On the count of three, they burst through the door into the compartment.

The compartment was warm, stifling actually, and full of groggy, half-asleep peasants from the countryside. There were few seats. Most were sprawled about on the floorboards of the car, covered with rags and cloth and coats. A few stirred at the sight of the armed Americans, though both wore grimy cotton tunics with PLA insignia.

With a hand chop, Skiles signaled Benecky to stay at the door and cover it. Skiles kicked at a few legs and scooted to the end of the car, securing the door at that end. Now, no one could get into or out of the car.

As the Americans glowered at their captives, a few more peasants stirred and sat up, realization dawning that something was happening. Just then, the car erupted into a flurry of excited shouts and gestures.

An elderly woman with a wrinkled face and missing teeth came forward, shaking tiny fists at Benecky. She stamped her feet like a petulant child, screaming, "Dso-kai, dso-kai! Get out of here!"

Benecky roughly shoved her back and she fell onto her rump in a pile of rags.

Not sure where the train was headed, the corporal could only look sheepishly over at Skiles and glare angrily at the peasants, both brandishing their weapons at anyone that moved.
CHAPTER 28

Monday, January, 29, 1951

Anshan People's Revolutionary Air Base

8:30 p.m.

Fyodor Trofimenko found a table by the window and sat down to nurse a cup of hot green tea. The officer's mess at the air base overlooked the flight line. Floodlights illuminated the ramp and taxiways as MiGs maneuvered out to the main runway. In the distance, tongues of flame thundered down the runway as, one after another, interceptors of the PLA Air Force First Air Army's 18th Air Defense Regiment roared into the night sky in paired takeoffs.

Trofimenko wondered if all the MiGs in China could stop a flight of American B-29s. His own experience with the Voenno-Vozdushniy Sily (Soviet Military Air Forces) nearly a week ago wasn't very comforting.

"Comrade Trofimenko?"

A short, stocky balding civilian in drab cotton tunic and cap approached the table. He readily introduced himself.

"Gao Lin Liu." He shook hands with the Russian, after a short bow. "Special Unit 8341, Military Security Service."

Trofimenko had heard of the Chinese secret service. 'Little brothers' to the NKVD, the two services had occasionally run joint operations in Korea and Japan. Trofimenko knew that Unit 8341 was under the direct control of the Party's Central Military Commission, taking orders from Lin Piao himself.

"A pleasure, comrade." Trofimenko offered the other table seat and Gao sat down. Soon, they were both sipping green tea.

"My condolences," Gao went on. "The Government of the People's Republic considers the American actions a great crime. The victorious people of China stand with our Russian comrades in this dark hour."

Trofimenko studied the Chinese officer warily. "The capitalists don't have a chance."

"Indeed. They're filled with historical contradictions. But--" Gao sniffed the aroma of the hot tea--"enough Marxist doctrine. This Karytinin fellow--the one the Americans arrested--you knew him? My contacts say he was NKVD."

Trofimenko stared oddly at Gao. "What did you say?"

"Karytinin...your operative who was arrested--"

"Arrested--when? When did this happen? What do you know?"

Gao was momentarily flustered. Did the Russian not know? "Your operative in America...I assumed you were familiar with the--"

Trofimenko sat up straight and deliberately put his cup down. He glared at Gao. "What of Karytinin? What's happened?"

Gao shrugged. "It's common knowledge in the Unit. We have contacts with the NKVD. Alexander Karytinin--"

"Yes, Treeline, what about him-"

Now it was Gao's turn to be puzzled. "There was a report this morning--at the central office-- about an arrest the Americans made yesterday. In Washington. A 'Russian Spy' they are trumpeting it. Caught with atomic secrets. Very clever, comrade--" Gao smirked. "You've got so many agents in their atomic agency, they're running around looking under rugs everywhere. Tell me--how high was this Treeline? Did he know Oppenheimer?"

Trofimenko barely heard him. Treeline? Karytinin arrested? He and Alexander had gone through foreign operative school in Smolensk together. They had run the obstacle course together many times. Done practice drops. Scouted Red Army bases from snowdrifts in the birch woods. Practiced tradecraft in Kiev, Leningrad, a dozen other cities. Karytinin...he'd always been smooth, urbane, careful, the consummate professional. Karytinin arrested?

It wasn't possible.

Trofimenko was still as a statue. Another MiG takeoff rattled the windows. "Comrade, you must tell me everything you know about this business. Everything--"

Gao related the story. The truth was that Alexander Karytinin--nee Treeline--was the most highly placed officer in America's entire atomic establishment. He was an administrative assistant to the Director of the Atomic Energy Commission, Gordon Dean. Gao ran down the details. As he did, Trofimenko's heart sank. Karytinin had been his closet friend in the spetzialnoye school. Now he was what: a prisoner of the Americans, accused of espionage?

Listening to Gao's version of the story, Trofimenko found himself more and more agitated. Jiang was right. This was how Americans cooperated. Feed you with one hand and stab you in the back with the other. It was bad enough a personal friend had been betrayed and caught. Trofimenko was more angry with himself. FBI agent Robert Blount had compromised him on the ride out aboard Chesapeake. It had to be Blount who had found out about Karytinin--had he really been that careless?--and gotten that information back to the Bureau, information Trofimenko knew he'd been careless with, information that had somehow led to Alexander's arrest.

That was the crux of it, wasn't it? Trofimenko knew his own mistakes had cost them Karytinin. A critical asset in America's atomic energy complex had been compromised and lost. If Beria knew how Treeline's cover had been blown, his own life would be forfeit.

Angrily, Trofimenko slammed down his tea, sloshing hot liquid on the table. Kitchens had played him for a fool. All the Americans had done it. Now the stakes were immeasurably higher. And someone would have to pay.

"Where are you going, comrade?" Gao asked. The Russian had abruptly stood up.

"To the barracks. To have a talk with my American 'colleague'." Trofimenko stalked out of the officer's mess and walked out of the building. Despite the restrictions against smoking around the flight line, he lit a cigarette and walked briskly toward a compound of low cinder block buildings beyond the fence. It was a barracks area. Lyle Kitchens had been held there under semi-arrest since being brought to Anshan the day before.

Trofimenko's own State Security credentials got him into the building. A cold, dim, sparsely furnished common bunk room in the back was the American's quarters. He found Kitchens lying on a dusty mattress, staring up at the ceiling.

The Russian stood stiffly in the doorway.

Kitchens sat up, blinking at the light flooding in from the corridor. "Fred, what gives? When can I get the hell out of here? And what's with all the takeoffs? It's like the Chinese are scrambling everything they've got."

Trofimenko glared silently at the American, with cold contempt. "Major, you have not been truthful with me. I see that now. We have to cooperate if this madness is to be stopped. But now--it's not possible...I see what you are...what trust means to you."

"What the hell are you talking about, pal?" Kitchens started to get up, but some sixth sense made him stay seated.

"We are at war, Major Kitchens. You and I. Our countries were once Allies in the Great Hitlerist War, fighting the fascistiy. Russians wanted that friendship to continue. But instead, we're stabbed in the back."

Kitchens shook his head. "Fred, you're not making any sense. And we don't have time for games here. You've got to get me out of here, talk to your comrades. The Chinese are sending up everything they've got. But it won't work...they don't know B-29 tactics. I can help."

"Like you helped Alexander Karytinin?"

"Alexander--who the hell is that?"

Gruffly, bitterly, Trofimenko related the news. "Our countries are at war...I had hoped we could be friends, perhaps rise above the suspicions--use this crisis to build understanding. I took chances for you, Major. I stood up for you in Vladivostok, in Moscow, a lot of places. I told them you had knowledge, to be sure, and you could be useful. We needed that knowledge--where is the law that says only America should possess such dangerous powers as an atom bomb. There were plenty of Americans who agreed with us--Harry Gold, the Rosenbergs, many others. Now, we have the bomb too. But we don't use it on innocent civilians. Or threaten others with it, like your MacArthur. I trusted you were different, Major. A man of reason, a military man with conscience." Trofimenko shuddered. "But it isn't so, is it? Even while we worked together to stop these madmen, the war goes on. With one hand, you grasp mine to work together. With the other, you hold the world by the throat."

Kitchens had had enough. "Stop whining, Fred, for crying out loud. What the hell do you expect? We're going to let Russian spies just run all over the place, grab whatever they please? You guys sure don't. How many American officers does the NKVD employ? Look, if it makes you feel any better, I never wanted to work with a Communist agent anyway. The bosses said do it, so I had to do it. That's the way the game is played. There's always casualties, in any war. That's the difference between us: I'm a soldier, trained as a soldier. I've seen casualties, men get their friggin' heads blown off. You're not. To you, all this--espionage, sabotage, whatever--is like some kind of genteel sport. That's how you Russians are: it's okay for you to climb all over our biggest secrets like ants at a picnic. But it's not okay for us to protect ourselves. We're just supposed to roll over and play dead. Well, it ain't going to happen, pal. Korea should be showing you that."

Trofimenko came into the room. His fists were balled, held tightly by his sides. "Alexander Karytinin is no casualty. He's tovarisch, my comrade. I owe him--" he shrugged slightly--"everything. And now--" The Russian took another step.

Kitchens stood up. Behind the Russian, a pair of guards had appeared.

"I'm sorry, Fred, but spies are dangerous. They have to be caught and punished. We've got a right to defend ourselves--"

But he never got to finish the sentence. Trofimenko lunged forward, clutching at his throat. They collided and fell in a twisting heap to the wooden floorboards, wrestling and clawing at each other. The guards came in, but held back for a few moments, amused at the struggle.

The Soviet spy and the American major wrestled for awhile, rolling and thrashing about on the floor. The scuffle turned vicious as Trofimenko dug his fingers into Kitchens' neck, choking him. Kitchens counterpunched and got leverage on the Russian, pinning him to the floorboards, jabbing fists in his face. Squirming underneath, Trofimenko managed to knock Kitchens over and they both scrambled to their feet, ready for another round.

The guards let the fight go on for awhile longer, encouraging the combatants, laughing at missed punches. Trofimenko stumbled against the side of a bunk and fell heavily backward, crashing into a window with a clatter of blinds. Enraged, he charged the American and they fell in a heap to the floor again.

Kitchens was taking quite a licking, with the Russian dealing a windmill of punches. A cut opened up along the side of his mouth and he tasted blood, flailing out violently to keep the Russian away. Trofimenko was about to wade in and finish the major off when the guards decided to intervene.

After some cleanup, both men were hauled before the base commander, Colonel Sun Hsaio-long. Kitchens had a deep cut to his lips. Trofimenko was bruised below his right eye, with lacerations to his chin and nose. Both men stood before the diminutive Colonel like naughty schoolboys.

Sun gave the pair a stinging dressing down. He squinted up through tiny rimless frames. "Apparently, the two of you don't appreciate the hospitality of the Chinese people." He waved a dispatch in their faces. "The People's patience is at an end. Now, I've got to do something with both you. Comrade Trofimenko, there's a car waiting for you outside."

"Where am I going?" the Russian asked.

"To your Embassy. I'm turning you over to them. We've gotten a lot of fraternal assistance for our forces in Korea but we need more. I'm giving you to General Petrov. Tell him what you've seen...what the Americans are up to. We'll need every bit of help we can get to stop their bombers."

Kitchens winced as he touched his swollen lower lip. "You won't be able to stop them."

"No thanks to you," Trofimenko said. "This man can't be trusted. He's a spy for the Americans. He should be shot."

"It may come to that, comrade," Sun said. "Major Kitchens, by order of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, you are charged as an American spy. Under wartime laws of the People's Republic, no trial is necessary. There's sufficient evidence that Major Kitchens is a plant, sent here to help guide American B-29 bombers to their targets. But Major, your criminal mission will fail. So far the bombers have not been launched. Our assault on Mishida Island has disrupted the mission. And to make sure you provide no further guidance to the B-29s, the Party has directed me to see that you are executed as an enemy of the People's Republic at dawn tomorrow."

Kitchens turned pale and swallowed hard. He had gone from being a U.S. Army case investigator to collaborating with the Chinese and the Russians with official permission, to an enemy of the state, now facing execution. All in just a few weeks.

"This is a serious mistake, Colonel. I'm assigned to help you. Help all of us stop this mission. You can't stop the bombers without me."

"We shall see about that, Major." Sun nodded to the guards. Kitchens was roughly pulled from the room, a final sideways glance at Trofimenko, who turned away.

Lyle Kitchens offered no resistance as he was led away, this time not back to the barracks, but to a dank military prison on the other side of the base.

Tuesday, 1-30-51

Peking

7:00 a.m.

Mao Tse-tung took a deep drag on the Red Dragon cigarette and waved smoke at the map table set up in the Court of Ten Harmonies. Marshal Peng Dehuai and Marshal Zhu De glowered down at the charts, their faces flushed red from the stinging rebuke the Incomparable Teacher of the Masses had just delivered.

"The Third Offensive is a shambles, comrades. It's a mess and it's got to be fixed. We've got the Americans on the run, and we've got to finish them off. Revolutionary justice demands it. The people demand it. Military leaders like you must fulfill their duties to the utmost...anything less is criminal."

The strategy session had been going on half the night and the room was filled with smoky haze and the sweat of worried men. Mao had called the meeting the previous evening. The purpose was to decide how to respond to the new American counteroffensive. Matthew Ridgeway's Operation Thunderbolt had inflicted stupendous casualties on the Chinese Peoples Volunteers all along the central front and the great push south to Pusan was stalled.

Mao was furious. He had stormed about the musty chamber all night long, a chamber once used by the Dowager Empress for pedicures for her many dogs. With the first light of morning through frost-rimmed windows, Mao had finally relented, the storm spent.

Peng argued vehemently for more supplies. "We need more help from our Russian friends."

"You always ask for more," Mao countered.

Peng was unyielding. "It's true...we need guns, bullets, rice, shoes and uniforms for cold weather, mortar rounds, everything. We really need trucks to carry supplies."

"Our coolies aren't good enough for you, is that it?"

"Our coolies can only carry so much," Peng said. "And they have to go at night. American warplanes own the skies during the day. We're losing hundreds of supply carriers every day...to the weather, disease, enemy action, severe injuries on icy mountain paths. If the Russians would just send us trucks--"

"You think the Americans won't destroy the trucks too?" Zhe De said sourly. "A truck is a much larger target."

Mao added, "We fought the Japanese and the Nationalists with the same supply system, all across China. No truck is more flexible, more resourceful, or cheaper than a good coolie."

"Even when they die by the hundreds every week, and take their supplies with them? Half my rations are eaten before they ever make it to the front lines."

"Look--" Mao pointed with the stub of his cigarette at the chest of Marshal Peng--"I'm not disagreeing with you. It's just that I doubt Stalin can be convinced to do much more than he's already doing."

Chou En-lai, the Foreign Minister, was hunched forward in a chair in the corner. He'd been suffering all night from indigestion. "He's right, Marshal. The Russians have been pouring supplies into the Far East, into Manchuria and North Korea for weeks."

"And getting shot up by the Americans just as fast," Peng observed tartly.

Mao agreed. "We shouldn't forget the fact that big supply centers like Shenyang and even Vladivostok make juicy targets for the Americans' atom bombs. We've got reliable intelligence from one of Marshal Peng's men that Shenyang is indeed a target of this criminal band of rogue pilots. In fact, the planes were only hours from launch, until our commandos disrupted things at Mishida Island. It's still not clear, is it Marshal, whether all the planes have been destroyed?"

Peng recounted what was known. "Major Jiang witnessed the destruction of one plane and damage to several others. It's not known how many were put out of action. The Sharp Swords were essentially wiped out in the assault. Jiang just got away, before the American Marines overran the airfield."

Discussion continued over the reports Jiang had brought back to Peking.

Zhu De idly cleaned his spectacles. "Incredible...if Jiang weren't there to see it with his own eyes. Americans assaulting their own airfield. Shooting at their own people.

"We can only hope they were successful," Mao said. There was no need to review the poor state of Chinese air defenses; the gaps were well enough known.

Peng was pessimistic. "If any of the planes are launched, it's virtually certain some of the B-29s will get through."

Zhu chided him. "Defeatist attitudes won't win anything, Marshal. Do you think the People's Liberation Army thought about defeat when they marched seven thousand miles and holed up in the caves of Shensi?"

"Since I was there with you," Peng said sourly, "I know exactly what they thought. Mostly about food and sex, like any good soldiers."

Mao held up a hand. "That's enough. Bickering isn't getting us anywhere." The Glorious Crucible of Revolutionary Fervor paced the room, idly re-arranging vases and tapestries that dated from the Ming Dynasty. "Maybe it would be better if a few atom bombs did fall on China."

Chou saw where he was going. "It would certainly force the issue with Stalin."

The Russians had both publicly and privately announced that they would enter the war themselves if China was bombed. Mao admitted that Stalin had told him the Russians would move in Europe and Asia if atom bombs were used against China.

"He's still embarrassed over the situation in Berlin," Mao said. "He'd love to have a pretext to move in and seize all of it. Of course," he added, " we all know that if Stalin moves against Berlin, the West and the Americans will react aggressively again. It would mean world war."

"Comrade Mao," Zhu had an idea. "My Air Force commanders have been proposing that we put up a defensive screen of MiGs, to supplement our radar systems."

"Our radars have more holes than that tapestry over there," Peng said.

Zhu ignored him and went on. "The commanders say a coastal barrier of MiGs on constant patrol, ready to spot and shoot down the Americans if they launch, could be done. We have some radar coverage of our coastline. But we have many MiGs. Some could be pulled back from An-jiin, if the Russians could cover Manchuria for us."

The matter was discussed for a few minutes but the idea didn't seem feasible. No one was really sure what bearing or altitude the bombers might take.

"Still," Mao admitted, "a limited MiG screen along certain bearings that are likely approach corridors, especially around some of the known targets like Peking, would be a good idea." He approved Zhu's proposal.

"I'm convinced," he went on, "that the key to stopping these criminal planes, if the ground assaults fail, is to detect the aircraft as soon as possible and intercept them over the East China Sea. That way, the bombs and the planes can be shot down and fall into the ocean."

Zhu agreed and made notes to discuss with his commanders later. Plans were made to dispatch both aircraft and PLA Navy picket boats from Tsingtao to positions just west of Okinawa, to try and provide as much warning as possible.

"If the American Marines are themselves attacking Mishida," Mao told them, "there is little else we can do to assault the base ourselves." He issued the formal order for the picket boats and MiGs to be released and urged speed in getting to their positions near Okinawa. "We must blanket the sea lanes with our radars and planes and ships. We must find and shoot down those B-29s."

Mao finally dismissed the meeting and all but Chou En-Lai and Zhu De wearily retired for a quick breakfast and a few hours sleep. Warming to his subject, Mao lit another cigarette with the smoldering stub of an earlier one.

"I want to hear more of this American Army major we have captured. Is this the same men Jiang was working with?"

Zhu De replied, "He was injured in the Mishida assault. He was already on the island. Jiang brought him back, for interrogation. Quite a find, this major."

Mao was thoughtful. He sat beside the chart table, running nicotine-stained fingers along the battle lines south of the Han River in Korea. "Maybe there's a way this Major Kitchens can be used as a bargaining chip with the Americans."

Zhu agreed. "Undoubtedly, he knows a lot that we could use."

"Perhaps, Major Kitchens can be prevailed upon to convince these criminal plotters not to fly their planes. That's the key. Perhaps, the Major can tell us more about MacArthur or Truman. Even how we can persuade them to avoid widening the war."

Tuesday, 1-30-51

Washington, D.C.

11:25 a.m.

J. Edgar Hoover was grim and poker-faced as he clutched the satchel to his chest and climbed the steps to Blair House. He nodded at Floyd Boring at the front door; Boring was the President's principal Secret Service agent during the day shift. Hoover was shown into the parquet foyer, removed his wool coat and gave his homburg to the agent to hang up.

"He's upstairs, Mr. Director," Boring said. The agent's blue eyes were pale with the fatigue of long hours on duty. The President had been running meetings virtually around the clock over the Korean business.

"Office or bedroom, Floyd?"

"In the office, sir."

Hoover trudged up two more flights of stairs. He'd be happier when the White House renovation was completed. The West Wing and the Mansion didn't have so many steep stairs.

The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had come to see the President, with information and recommendations for Truman's eyes only. He'd requested a special meeting. Admiral Leahy, the President's chief aide, had slotted him for today, squeezed in between a photo session with the Future Farmers of America and a luncheon speech to a veterans group.

It concerned the President's impending trip to Hawaii.

Truman was behind his desk, sleeves rolled up, distracted. He received Hoover cordially enough, motioning the Director to sit across the desk.

"I understand you wanted to see me, Mr. Hoover. Bill Leahy said it was urgent."

Hoover unsnapped the clasp of his satchel and extracted a sheaf of papers. "Yes, Mr. President." He gave them to Truman, who scanned the pages perfunctorily. "These are evidence and intelligence reports on the arrest last night of Alexander Karytinin."

"The Russian spy?"

'Yes, sir. He had been under surveillance for quite some time."

Truman passed the pages back, shaking his head. "Hard to believe, isn't it? Moles and spies right inside our own Government. Any problems?"

"Not with Mr. Karytinin, no, sir. We caught him dead to rights, watched him make a street pass outside Donnegans Irish Pub in Alexandria, then the agents followed him right to his home on Connecticut Avenue. Made the arrest there. His townhouse turned out to be a mother lode of information. That's why I'm here, sir."

Truman took off his spectacles. Hoover noted the dark circles under his eyes. The President hadn't been sleeping very well lately. Floyd Boring has said as much downstairs.

"Will this arrest seriously damage the Soviet spy network in this country?"

Hoover chose his words carefully. "We think the NKVD will find it a lot harder to do their jobs now. Karytinin was the highest placed spy we've caught yet."

"Right in the Director's office at Atomic Energy--" Truman shook his head, leaned back in his seat and rubbed his eyes wearily. "We've got to root out every last vestige of Communist subversion and espionage in our atomic establishment. It's critical we keep the Reds away from our bomb program. Congress forced my hand with the loyalty oaths--hell, I don't like 'em either--but I have no choice. And finding people like this Karytinin fellow so high up doesn't help."

"Not to worry, Mr. President. The Bureau has eyes on lots of suspicious people. On any given day, we're tailing several dozen foreign nationals and even more Americans."

"That's what bothers me. The Russians, I can understand. It's the spineless Americans who spy for them that really bothers me. They all should be shot--of course, the President can't say that in public. But that's how I feel."

Hoover was noncommittal. "In shaking down Mr. Karytinin's apartment, we turned up some additional evidence that you need to know about, sir."

"What kind of evidence?"

"Well, sir, we do have sources inside the Defense Department, working with Army counterintelligence, the Navy and all the services. Interagency liaison...that sort of thing. In the last twenty-four hours, one of our sources has turned up information that seems to implicate specific people under General MacArthur in the Gallant Flag plot. To be honest, sir, there's information indicating that you may walking into a trap, by flying out to Hawaii."

Truman's expression abruptly changed. He rocked forward in his chair and sat up straight. "What are you saying, exactly?"

"Just this, Mr. President: my agents have turned up additional facts concerning one Brigadier General Paul Craft, who works in the G-3 office under MacArthur, specifically for General Edwin Wright. We now have specific, credible and highly detailed evidence linking Craft with a Japanese national named Tetsuko. The Army investigators have already linked Tetsuko to this plot. There is also some evidence of complicity in the staff of Far Eastern Air Forces. This is highly placed and very sensitive, Mr. President." Hoover leaned forward, propping an elbow on Truman's desk, lowering his voice. "Frankly, Mr. President, we have reason to believe that MacArthur or some of his staff may try to seize you in Hawaii or detain you in some way, just long enough to ensure the Gallant Flag mission can continue."

"We're in the process of shutting down this madness right now," Truman informed him. "The base in Okinawa is now, or soon will be under the control of the United States Marines."

Hoover shook his head sadly. "It appears the plotters have contingency plans to cover something like this. Some of the documents in Mr. Karytinin's townhouse make reference to 'dealing with the Farmer.' Several times, there are such references, including statements to the effect that 'the Farmer should have an accident.' Mr. President, highly placed sources in our code-breaking organization say 'The Farmer' is NKVD slang for you...for the President."

Truman was skeptical. "That seems a stretch."

"Perhaps, but we can't be too careful. I've already formally advised the Secret Service earlier this morning. Remember too that MacArthur was already an unofficial candidate for President back in '48. The Bureau thinks that the General is maneuvering himself to try and bring the war to a quick halt, through the use of atomic bombs on China, then somehow detain or otherwise discredit you during this Hawaii trip and offer himself up to the country as the best Republican candidate next year."

Truman snorted. "I think the Republicans already have their eyes on Eisenhower."

Hoover was adamant. "We are concerned, Mr. President. For your safety. The evidence adds up."

Truman took a deep breath. "I understand, Mr. Hoover, and I thank you. All this is rather far-fetched, although I admit the evidence could be seen this way."

"Perhaps, you should postpone your trip, sir."

"I can't do that. Especially now. The main reason I want to see MacArthur is to discuss strategy for the Far East." Truman's lips tightened perceptibly. "And to put the General firmly in his place regarding the chain of command. MacArthur has been using his position as Commander of UN forces to go over my head and appeal his ideas directly to the United Nations. He's been playing me off against the Joint Chiefs and the UN, keeping himself in a position of maximum authority out there. This is going to stop right now."

Truman thanked Hoover for his information and his recommendations. "I'll get back to you this afternoon, with my decision." He dismissed the Director, and when Hoover had left, he summoned his aide Admiral William Leahy.

Leahy popped his head in a moment later. "Yes, Mr. President?"

"Bill, get George Marshall over here. Right away. I need to talk with him...and you. Both of you."

Leahy disappeared to make the call.

An hour later, General George Marshall was shown into the downstairs kitchens of Blair House by agent Floyd Boring. Truman was awaiting lunch--Rose Connolly had promised him one of her pimento cheese sandwiches--and sipping coffee by the rear garden windows.

Truman related Hoover's suspicions, while lunch was prepared.

"Frankly, George, I'm pretty skeptical. You know what a worrywart Hoover is. A good lawyer could take his evidence and make half a dozen different cases out it...every one of them contradictory."

Marshall stood hands folded behind his back, in the corner by a clock-wall sconce and let the clock chime twelve noon while he composed an answer. Marshall was a thoughtful, deliberate man, possessed of a stature and authority that Harry Truman greatly admired, and mildly resented. Any time the President wanted the full weight of an American icon behind a decision, he trotted Marshall out and let the wolves of the press try to crack that façade. They always failed.

"Mr. President, of course, you're right, it may be nothing at all. I've seen some of the evidence Hoover mentioned. But there's also a chance there could be something to it."

Truman folded his arms over his chest. "I won't let MacArthur dictate where and when I go places."

"Maybe I should go in your place, sir."

Truman thought the idea had merit. Marshall had the kind of standing MacArthur respected. Of all the people who could convey the President's concerns on strategy and the chain of command, Marshall was the best. And, Marshall was senior, and nominally MacArthur's superior officer, though Marshall was supposed to be retired from military service.

"That's not a bad idea." Truman decided. As long as MacArthur doesn't see it as cowardice...Harry Truman couldn't abide a coward. He'd be damned if he was going to let Mr. Brass Hat publicly show him up as a coward. "I could use a few days in Missouri. A little rest and recuperation."

Marshall was agreeable. "When do you want me to leave, Mr. President?"

Truman invited the retired Army Chief of Staff to sit with him for lunch. Extra sandwiches were made.

"As soon as I can work out an agenda. We're not going to advise MacArthur of this change. He might not come if he knew I wouldn't be there. Meet with the General. I'll draw up a list of talking points for you."

Marshall hated to hear a field commander so disparaged, even if it was true. "I think General MacArthur will follow orders."

Truman smiled, a disdainful smirk. "You do, huh? You're the only one, George. MacArthur runs Japan like some imperial potentate. But he's not going to run this war that way. You be ready to leave by tomorrow morning."

Leahy showed up and the men ate lunch. Marshall agreed to return to Blair House later that afternoon for a more detailed briefing by the President on what he wanted discussed and decided. After sandwiches and coffee, topped off with Rose's apple pie for desert, Marshall left Blair House and headed back to the Pentagon.

He was troubled by what the President had just assigned him.

After Marshall left, Harry Truman returned to his third-floor office to finish up paperwork. There were bills to review and orders to sign. But he found it hard to concentrate. For long minutes, he stared out through light snowfall at the bleak wintry landscape behind the House. Finding no solace in the view, he got up and restlessly paced the hall outside, pausing to study each of the Federal period portraits of legendary Americans...Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton.

Just what the hell have you got up your braided sleeve, General MacArthur, he asked himself. Alexander Hamilton stared balefully down at him.

On a whim, he decided to ring up General Omar Bradley and Admiral Forrest Sherman at the Pentagon. He wanted an update on the Marines' assault on Mishida Island.
CHAPTER 29

Wednesday, January 31, 1951

Luzhou Air Base, Formosa

8:00 a.m.

Luzhou Air Base was covered in fog and light drizzle as Flagpole Leader turned onto Runway 07.. Behind the B-29 bomber piloted by Major General Clayton LaSalle, three more B-29s trundled along the taxiway, their Wright Cyclone engines droning in the still, damp morning air. LaSalle watched the line of bombers as they followed him toward the 8000-foot runway. Each bore a single Mark VI fission-type implosion atomic bomb. All were fully fueled and checked out, with repairs from the damage done at Mishida completed by sunup.

Their targets were Peking and three other Red Chinese military and political centers: Port Arthur, Tsingtao and Shenyang. Their mission was to try and end the Korean 'police action' in a single devastating blow.

But even Clayton LaSalle knew, deep down inside, that the likely result was that America and Russia would be drawn into direct conflict with each other, possibly igniting a third world war.

LaSalle shoved the four throttle levers on his left console all the way forward. The 2200-horsepower engines strained against the brakes and the entire aircraft shuddered with barely contained power. He looked over at his right-seater. Major Tony Scopes had been assigned to fly Flagpole Three, nicknamed Ace's Wild, but the plane had been irreparably damaged at Mishida and had to be abandoned. Now Scopes stared resolutely through the forward bird cage at the misty expanse of Luzhou's lone runway.

"General, this is it."

LaSalle nodded. He was proud and anxious. "It's been a long, winding road to this point, Major. A hell of lot of people tried to stop this from happening."

"Sometimes, when you're right, you gotta pay the price. You think they'll build statues to us when this is all over?"

LaSalle smiled. "Maybe. But that's not important. Statues just attract birdshit. I'm just proud as hell of this whole outfit. We had a lot of enemies. Not all of them were Reds either. But we got here and we're ready to go. Now it's time to put bombs on target."

"Yes, sir."

"All stations," LaSalle ordered through the plane's intercom. "Sound off."

One by one, the rest of the crew of Bouncin' Betty, known as Flagpole Leader, called in readiness. Co-pilot, bombardier, radioman, engineer, waist and tail gunners, nose and top gunners.

"The crew's ready to roll, General."

LaSalle said, "Engineer...takeoff mixture."

"Done, General. All engines in the green. RPMs good, mixture good, temperatures good."

"Flaps?"

"Down thirty," Scopes replied, checking the indicator.

"Luzhou Tower, this is Flagpole Leader, ready for takeoff."

The tower controller came back, "Flagpole Leader, you are number one and cleared for takeoff. Standby for important transmission--"

LaSalle glanced over at Scopes. What the hell did that mean?

The answer came a moment later. His Excellency, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's gravelly, heavily accented voice came over the speaker.

"Good luck to Gallant Flag, General LaSalle. Long live America! And kill as many Communist bandits as you can! The hopes and prayers of all Chinese people are with you on this brave mission! Dsai-jian! And good hunting!"

LaSalle said, "Thank you, sir. We aim to kick ass in the enemy's backyard."

Inside the tower cab, Chiang Kai-shek was filled with pride as he watched the lumbering bombers maneuver for takeoff. As soon as the planes were safely airborne, he would tell General MacArthur of the special role Formosa's old Luzhou field played in launching the great Gallant Flag mission. He would also mention the fact that sixty-five thousand troops of the Kuomintang army were standing by to attempt an amphibious landing on the mainland, at beaches from Xiamen to Wenzhou, needing only the Go signal from SCAP himself.

Chiang was particularly pleased that General LaSalle was piloting the lead aircraft, the plane that would drop the atom bomb on Peking itself.

If only this had come a year and a half ago, he thought wistfully. But no matter--

When this glorious day was over, Mao Tse-tung and his band of scruffy pirates would be dead and reeling and Chiang expected a relatively easy march into the heartland of the Middle Kingdom. With the head of the dragon decapitated, the body could only thrash about violently for awhile. After the death throes of the beast were done, China would be his.

"Flagpole Leader, rolling...." LaSalle released the red brake levers and Bouncin' Betty started moving. The takeoff was a long and tense minute and a half affair, as the bomber gathered speed. With a nine-thousand pound Mark VI in her belly, she handled like a pregnant pig, in LaSalle's wording. Takeoff speed would come at 145 knots.

"Come on, Betty...come on...." Tony Scopes leaned forward, urging the plane on with his body.

The end of the runway loomed ahead, materializing out of the fog. Beyond, lay miles of rice paddies and green marshland, a great bowl surrounded by the Taiwan Shan range, some of whose peaks reached nearly eight thousand feet. LaSalle had done the calculations while Luzhou's ground crewmen made sheet metal repairs to his wings and fuselage several hours ago. If all went well and the winds didn't pick up too much, Flagpole Leader expected to lift off Runway 07 at a very shallow angle and pour on the gas once airborne, clearing the nearest hills by several hundred feet.

If all went well.

"Comin' up, General...one thirty five...one thirty eight...one forty--"

LaSalle let Scopes call out the airspeed and concentrated on feeling the plane along the runway. They were nearing decision speed, with little room to stop, and still he couldn't feel any 'lift' under the wings. Bouncin' Betty wasn't ready to fly.

"--one forty two...one forty three...this is it! One forty five...rotate!--"

Still no lift! The calculations said the wings had enough lift at one forty five. Damn if I can feel it, he muttered. Cautiously, he eased the wheel back....

Bouncin' Betty shuddered and vibrated like a dog in the rain. At first, there was no sensation of flight at all. Then, his eyes glued to the altimeter, Scopes yelled out.

"That's it! We're up..." The altimeter needle had pogoed off its stop and started moving. Flagpole Leader was airborne at last!

"I'm biting now--" LaSalle cried out. The wheel buffeted and fought back, as the B-29's wings chewed into the damp air, clawing for altitude. "Give her everything, Mike!" he yelled at the engineer. Behind them, the huge Wright engines screamed for lift and foot by precious foot, the bomber eased skyward.

They cleared the Taiwan Shan by less than a hundred feet.

Flagpole Leader staggered up to ten thousand feet, taking nearly ten minutes, banking left toward the ocean. He needed to stay at or below that altitude, otherwise Air Force radar at Itazuke, Japan, might detect the bombers as they formed up.

LaSalle breathed a silent prayer of relief and put the aircraft into a racetrack pattern, orbiting the airfield, waiting for the rest of the Gallant Flag to get airborne. He looked over at Tony Scopes, who was daubing sweat from his eyes and laughed softly.

"Really gets the heart pumping, eh, General?"

LaSalle nodded. "It does that. Let's get squared away here. I want to watch the others." He switched to the airborne frequency. "Flagpole Leader to all aircraft. On your takeoffs, keep your nose wheel down until you reach 145 knots minimum. You won't feel any lift. At 145, pull her up slightly and give her the gas. Once your engines are maxed out, ease the wheel up and put her in a slight climb but don't force it or you'll stall." He swallowed hard, remembering the sight of the hills looming ahead through their windscreen. "And watch out for the mountains, boys."

Flagpole Leader circled the field as the rest of the squadron taxied into position. One by one, three more B-29s roared down the runway and struggled into the air.

Flagpole Four was a bomber nicknamed Victorious Vicki, piloted by Lt. Col. Randy Sherman of the 19th Bomb Group. Her target was the Peoples Liberation Army naval base at Tsingtao.

Flagpole Two was an aircraft nicknamed Eight-Ball. She was commanded by Major Chester 'Kit' Carson, with an ostensible target of the shipyard complex at Port Arthur, on the Laionung Peninsula.

Flagpole One was the call sign of a plane once known as Hellzapoppin'. Lt. Col. Don Jacobs piloted her and his target was the Manchurian supply complex around the city of Shenyang, a critical target for interdicting supplies flowing into the Korean theater.

Half an hour later, the formation had formed up in squadron order, orbiting the northeastern corner of Formosa at an altitude of ten thousand feet.

"On my mark," radioed Flagpole Leader, "turn left to heading 025 degrees. Lower your altitude to five thousand feet and trim for cruise, best fuel economy. Stay on the curve, boys. We've got a long way to go."

One after the other, the renegade aircraft of Gallant Flag executed the turn and began nosing down below radar-detection altitude.

When LaSalle was satisfied the squadron was in good shape, he made another call.

"Flagpole Leader to flight. Arm all bombs. I repeat...arm all bombs now."

In all four aircraft, two crewmen burrowed aft through the long tunnel into the bomb bay. Clambering around the bomb bay like a monkey, one crewman unlocked a sealed lead container and extracted with a special set of tongs a conical plutonium breech plug which, when inserted into the corresponding opening in the bomb casing would begin the final arming process.

As Flagpole Leader and her brood set course for the 'split point' where the aircraft would diverge for their final bomb runs into the targets, in each bomb bay, the deadly 80-kiloton Mark VI bombs were being armed and set for airburst over their targets.

Wednesday, 1-31-51

The Dai Ichi Building, Tokyo

9:10 a.m.

General Douglas MacArthur paced the wooden floorboards of the sixth floor war room restlessly. His hands were folded behind his back. His face was resolute, teeth clenching an unlit corncob pipe. Words and phrases swirled in his mind, half-finished sentences, dictated to an unseen assistant. History and drama coursed through his veins. MacArthur stood astride the Far East like a colossus, a force of nature able to bend entire nations to his will.

If only he could do the same to those ignoramuses in Washington, D.C.

No one else was present in the warroom. The Supreme Commander was alone with his thoughts, mulling over what he would say to Harry Truman at their scheduled meeting in Hawaii the next day, February 1. He tried out different phrases, different oratorical flourishes. He had no doubt he could dominate the little haberdasher from Missouri, in a face to face meeting. It was only when Truman was surrounded by his demented cadre of sycophants and advisors that nonsense spewed forth from the White House. Maybe meeting the President in the middle of the Pacific was a good thing after all. Man to man, MacArthur had always been able to explain the truth of things to Harry Truman.

Still, MacArthur had dark forebodings about this meeting. A nest of enemies had gestated in the Nation's Capital and he knew they were out to get him anyway they could. Men with no spine, the sort of liberal, mushy-headed, champagne-drinking cowards that had lost China for the West, and would lose Korea and Japan too, if men like he hadn't stood resolutely in the path of the advancing Red tide.

He paused momentarily at a giant wall map of the confusing military situation along the front lines in Korea.

Thank God for Ridgeway, he reflected. Operation Thunderbolt had been an unqualified success, smashing the Chicom lines from Osan in the west to Yoju in the center of the country. The Red advance had at last been blunted and the Chicoms had suffered stupendous casualties, throwing wave after wave of infantry against fortified UN positions around Wonju. The front lines were fluid but the general drift was steadily back north. Only the 5th Cav had run into stiff resistance, from residual pockets of Chicoms on the road north to Kyongan-ni. He had cabled Ridgeway for progress last night. The former airborne commander had responded cautiously that he expected to be on the south banks of the Han River in a week to ten days, and in position for an assault on Seoul a few days after that.

It was imperative that the UN forces push the Reds back at least as far as the 38th Parallel, further if possible. MacArthur snorted, nearly bit off the stem of his pipe, as he resumed pacing.

Further if possible. Those were Marshall's words, couched as always with a patina of political sensitivity that MacArthur had nothing but disdain for. He respected George Marshall a great deal, but the man had been in Washington too long.

What was really needed, MacArthur surmised, was another Inchon...an end run or flanking maneuver, unsuspected by the enemy.

Almost as if on cue, MacArthur heard a knock on the door.

Colonel Kades stuck his face in. Kades was one of SCAP's military staff aides.

"General Craft...here to see you, sir."

MacArthur looked up. "Craft? Good, good...show him in, will you, Charles?"

Paul Craft came into the darkened warroom. MacArthur greeted the G-3 assistant warmly.

"General--" he stuck out his hand. Craft felt MacArthur's firm handshake. SCAP guided him by the shoulder to a chair at the mahogany table. For once, Paul Craft was all smiles.

"General, I'm pleased to report some very good news."

MacArthur continued pacing around the room. "I could sure use it this morning, son."

"The final phase of Operation Gallant Flag is now underway. The aircraft involved, at least four of them, are in the air, en route to their targets. ETA is anticipated in six to seven hours." Craft checked his watch. "Sometime about 1600 hours this afternoon, targets in Shenyang, Port Arthur, Tsingtao and Peking, will each be hit with 80-kiloton atomic bombs. The aircraft are currently flying low, under five thousand feet across the East China Sea, to avoid the radar station at Itazuke, Japan. Once they're past that, they'll climb to about thirty thousand feet, and at the 'split point', diverge for their bomb runs."

MacArthur paused in front of the tactical map, tapping several of the targets with his fingers and broke into a broad smile. "That is good news, Paul. Only four aircraft?"

Craft briefly detailed what had happened at Mishida, how the Navy and Marines had apparently had orders to stop operations and how LaSalle managed to escape with four of the bombers to Luzhou airfield on Formosa.

"Our old Kuomintang contacts paid off, General," Craft added. "LaSalle got away with four planes. The fifth was too badly damaged at Mishida. But several of the crew were taken to supplement the other crews."

SCAP was positively beaming, rubbing his hands together. "Paul, you've done a magnificent job with this operation. Your country will reward you...if not now, at sometime in the future. The American people appreciate sacrifice, even if their politicians don't." His face darkened. "I was betrayed by FEAF. Stratemeyer disobeyed my direct orders to cordon off Mishida. The Navy too. They're in bed together with Truman and the State Department. Paul, you watch yourself around Tokyo. There are forces about that mean both of us harm, forces trying to destroy all we have accomplished here in the Far East." MacArthur started pacing again, his jaw set at a determined angle. "I'm convinced that some of Truman's advisors are Communist sympathizers. They'll stop at nothing to stop me."

"We can't let them, General. There's too much at stake."

MacArthur smiled faintly. "There is something else...you don't know about it. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek has generously offered the services of sixty-five thousand troops to make several amphibious landings on the mainland and open up a second front. These landings will take place before the end of the week."

Craft understood the implications. The war was being widened dramatically.

MacArthur went on. "Combined with the Gallant Flag mission, these landings should take a lot of pressure off the Korean front and allow us to roll northward. This time, to stay," he added. SCAP used the wall map to show Craft how he intended to roll all the way to the Yalu River, at the very least. "Perhaps," he intoned, "if the situation presents itself, even across the Yalu."

That raised Craft's eyebrows.

"General, is that a serious plan?"

MacArthur had long enjoyed making bold, surprising strategic moves. "Paul, we have an historic opportunity to confront and defeat Communism on the battlefield. If we are successful, we can set the Reds back decades, roll back the gains they've made recently and change history forever." MacArthur's face darkened.

"But if we fail, if the timid forces gathering against me cause us to fail, I predict that Communism will move forward around the world with gathering momentum and free peoples everywhere will suffer generations of slavery. We have a stark choice, Paul, facing us today. Face up to our responsibilities and fight the Communists with everything we have or consign the world to another dark age."

Craft always felt like a student at a history lecture when MacArthur was running a briefing. SCAP didn't talk to anyone like a normal person. Every word was calculated and delivered as if to a greater audience beyond the walls.

MacArthur checked his watch. It was time for him to return to his residence at the U.S. Embassy compound and start packing for the Hawaii trip. The plane, a Air Transport Command C-54 nicknamed the Bataan would be leaving that afternoon for the overnight trip to Hawaii.

In leaving, MacArthur gave a final order to Craft. "Pray for me, Paul. Pray for all of us."

SCAP left the warroom. Craft reflected that the order really wasn't needed.

He'd been praying for weeks.

Wednesday, 1-31-51

Peking

11:00 a.m.

The two-seater MiG-15 jet trainer roared off the runway at Anshan People's Revolutionary Air Base and streaked upward through swollen snow clouds. The front seat was occupied by instructor pilot Major Anatoli Leptev, squadron leader of Baikal Squadron of the Eighth Air Defense Army of the Soviet Troops of National Air Defense, the PVO Strany. Leptev climbed rapidly, at the MiG's best rate of climb of 10,500 feet per minute, and banked hard to port, nosing the aircraft onto a heading northeast of Peking. His destination: Spassk Dalniy Air Base, near Vladivostok.

In the rear seat was Fyodor Trofimenko.

After the scuffle in the barracks with Lyle Kitchens, Trofimenko had been escorted off the base and driven toward the Soviet Embassy, on Chang-an Avenue near the Forbidden City. But the trip was never completed. Halfway to the embassy compound, the driver took a radioed message directing him to drop off the NKVD officer at Peoples Liberation Army headquarters nearby.

There, Trofimenko met with Marshal Zhu De.

An hour later, armed with a new mission from Zhu, Trofimenko was back at the Anshan base, suiting up in the ready room with Major Leptev.

Zhu De had ordered Trofimenko to return to the Soviet Union, by the fastest route possible. He was to work with the high command of the Far East Air Defense District in Khaborovsk, on direct appeal from Mao himself, to coordinate Soviet assistance in detecting and intercepting the B-29s now in the air. Driven off Mishida Island by the U.S. Marines, the pirate aircraft had flown to a base in the mountains of northern Formosa, a base called Luzhou.

Now the bombers were airborne and en route to their targets.

Zhu was pale and drawn. "We know from intelligence," he said, "that Peking is one of the targets. We have five, maybe six or seven hours at most, depending on the routes the bombers take. I can't emphasize this enough, comrade...we need your help. We are desperate. Even now, Mao is calling Josef Stalin, pleading for the Soviet Union to flood the skies with jets...so we can find and shoot down these criminals."

"I'm only an NKVD officer," Trofimenko had protested. "I have little military background." Left unsaid was his usual reluctance to make any trips into the belly of the beast at all. The further he stayed from Mother Russia, the better. "And I'm certainly no pilot. I don't even know who's in charge...the High Command of the Far East...all my contacts are through State Security, Vladivostok office."

"It doesn't matter." Zhu brushed his concerns aside. "Marshal Rodion Malinovsky commands the Far Eastern districts. What's needed now is for every defense radar along our coastline and every available MiG to get into the air and form an impenetrable screen. That's why we need your help. The bombers must first be detected, then shot down. And, they must be shot down over the sea."

Trofimenko's protests were ignored. A phone was produced and he was made to call State Security in Moscow, then convey Zhu's requests through the First Chief Directorate at Dzerzhinsky Square. The connections took time and Zhu was impatient. After an hour, the duty officer told them that the Ministry of Defense had been advised of the request, and that Marshal Govorov, of the Troops of National Air Defense would be calling within the hour.

Zhu fumed and paced restlessly about the bare cinder block room below the Court of Ten Harmonies. They could not afford to waste any more time. Even as an extraordinary plenum session of the Politburo was being convened in a third floor banquet hall of the Kremlin's Arsenal Building six thousand miles away, Marshal Zhu made more phone calls.

"I am sending you on a personal mission for the Chinese people," he announced. "A MiG is waiting for you at Anshan. The jet will take you directly to the headquarters base of your Far Eastern Air Defense District...Spassk Dalniy. Go now, comrade. Go and get us help before the bombs fall and the world plunges into catastrophe."

Less than an hour later, Trofimenko and Leptev were rocketing off Runway 21 at Anshan, and streaking through bumpy clouds nine hundred miles across the snowy Manchurian countryside toward Spassk Dalniy.

Leptev's gravelly voice crackled over his radio headset. "Did you hear the news, Fyodor Maximovich?"

"What news?"

"Rumors for now...I heard them at the base...chatter among the Russian pilots, mostly...Stalin's meeting with the big shots in Moscow. Regiment's got some kind of contact going with bases back west, big bases like Kharlemov, Kalinin, Orlovsk, places like that. Word is Stalin and Zhukov have ordered the big cows--the Tu-4 bombers--forward, to their assault airfields."

"What? What are you saying?" It was absurd.

"No...it's true, according to the rumors. Several squadrons...to the Kola, Poland, Germany...places like Karlsruhe."

Karlsruhe? "That's where the atom bombs are, isn't it?"

Leptev chuckled. "That's a state secret, comrade. But I think you're right. Of course, we could both be shot for saying it."

Trofimenko's throat went dry. What did they think they were doing?

"You know, Anatoli Ivanovich, we don't have as many atom bombs as the West."

"So what. Truman doesn't know that. I imagine Stalin thinks Truman can be bluffed."

Trofimenko chewed on that for a moment. "The Japanese tried that. They lost Hiroshima and Nagasaki because of it."

Leptev was silent, while the MiG made a series of turns, seeking out smoother air. They climbed to 35,000 feet and the Major nudged the throttle forward. The Klimov turbojet roared under their seats with a deafening growl, kicking in at its full 5000 pounds of thrust. The entire airframe shuddered.

"Not to worry, old friend," he finally said. "If atom bombs fall in China, they'll fall in Europe too. I'm sure of it. And the world will be at war once again."

Trofimenko barely heard the eagerness in the Major's voice. He was deep in thought...trying to figure out a way to prod the Air Defense Forces to act, and act quickly to help China.

There was just a chance, he realized, that one or more of the Gallant Flag targets might be in or around the Vladivostok area. Trofimenko knew he had significant information that could make air defense and intercept missions more effective...not that the squadrons of the Aviatsiya PVO could do anything with it. The training mission he had flown with Leptev several weeks ago proved that.

Still, he had details and facts about Gallant Flag, about the bombs, about some of the men involved that might be useful. He was going outside his area of responsibility as an NKVD officer. The question was: would Govorov or any of the Far Eastern Air Defense commanders even listen to a low-level NKVD officer?

He had to do something. Beria had given him the job, bluntly laid out the mission in fact, of stopping Gallant Flag. Beria was usually subtle in his requirements. When Lavrenti Pavlovich stopped being subtle, the Gulag was never very far away.

Beria had assigned him to sabotage the B-29s before they were launched. Now he had failed in that task. He knew full well what the price of that failure would be.

Trofimenko looked down through the side of the windscreen. Through patches of white and gray, he caught occasional glimpses of the barren Manchurian mountains, the white ridges and smoky valleys of its ancient glacial terrain.

He knew he had led a warm and cozy life the last five years in occupied Japan, working for State Security and the foreign directorates. Was it now to all come to an end? That wasn't going to happen, that could not be allowed to happen. He would especially miss Fumei An, if Beria or Petrov saw fit to recall him to Russia.

If he could help out the air defense effort, perhaps Beria would let him stay on in Japan. He had done good work. Produced his quota of intelligence. Fulfilled all assignments...well, most of them. He could still be useful now, helping the Russians and the Chinese defend against the B-29s.

And if he failed....well, Trofimenko preferred not to think about that. It was bad enough he would back on Russian soil again at Spassk Dalniy. That made him nervous...or was it Leptev's flying?

If he failed and the bombs fell, Fyodor Trofimenko made up his mind, he would simply defect back to Japan and turn himself into the Japanese or the American authorities.

At least then, he would have some sort of life. It was better than being sentenced to the Gulag...or shot.

Wednesday, 1-31-51

Anshan Peoples Revolutionary Air Base

7:30 a.m.

Major Lyle Kitchens' heart was pounding when the door to his prison cell opened just after dawn. He hadn't slept all night; imagining in spite of himself, what it would feel like to be marched out to the firing range, tied to a post, and shot at sunrise. He had tried out every possible permutation--wondering whether he would wet his pants, would he be given a chance to say anything, would they feed him--feeding his own anxiety and cold sweat until he couldn't stand it any longer and passed out from sheer exhaustion.

The keys clanging in the door lock had awakened him. And the cycle started all over again.

He was handcuffed but instead of being marched out to the courtyard behind the stockade, he was instead taken to a truck and driven into the city of Peking. After nearly an hour's ride, he caught a glimpse through a crack in the canvas siding of ornate tiled buildings gliding by. In fact, the truck had driven west along Chang-an Avenue, through the vast cobblestoned Tien an Men Square and past the Forbidden City's majestic Meridien Gate to a compound of cinder block buildings surrounding a serpentine lake, now frozen over with ice.

The truck pulled into an inner courtyard of the People's Liberation Army general headquarters and Kitchens was quick-marched inside. In time, he was shown into a small room lit with gas lamps, the walls hung with faded tapestries, dragons head sconces and lacquered wooden cabinets. His handcuffs were removed and he found himself standing face to face with Marshal Zhu De, PLA commander. Nearby, in a pool of sunshine streaming in through barred windows, stood China's foreign minister, Chou En-lai, hands folded behind his back. Chou puffed determinedly at a pipe. The aroma was a pungent woodsy scent.

Both men stared at Kitchens with grim faces. Tea was offered. Kitchens hesitated--was this a trick? a few last minute questions before the big moment? He accepted the tiny cup and sipped the strong Yunnan tea gratefully.

Why all the sudden hospitality? Kitchens suspected something but what? He was sure he was living on borrowed time. At any moment, he expected to be dragged from the room and stood up against some cement wall, blindfolded, and riddled with bullets. He had already decided he would tense his body for the moment the slugs hit, try to fall at attention, like a soldier, rather than crumple to the ground like a pile of rags.

But the dawn seemed to have come and gone. And the executioner hadn't shown. So far.

Zhu De was cold and formal. He informed Kitchens, through an interpreter, that the Gallant Flag B-29s had just been launched, from Formosa, and were en route to their targets.

"We know Peking is one of the targets, Major. If we can't shoot down these planes in the next five or six hours, you will die in an atomic explosion, right where you stand."

Kitchens was stunned, almost speechless. Formosa? Somehow, LaSalle had managed to get some of his planes away from the chaos on Mishida. That was bad. Real bad.

Zhu rudely snapped him out of his thoughts. "China insists on your help, Major. I want you to help us shoot down these bombers. Preferably over the sea."

Kitchens tried to stifle a quiet smile. The absurdity of the situation had just struck him. "Marshal, I'm not sure what I can do...I'm not a pilot. I know some of the people...but this is out of my ballgame."

Neither man really expected this American spy to cooperate. Spies were enemies of the people, to be eliminated wherever they were found, but Zhu had wanted to give Kitchens a chance. Maybe there was something he could do....

"Major, in the last nine months, since Mao stood at Tien an Men and proclaimed the People's Republic, we have eliminated over two million spies, shirkers, informants, and criminals from our country. China is a better place because the Army does its duty." He shrugged. "I pulled you out of prison this morning for one reason: the help you could give us. Understand: I don't expect you to help. America is the enemy. Enemies don't help each other. And China can defend herself. We've shown that in Korea. But I had some hope...a small hope, to be sure, that you have information we could use. About the planes, the bombs, the missions...what speeds, altitudes, what routes the planes will take. It was a worth a chance."

Kitchens studied the Marshal's face. It was serene, and composed, a slight tic at the corners of his mouth. "Marshal, my government ordered me to work with a Russian spy and a Chinese officer. As far as I know, those orders still stand. I'll help anyway I can. But I won't betray my country."

Zhu considered that. He cast a siGivens glance at Chou, who responded with an imperceptible nod. "It is an odd time, is it not, Major? China and America are at war. Yet we try to cooperate at the same time."

"To keep the war from blowing up in our faces, I guess," Kitchens said. "I don't make policy. I'm just a soldier, sworn to do my duty."

"And if your duty requires you to lay down your weapon and help your enemy--?"

Kitchens relaxed slightly, finished off the tea. "Then I guess I have to follow my orders, sir."

"And what do your orders tell you about this situation." Zhu swept his hand around the room.

Kitchens shrugged. "They don't, Marshal. My orders said nothing about coming to China. I guess...I kind of re-interpreted them." He swallowed hard. "If I had stayed at Mishida...not left with the Jiang, Fred...who knows? The Marines would just as easily have shot me as any of your men. It doesn't make any sense...but I thought I could help more...coming over, coming along. I don't know now...maybe it wasn't such a great idea, but I'm here. I'm not sure...if or when I can go back." Kitchens looked at Zhu square in the face. "I may already have committed treason, in some eyes. Mishida was so confusing...."

Zhu seemed to appreciate the dilemma. "Tell me more about this B-29 airplane. How high can it fly? How fast? What do you know of the mission? The headings...what altitudes are the bombs set for?"

The conversation settled down to specific details of intelligence Kitchens had picked up. Kitchens related what he knew--"Understand one thing, Marshal...I won't betray my country. We're still at war. You're still the enemy. I can help you stop the bombers but I have to draw the line--"

Zhu was irritated. "Where is this line you speak of, Major? Is there a line in the sky...on one side America...on the other side China? There is no line. If you won't help me, who have you betrayed? America? China? The whole world? Either you help now, or you will be shot."

Kitchens realized the truth of what Zhu was saying. "It's just...I don't know...it's so damn hard. My orders don't cover this...I'm not sure."

Zhu bore into the Major. "Here in this room, you are not American. I am not Chinese. We are simply men. The world is facing a catastrophe. Americans have made this possible, with their planes and their atom bombs. Now...help us stop this catastrophe before we all die."

Kitchens related what he knew and before long, Zhu had summoned his own air defense chief into the room. General Wei Xian was ruddy, balding and chain-smoked nervously, as he listened to Kitchens. A map was quickly provided and Kitchens laid out the details of the mission as he understood it.

It wasn't much. But he hadn't been able to turn up much on the mission itself. Clayton LaSalle had kept that closely held.

He could see Zhu and Wei were disappointed with the details. Kitchens decided to make a bold proposal.

"Let me fly with one of your interceptor pilots. You have two-seat MiGs, don't you? Maybe I can help better in the air."

Zhu winced at the idea. "Such things are not possible, Major. Revolution demands discipline."

Wei, however was intrigued. "Perhaps, Marshal...if we--"

"No, it is not possible. This man is a spy, already charged."

Kitchens pleaded with them. "At least, if I could ride with one of your pilots, if we could intercept the bombers, I could use air-to-air radio...try to talk the pilots out of the mission. They might listen to me...American to American."

Zhu's face softened noticeably. "Arrangements will not be easy...there isn't much time--"

"Marshal," Kitchens said, "this whole operation is illegal as hell. I've told your people that before. The American pilots know that too. They know what they're doing is wrong. But they all worship MacArthur. And they're all patriots. Maybe hearing from an American can change a few minds. It's worth a shot."

Wei encouraged Zhu at the same time. "We have few other choices, Marshal."

The idea seemed ridiculous on the face if it. American spies did not fly in MiG fighters with Chinese pilots. What if the Major learned things about the MiG that helped America shoot more down over Korea? What if Kitchens was able to persuade the criminal B-29s to abort their mission? Zhu tried to weigh the risks...what would Mao say? What would the Central Military Commission say? Putting an American spy in a Chinese MiG to help shoot down American bombers...it didn't make any sense. None of this made any sense.

The more the idea was discussed, the more Zhu and Wei realized they had little to lose. It came down to trust...trusting Major Kitchens...an American spy. The enemy.

Zhu finally gave his approval. "I must take this to Mao and Lin Piao too. If they disapprove--"

"By that time," Wei observed, "the bombers will either be gone or--"

"--Chinese cities will be in flames....yes, I know that," Zhu said. "Wei, you go with the Major. Take him to Anshan. Here--" Zhu scribbled out some hurried orders on a scrap of paper "--give that to Sun. He'll never believe any of this. See that the Major gets a ride on a MiG. And get your aircraft into the air, as many as you can. We've got to fill the sky with eyeballs...every available man looking for those bombers."

Wei saluted and escorted Kitchens out of the PLA compound. He commandeered a staff car and they sped back through Peking, its streets now clotted with midday hordes of bicycles, pedicabs and pedestrians. An hour later, they pulled through the wooden gates onto the airbase.

Even as they parked outside the main hangar, Kitchens noticed men running in all directions. A long of row of silvery MiG-15s had started up their engines up and down the ramp. An Shan People's Revolutionary Air Base was in the midst of a scramble. Every available aircraft was being pressed into service.

After ten minutes of confusion, Wei located a serviceable MiG-15 jet trainer and a pilot. His name was Flight Lieutenant Wu Hu-ban. Wu met the general and Kitchens under the wing of the MiG, as mechanics worked on hydraulic lines to the flaps. Wu was chubby, sporting a green leather flight cap and goggles. Wei explained the change in mission.

Kitchens was amused at the range of faces the Flight Lieutenant made as the true nature of Wei's orders became apparent. Wu's pudgy face evolved from concentration on getting his plane flightworthy to something resembling consternation, followed by a wary squint, then resignation. Wei was commander of the Air Defense Forces of the PLA. Wu had no choice but to obey. Fortunately, he spoke passable English.

For the next half hour, Wu and his crew chief went over MiG safety and operational details with Kitchens, always careful to say as little as possible. Neither man wanted to be accused later of giving the MiG's secrets away to the enemy. A jacket and flight cap and goggles were located and given to the American.

"Touch nothing," Wu warned him. "Do exactly as I say. You understand the radio?"

Kitchens had studied the details of the set, how to dial and set the transmitter, how to amplify signals, how to read the gauges and the direction finder...most of the instruments were still in Cyrillic script. The Russians had just turned over the plane a few weeks before. Wu had labeled some instruments in his cockpit with chalk and crayon. Cryptic Chinese ideograms covered part of the rear cockpit too.

"Don't worry, Lieutenant. I value my life too. You drive. I'll talk."

And so they came to an uneasy understanding--the Chinese MiG pilot and the American Army case investigator.

Both men climbed into their cockpit seats. As ground crewmen were strapping him in, Kitchens took a deep breath. He was undoubtedly the first American to ever sit in a Communist MiG jet fighter. An intelligence windfall of the first order...any details he could bring back would go a long way to making up for past mistakes. Would the Army drop any treason charges? Would there even be a court-martial, if he came back with specifics on the MiG-15?

It was a delicious thought Kitchens had, as Wu turned over the Klimov jet engine and it caught, filling the air with a deafening roar. The entire airframe shuddered with power. The chocks were pulled and in seconds, they were taxiing down the ramp toward the active runway.

What a career-enhancing move it would be if he could either entice Lieutenant Wu to defect with the MiG or somehow take control of the aircraft and steer it to South Korea or Japan.

But Kitchens just as quickly smothered that thought. He had no idea how to fly a plane, certainly not one as alien as this one, marked with a mixture of Russian and Chinese symbols.

There were more important matters to deal with. Like finding those renegade B-29s and stopping them. Kitchens shook his head again at the incredible turn of events: an American Army officer helping the Red Chinese shoot down a renegade bunch of American B-29s.

Compared to this, he thought, Hitler and Tojo were nothing.

Wednesday, 1-31-51

Peking

9:30 a.m.

Sergeant Lou Skiles parted the moth-eaten curtains and peered out the frosty windows of the train car. The train had been chugging along at a steady pace for what seemed like days and as dawn broke, it was apparent they were moving into a densely populated area. The tracks wound back and forth through narrow corridors made up of stone and cement buildings, deeply shadowed, occasionally passing under ornate bridges thronged with thousands of pedestrians.

"Hey, Ray...look at this...some kind of airbase--"

Benecky hobbled over, careful not to trip over the tangle of legs and arms of the peasants they had inadvertently taken hostage. Frowns and scowls peered up at him from behind shawls and jackets and filthy rags.

"What?"

"Look--jets taking off. Must be those MiGs we've been hearing about."

Benecky looked through the dusty glass. Even over the drone of the train engines, a high pitched roar could be heard in the distance. Something glinted in the early morning sky, quick flashes of silver arrowing off into a hard deep blue dawn.

"Son of a bitch...where the hell are we, do you think?"

Skiles pointed to the hazy line of sloped tile roofs ahead of them. "Big city, looks like."

"Peking, you think?"

"Maybe."

Both Marines looked at each other. Behind them, a few peasants began stirring, whispering in low tones. Skiles glared at the nearest one, an elderly lady buried under rags. Her eyes were wide, but wary. He shook his carbine at her, but she didn't flinch, just stared back angrily.

The train began to slow down noticeably, causing more stirring in the compartment. A few passengers sat up, their eyes fixed on the Americans. Murmurs and whispers filled the air. Children began to whine. The hostages were restless.

From the window, the outskirts of Peking could have been any city, save for the piles of rubble. Most buildings were patchy gray stone and cinder block, a few with shell or bullet holes in the walls. The air was thick with a cold yellow pall, dust and haze from the surrounding desert. Soot and ash floated on the wind. Mounds of dirty snow banked against the sides of many buildings.

"We're slowing down," Skiles noticed.

"We gotta get off, Sarge," Benecky said. "This thing pulls into a station and we're going to be crawling with troops. Every town we've been in has been crawling with troops."

"You're probably right." Skiles helped the Corporal limp back across the compartment, dodging feet and shoes and icy stares, to the rear door. He pulled it open, sending a wintry blast into the car, then helped Benecky out onto the platform. The cold Siberian air struck them like a hammer.

It had been a harrowing, sleepless night. Through the hours, the two Marines had achieved a kind of standoff with the peasants. Dressed in fur and quilt parkas, from a distance, the Americans could have passed for peasants themselves. Skiles had even fashioned a crude sort of crutch for Benecky to get about on, made from pieces of door jamb he had splintered off.

As the train ground slowly to a halt, the Marines leaped to the track bed and rolled away from the train, down a shallow embankment into a frozen culvert. Scrambling to get out of sight, they soon found themselves in a dingy alley, alone save for a single mule tied to a post at the corner. The train squealed and creaked past, rounding a turn and was lost to view in minutes.

"Where the hell are we, Lou?" Benecky whispered.

"How the hell should I know...this ain't exactly Abilene, Texas, you know. Come on....let's get away from this alley." They ducked back into the deep shadows, trying to reconnoiter their surroundings without attracting too much attention. Beyond the end of the alley, a steady stream of bicycle and foot traffic filled the dusty street.

The Marines slipped quietly through the residential quarter, alley to alley, always staying in the shadows, flattening themselves to the ground or against sides of buildings whenever voices came near. Once, they were spotted, by a small child, who froze in terror ten feet in front of them. Skiles waved the child quiet, then for good measure handed him a piece of a riceball he'd swiped from a soldier by the reservoir at Fushun. The boy snatched the rice chunk, examined it critically for a moment, then popped it in his mouth. Then he turned and disappeared as fast as he had come.

"Guess that's what he wanted--" Skiles breathed. "Come on...."

They ran into a scraggly dog, which snarled and was promptly fed its own pinch of rice, but otherwise they managed to move generally parallel to the train tracks, ducking in and out of narrow dirt paths and freezing alleys and icy courtyards stacked with wood and snow-covered charcoal lumps and the occasional line of clothes hung out to dry. It was snowing lightly, making cover easier, and bitterly cold.

Skiles knew he couldn't continue to give away the riceballs and garlic bulbs and frozen mutton strings they'd picked off the soldiers. They would need more food and warmth before long or they'd die of exposure.

Almost by accident, they came across a low stone building whose swooping tiled roof was thick with antennas. A little reconnaissance turned up a radio tower behind the building, connected by brick path and a tattered breezeway. The rear entrance was not secured and the two Marines slipped inside, finding the small room into which they had come warm, almost stuffy, and smelling of pungent garlic and spices. Something was cooking nearby.

They reconnoitered the building carefully, mindful of low voices issuing through thin walls from somewhere up front and soon realized they had stumbled onto some sort of radio station or communications center. They had seen the transmitting tower and a small forest of aerials and antennas on the roof. Down a dank hall, they spotted several rooms full of electronic equipment, though no attendants.

"Looks like a radio station," Benecky whispered. He hobbled across the hall on his crutch, trying to find the source of the voices.

"Or a studio," said Skiles. Suddenly, shadows passed along the wall. The Marines hit the floor, hiding in a pool of dark. The rustle of heavy coats passed by the end of the hall. Two soldiers, armed with assault rifles, crossed the opening, passing on.

Now they knew whose voices they had heard.

"Where's the staff?" Benecky mouthed.

Skiles shrugged. Too early, maybe? Then he had an idea. He whispered the details to the Corporal, who readily agreed.

Both men knew about something the Dragon's Tail commandos had called Gallant Flag. Sergeant Wie, the unit commander, had told them Peking was definitely a target, before he had died in a ditch beside the overturned truck. Give me my country back, he had gotten out, before he had succumbed to his wounds.

Skiles and Benecky had managed to get away on the makeshift life raft and had made an irrevocable decision to go inland, rather than try and make the coast. They knew Peking was going to be hit, if Wie was right. Both Marines wanted to be there. It had been a mutual decision, almost automatic, discussed little but firmed up all the same the last few days. They'd groped around the subject for awhile, but there wasn't much to say. Sergeant Lou Skiles and Corporal Stan Benecky had long since made peace with their decision. They intended to die, fighting the enemy in his own capital city.

The only question was how.

Skiles' idea was simple: they would scout about for more arms, then seize the radio station. Benecky was sure he would figure the gear out; he'd spent enough time struggling with balky squad radios to have a feel for the stuff. Skiles had asked if it were possible to broadcast a signal the Peking-bound bombers could home in on.

"Sure, if the transmitter's got enough power and the Superforts can find the frequency. Question is: will they be scanning in the bands we transmit on?"

The Marines knew perfectly well they'd probably be incinerated in the atomic blast, but the satisfaction of seeing the enemy's own capital obliterated was worth it. Sending a signal, so Skiles figured, would make it easier for the bombers to find their way to the target.

Benecky was okay with the idea. "But Sarge, we don't know when the bombers are coming."

"And we don't have any way to find out either," Skiles admitted. Both men suddenly felt stronger, a sense of mission giving them something to fight for. "The best we can do is seize the station and hold out as long as we can."

It was a sure bet that the Communists considered such a radio station as important state property. Better to get their brainwashing lies and propaganda out to the masses.

"How long you reckon we'll be able to hold out?" Benecky asked.

Skiles shrugged, listening as the sounds of the two soldiers faded down the hall. "Who the hell knows? A few hours. Maybe a few days. Eventually, they'll get us. All we can hope for is to get on the air, and get a signal out long enough, a sort of welcoming message, for the bombers to find and home in on."

"It's a swell idea, Sarge," Benecky had visions of playing a few favorite Dorsey or Glen Miller tunes, thinking back to Frisco and the last few days of liberty before the First Marines had shipped out for duty in the Far East.

"Well, we'd better get as many rifles and ammo clips as we can find...that's all I got to say about it." He rattled the clips already pocketed from their previous encounters. "This shit won't last ten minutes in a good fight."

"Hold on to your socks, pal...we'll go hunting, just like we did before. There's got to be more soldiers where these clowns came from."

"So let's get cracking."

"You're not going anywhere, crip." Skiles stashed Benecky in a closet off a sideroom and told him to shut up. "I'll be back in a few minutes."

"Bring me a burp gun, Sarge...I still got clips for one of those."

"I'd bring you a friggin' tank, if I could drive it. Just shut up and keep down."

He shoved Benecky back and closed the door. Then he slid down the hall the same way they had come and emerged into the courtyard of the transmitter tower.

Which way? Skiles skulked through several more courtyards and alleys, dodging faces and voices, hanging back in the shadows. Once he was nearly spotted and chased by a militia patrol, just managing to elude his pursuers in a narrow warren of paths between two high stone walls. Twisting, diving and scrambling through gates and dim passages, he figured he'd gotten himself lost for good. But over the tops of the walls and stone hedges, the transmitter tower still loomed in yellow haze. As long as he kept that in view, he could find his way back.

Through a narrow crevice at the end of one path, he heard the sound of heavy trucks and spied a convoy of troop-carrying vehicles rolling down the street, perhaps heading for the train station. The station had to be nearby. And where there were trains, nowadays, there were soldiers.

The convoy seemed to stop nearby, so Skiles followed the sound and smell of the diesel engines, coming after some minutes to a truck park, alongside an open ground filled with statuary and broken fountains. Soldiers had fallen out and were forming up into squads for marching into a large colonnaded building across the street.

Skiles wondered if the building might be some kind of armory. It was just a thought...the place reminded him of half a dozen National Guard armories back in the States. Maybe the Reds had the same thing.

How to get inside...that was the question. He spotted a wizened man in a wide-brimmed hat, pulling a dilapidated riksha along the side of the street. The sight gave him an idea.

Skiles followed the riksha from alley to alley, until the man turned a corner and trudged down a side street. Out of sight of the convoy, he nabbed the old man in the shadow of a high wall and pulled him away from the cart. The man fluttered, flailing his arms like a bird and slinked away into the dust. Skiles tightened up his jacket, picked up the hat the old man had dropped and pulled it low over his forehead. Then he hitched up the riksha and pulled it out onto the street again, dodging streams of pedestrians and bicycles.

Just like a taxi, looking for a fare, he thought to himself. He worked his way against the crowds, crossing the street, and soon parked the riksha in front of the colonnaded building. Squads of soldiers were being quick marched in and out of the front entrance. Between formations, Lou Skiles slipped inside.

As he had suspected, it was an armory of sorts. A vast gymnasium-like hall dominated the center of the building. Soldiers had assembled there. A podium festooned with microphones in front of patriotic posters and tapestry scenes of infantry marching off to war filled one end of the hall. Skiles hung back, letting formations of soldiers pass by. When the halls were momentarily clear, he crept up and down, checking into every room.

The arms locker turned out to be at the end of one hall, parallel to the street. He recognized it from the stout padlocks and bars on the heavy door—the door was carved with griffins and dragons and heavily lacquered.

The moment was now and Skiles knew only one way to get the locks off. He extracted the Tokarev 7.62-millimeter sidearm he had lifted from the Red officer at Fushun and fired two rounds at the locks. They splintered and flew open, the boom echoing up and down the hall. He knew he had only a few seconds to grab whatever ammo and weapons he could.

Inside the weapons locker, racks of carbines and machine guns lined the walls. Clips and magazines of ammunition filled bins along lower shelves. Skiles burst through the door and scooped up as many clips as his arms could carry, stuffing them into his jacket and pants. For good measure, he grabbed another carbine and a machine gun as well, then ducked out into the hall. A clatter of footsteps told him he'd have plenty of company in a few seconds.

He found a cross hall and then a kicked through a window into another alley behind the armory, rolling in the dirt as he tumbled out. Skiles scooted along a wall, then located the transmitter tower through some bare tree limbs and methodically began working his way back toward the radio station, always careful to stay low. The weapons clanked and rattled under his jacket.

There was a loud commotion in front of the armory, as soldiers poured into the building. In the confusion, Skiles crossed the street, weaving his way in and out of the throng and made a narrow footpath between buildings. From there, five minutes' of maneuvering through courtyards and narrow lanes and twisting passages, always deep in shadow from the low winter sun, put him at the rear entrance of the radio station again.

He waited a few minutes, listening to the shouts out in the street, the sound of engines revving, harsh commands barked out and the heavy tread of many feet as a search operation was organized for the shooter.

He smiled. The Chicoms were about to get a big surprise.

Inside the radio station, he found Benecky about to chew his fingers off.

"What the hell's going on, Sarge? You shoot up half of Peking?"

"Just about...keep your voice down...here—" he handed over an armful of ammo clips. The two Marines loaded up.

The ammo and the weapons were divided. Both men had enough rounds for several hours of fighting. Each had a burp gun and a carbine. They worked out a quick assault plan, for covering the doors and taking control of the station.

"You really want to do this, Stan?" Benecky rammed a clip home and looked up at Skiles. "Sounds like the whole frigging Red Army marching out there."

"I stirred up a hornets' nest, that's for sure." Skiles crept up the hall on his knees to check out the control room. Voices had been gathering toward the front of the building. He peered in through a crack in the door.

Four men were huddled around a panel of buttons and dials, bundles of wiring exposed on top. Another man was standing on a chair, peering out ground level windows at the action in the street. Excited chatter flew around the room.

Sure ain't Fibber McGee, Skiles muttered to himself. All the technicians wore drab mustard cotton jackets and felt caps, just like the soldiers. The whole place was run by the Army. One of the technicians had a small rifle slung over his shoulder.

Skiles crawled back to the utility closet and piled in on top of Benecky.

"Four technicians, all of 'em Army. One weapon in sight...there's probably more. This could get exciting, Lou."

"No shit, Sarge." Benecky smiled a wan smile. "But what the hell...it's what they trained us to do. You ready?"

"No. You?"

"No."

They both giggled. "Pendleton was never like this," Benecky said. He got painfully to his feet, propped himself up on his makeshift crutch and cradled the carbine with the other arm. He put out a hand and touched Skiles on the shoulder. "Sarge...just one thing—"

"Yeah—" Skiles was already listening to the sounds, calculating the best moment to move.

"Whatever happens—I just wanted to say—"

Skiles turned back. "Knock it off, will you?"

"—what I'm trying to say is...um, you're the lousiest sarge I ever worked with and I hate your guts."

Skiles grinned. They giggled and hugged each other hard. "Break an arm, you prick...and get ready."

Benecky cycled the carbine's action. "Let's go," he whispered.

With Benecky covering the rear entrance from the closet, Skiles ran forward and burst into the main studio, squeezing off a few rounds to get everybody's attention. Window glass and blinds shattered with the stitch of bullets. With the muzzle of his burp gun, he motioned for everyone to drop to the floor.

The technician on the chair turned quickly. Skiles thought he had a gun. The Marine fired, spinning the man off the chair. He sprawled backward, airborne, before crashing heavily into a console. His body torqued and slumped to the floor, pumping bright red arterial blood from multiple neck wounds.

Skiles glared at the others, waving the burp gun around. The moment seemed frozen in time.

The takeover of the Peking radio station was underway.
CHAPTER 30

Thursday, February 1, 1951

Yokota Air Base, Japan

6:30 a.m.

An anvil of dark rain clouds had surged in from the western slopes of Fujiyama as the last F-84 Thunderjet of Coyote Flight lifted off Yokota's active runway and streaked upward into the belly of the storm. In the pre-dawn darkness, Captain Will Mack felt the satisfying rumble of five thousand pounds of afterburning thrust from his single Allison turbojet engine. It was better than sex, especially when the prospect of aerial combat was in the offing. Mack rode his bird hot and hard, banking west through moderate chop and squalls before the flight topped out at twenty-thousand feet and swung around for a vector from Itazuke Radar. He tickled the trigger of his six M-3 machine guns, itching to get into a fight with somebody.

The fact that the target was a bunch of American B-29 Superforts on some kind of cockamamie scheme to drop atom bombs on China made the shiver up his spine all the more delicious.

"Coyote Flight, this is Coyote Leader. On my mark, come right to heading two-five-five degrees. Maintain angels twenty and increase speed to four-eighty knots."

One after another, the rest of Coyote Flight acknowledged. As one, the four-plane group wheeled around to a full-westerly heading and streaked across the terraced rice paddies of the Kanto Plain, heading for the Sea of Japan, and a probable southward vector.

The mission of Coyote Flight was simple enough: to hunt down a band of renegade B-29s just launched from Formosa within the last few hours and engage. Coyote Flight was to make visual and, if possible, verbal radio contact with the bombers and order them to break off their presumed mission.

If the bombers refused to obey, Coyote Flight had full authorization, through FEAF and General Stratemeyer, all the way down from the President of the United States it was said, to engage the bombers and shoot them out of the sky.

Despite the thrill of getting after an aerial enemy in jet combat, Mack was vaguely uneasy about the mission of Coyote Flight. He'd been fully briefed at the squadron ready room at Yokota and he knew enough about Gallant Flag to understand the importance of what they were doing.

But like he'd mentioned to Coyote Two on the walk out to their aircraft later, he had a bit of a problem with the mission: Mack thought the B-29s should be allowed to continue their mission and bomb the hell out of China with their atomic bombs. Like a lot of airmen in the Far East, Mack was extremely frustrated with the restrictive rules of engagement that Washington had decreed for this war. Allowing the Reds a privileged sanctuary in Manchuria went pretty hard against the grain.

Coyote Two agreed.

In his own mind, Will Mack wasn't even sure he could bring himself to pull the trigger on his M-3 machine guns. Maybe, he thought, my guns will just jam or freeze up. He made a few mental plans in that direction.

As expected, Coyote Flight was streaking west at angels twenty over the cloudy Sea of Japan when the vector from Itazuke Control came in.

"Coyote Flight, this is Itazuke. Turn left heading two zero five degrees and descend to fifteen thousand feet. Begin orbit on radial sixty on my mark...three...two...one...mark. I am vectoring Falcon Flight to your position. You'll have company in about fifteen minutes."

"Coyote Flight...understood."

Great. Squadron had decided to scramble another flight of F-84 Thunderjets to hunt down the bombers with Coyote Flight. Mack was sour at having to share the glory with more jet jockeys but there was little he could do except wait. He radioed the news to the rest of the flight and the quartet of silvery jets took up a left-hand orbit a hundred miles northwest of Okinawa, waiting to join up with the newest flight out of Kadena.

Together, the two flights would await radar vectors from the Navy, which was even now sending picket ships into the sea lanes between the Manchurian coastline and Formosa. A wall of radar screens was being set up, Mack knew, in an attempt to pinpoint the four bombers before they crossed over into Chinese or Russian airspace.

Mack was skeptical that the Navy types could do any better than the Air Force, especially when he heard that the carrier Essex had left station along the west coast of Korea and was maneuvering into position to launch its own intercept mission.

Everybody wanted in on the act, Mack told himself.

Coyote Flight had only made a few orbits before Itazuke Control radioed up a tallyho on some radar contacts. Mack listened to the vector instructions, then squinted through the windscreen in that direction. It didn't make any sense. The bearing was all wrong.

"Itazuke Control, this is Coyote Leader...are you sure about that last bearing call? That's a northeast to southwest bearing. Ain't no way our boys could be coming from that direction...unless they took off from Vladivostok."

"Roger that," came the reply. "We have many targets on scope, that bearing. Repeated challenges have so far failed to get any response. It may be a Red flight. You are authorized to intercept and establish visual ID. Do not engage without permission. Repeat: do not engage without permission."

Mack tasted bile in the back of his throat. A flight of Red aircraft and we're not supposed to engage? What the hell kind of war was this?

Mack called out the vector to the rest of Coyote Flight and passed along Itazuke's instructions. "I don't like it either, boys, but that comes right from Squadron."

Coyote Four's voice crackled over the headset. "What if they fire on us, skipper?"

Mack was already banking his F-84 hard over to starboard. "If we don't get a friendly reception, then I guess we'll just have to crash their little party."

Falcon Flight had never shown up and Captain Will Mack wasn't going to wait to share the spoils. The four jets streaked off into the early morning dawnlight to find the intruders.

Twenty minutes later, Mack tallyhoed several flights of MiG-15s, on a southwesterly heading, cruising along at 35,000 feet.

"Itazuke Control, we got bad guys at angels 35. Bearing two one zero degrees. Soviet markings, looks like. Requesting permission to engage...they still haven't spotted us."

Itazuke Control was hesitant. "Wait one, Coyote Flight...we're in contact with FEAF Tokyo on this--"

What the hell could they be waiting on?

Finally, permission to engage came back and Mack breathed a silent thanks. Taking a deep breath, he ordered Coyote Flight onto an attack heading. They climbed for altitude, circling around behind the main body of aircraft. Mack visualized the attack in his mind...a great diving slash through the sky, with each half of Coyote Flight dropping out of the high thin clouds in a crisscrossing guns pass, timed to the split second. All he had to do was get them in position.

He'd never had a MiG kill over Korea, so the prospect of bagging one now was better than a Tokyo whore, all the more so if Itazuke Control thought the pilots were Russians.

Moments later, Coyote Flight was in position and Mack gave the word. Out of the sky, four Thunderjets streaked down on the unsuspecting MiGs like silver darts, a screaming split-second pass with M-3 guns blazing. Right away, Coyote Three clipped a MiG in the wings. The Soviet jet spun like a top, throwing oil and fuel and heavy black smoke, as it heeled over and plummeted toward the sea.

The MiGs scattered like wild cats and the fight was on.

Soon, the air was filled with whirling, firing jets, a real furball in the sky as Russian and U.S. fighters duked it out over the East China Sea at dawn. Several MiGs were quickly splashed right away but a pesky Russian pilot got in a lucky hit on a Thunderjet and it cartwheeled flaming into the sea. Mack winced as he wheeled about for another run...Coyote Three had never ejected. He hadn't had time.

Will Mack heard wild voices on the radio.

"Coyote Four...I got two on my tail...need help fast!--"

Mack spun in his seat, spying the jets corkscrewing through the clouds, two silvery MiGs clinging like mad to the Thunderjet's tail.

"Be right with you, Eddie...hold tight...give 'em the Prairie Rollercoaster!!"

Coyote Four inverted and dove for the ocean, the MiGs right on his tail. Spinning like a rifle bullet, Four plowed seaward, then leveled out a few hundred feet up and jinked and jived back and forth like a county fair rollercoaster, once even dropping down to only thirty feet above the waves. The MiGs clung stubbornly, then rose up like sprouting flowers as Coyote Four climbed skyward, turning Immelmans left and right.

"C'mon, skipper...get 'em off me, will you?"

"On my way, Mad Dog...just hold tight."

Mack streaked after the scrum and made several crossing passes, before he was finally able to bore in on the lagging MiG. Weaving back and forth like a drunken sailor, the MiG seemed unaware Mack was on him. Just a little bit more, pal...just a little bit more...Mack waited until the Russian's next snap roll walked right through the crosshairs on his sight. He squeezed the trigger and peppered the sky with tracers, stitching a neat line of cannon holes through the MiG's wings.

The Russian exploded in a red ball of flame and the wreckage blossomed and sank in flaming pieces toward the ocean.

"Thanks, skipper...now we got us an even fight."

The scramble lasted ten minutes in total. When it was all over, six of the eight MiGs had been splashed but at a cost of one F-84. Coyote Three had gone down with no chutes and Coyote Two, Mack's wingman, was streaming fuel from shrapnel holes.

The remaining two MiGs had had enough and turned tail back to the north. Mack called off the pursuit and checked his own fuel and ammo. Both were low and going after the Russians was out of the question. He called in their heading to Itazuke Control, so another intercept mission could be scrambled out of Japan, maybe Johnson or Miyasawa.

Then he pulled the plug on the intercept. Coyote Four and Two had already both called in bingo on their fuel lights. Mack requested an emergency vector into Japan, since Yokota was too far away to get back. Itazuke Control gave him one and Mack ordered the three remaining jets to trim for best cruise to Yokosuka Air Base. Yokosuka was the nearest runway, in a little green valley at the southern tip of Kyushu. With care and a little luck, they'd be able to make it.

Will Mack set his Alison engine on best cruise setting and used a handkerchief to wipe sweat from his face and forehead. He looked around, did a quick visual on Coyote Two. The fuel stream had worsened. At this rate, his wingman might not be able even to make the Japanese coastline.

Mack shook his head ruefully. One thing was for sure: the Russians had managed to accomplish what he had wanted to happen anyway, keeping them from having to shoot down their own bombers. Maybe the Navy would have the same bad luck.

But Mack couldn't spend any more time thinking about that.

"I'm flaming out, skipper...out of gas--" Coyote Two's engine had gone dark and the jet was now in a long glide, still way too far to make it to Yokosuka.

"Just ease her down, Mad Dog...ease her down. Shallow her out. She'll go for a long way if you trim her up right-"

"I'm listening---but Jesus, that water looks awfully cold to me."

Mack called in the news to Itazuke and to Squadron back at Yokota, requesting the rescue helos come pronto. With a sinking feeling of despair, he watched helplessly as Coyote Two sank lower and lower, then smacked the surface of the ocean and broke up.

"Coyote Two, you there? Coyote Two--Mad Dog, you still with us? Hey Mad Dog--"

All he could do was orbit the impact point for as long as fuel would permit, to establish a good position. They were still a hundred and fifty miles west of the Kyushu coastline. It would take an hour or more for anybody to get out this far, unless the Navy had somebody in the area.

Reluctantly, Captain Will Mack kept calling for Mad Dog, without response. His stomach was boiling as he banked his Thunderjet to the east, heading after the rest of Coyote Flight for dry land. He was almost out of fuel himself.

Thursday, 2-1-51

Over the East China Sea

6:15 a.m.

Tech Sergeant Duke Lanham squeezed through the pressurized tunnel and emerged into the cold drafty bomb bay of the B-29. The radioman, Staff Sergeant Mort Haggerty, was right behind him, bumping into him as they eased out onto the catwalk. The two men, who's job it was to complete final arming of the Mark VI atom bomb, stared at the dull green double ellipsoid suspended in the bomb bay with sober reflection on what they were about to do.

"God's own vengeance," muttered Lanham.

"MacArthur's too," said Haggerty.

"What's the difference?"

"Hell if I know. Let's get to work."

Flagpole Leader, aka Bouncin' Betty, was in level flight, now twenty thousand feet over the East China Sea, heading north toward the split point, denoted as Flagpole Point on the maps. Clayton LaSalle was flying the aircraft and the ship was steady, with only slight turbulence over the drone of her Wright Cyclone engines.

Secured to the shackles of the bomb bay rack, nine thousand pounds of destructive power, the explosive equivalent of eighty thousand tons of TNT, swayed slightly as the aircraft vibrated. Steadied by sway braces, surrounded by wires, heaters, a dessicator and ranks of pneumatic bottles, the Mark VI awaited only the final arming procedure to be ready for business.

Tech Sergeant Lanham, Flagpole Leader's weaponeer, pulled out the crumpled checklist and eased his way out along a rickety catwalk to the forward nose cap of the bomb. Haggerty hung back, leaning on a rail overlooking the switches and gauges of the arming panel.

Lanham passed the checklist back to the radioman. "Here. You hold this and read it out loud, step by step. Don't miss any steps."

"Don't worry, pal." Haggerty buttoned up his flight jacket and pulled his muffler tighter. It was freezing cold in the bomb bay.

Lanham braced himself in front of the bomb's nose cap. He unscrewed a circular trapdoor near the apex. "Okay, it's open--"

"Insert initiator plug," read Haggerty.

Lanham extracted a special set of metal tongs and located the proper container along a bank of containers secured to the H-frame. With the tongs, he pulled out the beryllium/polonium initiator and gingerly inserted it through the trapdoor. "This...goes at the very center, Mort. Gives the plutonium a kick of neutrons at the moment of detonation. Sort of like your car's starter motor."

"Super...just make sure you do it right. We've only got one shot at this. You ready for the next step?"

Lanham grunted, twisting his arms awkwardly to seat the initiator plug. In spite of cold drafts of air, he was already sweating. "Okay. Next step."

"Insert the plutonium plug. Make sure the plug is seated properly."

"No shit..." he located the lead-lined container and withdrew the gray conical plug of radioactive metal. Using the tongs, he carefully threaded the plug through the door opening and into the machined opening in the very core of the bomb. The fissionable material was now critical, able to chain react when properly detonated. Lanham pulled the tongs back out. His hands were shaking.

"Hey, watch those things, Duke. Don't drop 'em now."

"Yeah, yeah, what's next? Read on, will you?"

"Insert tamper plug, then the lens plug."

Lanham did as the checklist dictated. First, he inserted a shaped breech plug of uranium, part of a component known as the tamper. The purpose of the tamper was to reflect the first neutrons generated, to build up the chain reaction. After this was in place, he cautiously inserted the Comp B lens cap...the final piece completing the explosive lens system that gave the core its initial shock wave when detonated.

"--taking care not to cut or abrade any of the explosive wires--"

"Now you tell me. Thanks, pal. I already did that."

"Okay--" Haggerty waved at the nose cap door cover. "Replace the cover and torque it down. Make sure you un-tape the last barosensor ports around the edge before putting the cover back on."

Lanham pulled off the tape from several ports, then eased the door cover back into place and bolted it home.

He paused for a moment, to get his breath back. It was so cold that both men blew steam in their breath.

Lanham glanced with a weary smile, up at Haggerty. "You nervous?"

"Like a bride on wedding day. But proud too. About damn time we struck back, kicked Red ass like we should have done a long time ago."

"You think we can get through?"

Haggerty snapped his fingers. "Piece of cake. We got the best pilot in the whole damn Air Force up front. General LaSalle can put this baby anywhere he wants to, no sweat. I'm not worried...much."

They both got a laugh out of that. "What's next?"

Haggerty scanned the checklist, then indicated the arming panel, suspended on a rail overlooking the bomb's tail fins. "All up here now."

Lanham eased back off the scaffolding and stepped onto the catwalk that surrounded the bomb bay. He folded the scaffolding back and secured it.

Both men clung to the railing, while the arming panel steps were done.

"Spark gap master switch on..."

Lanham flipped a toggle. "Done."

"Check battery power..."

Lanham read off the gauge reading. Three hundred volts. Fully charged, ready to blow power to the capacitor banks, the so-called X unit, that would fire the detonator lenses. "Full juice on the battery. Capacitor banks look good."

"Check altimeter settings."

Lanham read off the dialed in settings on the barometric switches. "Seven thousand feet, on the money." The barosensors and altimeter were backups to the normal fuzing system, designed to ensure the bomb didn't go off until it had dropped below seven thousand feet.

"Now the Archies...check settings on the radar."

The 'Archies' were fighter aircraft tail warning radars, adapted for atomic bomb use. They were set to send a signal when the radar return indicated the bomb was at a height of 1850 feet.

"Radar signal checks good. Set for 1850. Backup circuit energized."

"Okay, pal, this is it." Haggerty folded over the checklist, silently mouthed to himself the last steps. His throat and lips were dry and chapped. He cleared his throat.

"Energize timing relays and circuit."

Lanham flipped several toggles. The fuzing system was now in place, pre-sets dialed in, on internal battery power.

"Energize delay circuit."

Lanham did that. The delay circuit factored in a planned pause in the sequence of relay closings, a further backup to the altimeter and the Archies. The delay was vital to give the pilot time to put the aircraft into an steep 155 degree bank and exit the blast area as fast as possible, to avoid damage from the detonation and reflected shock waves.

"What's next?"

Haggerty gave Lanham a serious final look. Their eyes met for a moment.

"Energize release circuit."

Without hesitation, Duke Lanham flipped that switch too. For good measure, he reached over the arming panel, and gave a moderate tug on the wires feeding into the aft tail section of the bomb. When the bomb shackles were opened and the Mark VI dropped away, the center wire would be yanked out, starting a loud tone in the aircraft's radio circuit. The tone was a simple timer, a countdown to detonation. At the pre-set altitude of 1850 feet, the tone would shut off.

And, a split second later, the cockpit of Flagpole Leader would shine with the power of a thousand suns.

"Release circuit energized."

Haggerty had developed a severe case of the shakes. "Let's get the hell out of here."

"Okay by me." Lanham keyed in the pilot's position. "General, the bomb is now fully armed. Release is energized. Lieutenant Egan has firing control."

LaSalle's voice came back gruff and abrupt. "Very well. Return to your stations."

The radioman and the weaponeer didn't need any further encouragement to do that.

Up front, Clayton LaSalle scanned the cloud decks of an early morning sunrise over the East China Sea. For the moment, things were quiet, the mission proceeding according to plan. Weather was acceptable. Fuel and engines were good. Port and starboard, three other B-29s droned alongside in flying finger formation, just off Bouncin' Betty's wings, level at angels twenty and two hundred and fifty knots.

LaSalle was completely unaware of the furious aerial battle that had just taken place a hundred miles east of his position.

Staff Sergeant Haggerty squeezed out of the tunnel, climbed down the steps and slipped back into his radioman's position. He checked tuning on the ARC-5, then spun the dial back and forth, hunting for local signals to home into.

"Everything go okay, Mort?" LaSalle's voice surprised him. The General craned around from his pilot's position in the bird cage, peering 'downstairs' at the radioman's nook.

"Yes, sir. We just followed the checklist. Bombardier now has firing control of the bomb. No problems, sir. It went just like the book said."

LaSalle nodded. "Good work, son. See if you can patch us into any tactical bands...I want to hear what's going on around us...see what's up. We might be having company before too long."

"Yes, sir...coming right up." Haggerty bent to his radio sets and started dialing and listening, thankful to concentrate on something. The less you thought about what they were doing, the better. Duke Lanham had taught him that.

The final steps were done and the bomb was now fully armed. LaSalle made a visual sweep of the horizon and the instruments, noting with amusement that his co-pilot, Tony Scopes, seemed to be lost in thought, staring out over the windscreen.

Each in his own way, LaSalle thought, makes peace with the gods of war.

He began thinking ahead, planning what they would do when the bomb was away and Bouncin Betty was speeding away from the ruins of Peking.

All along, he had imagined the best course would be to head due east. That would take them out of Chinese airspace and the hornet's nest of MiGs sure to be scrambling as fast as possible. With any luck, they could make it back to Japan, and set down either at Atsugi or Yokota, maybe Itazuke, if fuel was low.

Once on the ground, LaSalle anticipated serious trouble with the authorities. But he was sure SCAP would ultimately be able to protect them from prosecution.

And it was a damn sight better than getting shot down over China.

The split point was coming up in less than an hour and LaSalle decided to have a chat with Lieutenant Rudy Claxton, the navigator. Get some details straightened out on separation procedures, altitudes and headings. He was just unbuckling his shoulder harness and climbing out of his seat when the top gunner's voice sounded over the ship's intercom.

"Bandits! Bandits high, coming in at nine o'clock--bandits, Jesus, there must be a hundred of 'em--!"

LaSalle sat back down in a hurry. Sure enough, through the starboard windscreen, a line of black dots had suddenly popped out of the clouds, silhouetted against the white. As LaSalle watched, the dots grew larger, then scattered to take up positions around the bomber formation.

"Those sure don't look like MiGs," Tony Scopes said. He flexed his fingers around the control wheel.

"No..." LaSalle's lips were tight. The hint of a suspicion began to gnaw at him. "Flagpole Flight, this is Flagpole Leader. We've got company. I don't know who they are or what they want...but maintain formation. And keep quiet. Stay off the radio, until you hear from me."

Scopes had the binoculars out, scanning the skies, warily watching the jets close on them. "Jesus Christ, General...they're ours! Navy markings...looks like Banshees. Must be a carrier around here somewhere."

Before he could respond, LaSalle heard whistles and crackles through his headset. Maloney, the top gunner, cut in over the static.

"Skipper...they're Americans! What do you want me to do?"

"Hold you fire, Maloney. Hold your fire...Flagpole Flight, all gunners...hold your fire. Let me handle this--"

Then the static on the ARC-5 cleared. A deep voice broke into the airwaves.

"Unidentified American bombers...unidentified lead American B-29 bomber...this is Foxtrot One...U.S. Navy F2H Banshee, do you read me, over?"

LaSalle was aware of every eye in the cockpit riveted on him. He glared ahead, gripping the control wheel so tightly his knuckles were white. "Not a word, Haggerty--" he told the radioman. "Maintain radio silence."

LaSalle scanned the panel.

Where the hell did these jokers come from? He'd ordered the formation to stay low out of Luzhou airfield after takeoff. He had wanted to avoid the radar at Itazuke and a smaller one at Itazuke airbase on Kyushu. Maybe the conditions--

The deep voice came back. "Unidentified lead American bomber, this is Foxtrot One. Acknowledge at once. You are surrounded by U.S. Navy fighter aircraft. Acknowledge at once."

LaSalle stared straight through the windshield. "Tony--how many are there?"

Scopes peered fore and aft, portside to starboard, comparing notes with Haggerty and the engineer. "We count twelve, skipper. There seem to be more further off, slipping in and out of the clouds."

"Unidentified lead bomber, you are on an unauthorized mission. Break heading. Turn right to heading one zero five degrees at once. You're directed to change course and descend to ten thousand feet. Acknowledge at once!"

LaSalle checked his fuel gauges. "Engineer--fuel and engine status?"

Duke Lanham scanned the gauges: fuel was nominal, enough for another four hours at this rate. Electrics, pneumatics, hydraulics, all good. "Status nominal, General. All on the beam."

"Tony, we're not losing this mission," LaSalle said grimly. They had come this far. He was determined Gallant Flag would go on to the very end.

"I don't know, General...we're outgunned and outnumbered. We sure as hell can't outrun 'em either. Those babies give the MiGs hell."

LaSalle's mind was racing, evaluating options. They didn't have many. Play along, then break away and duck into the clouds. Dive into the cloud deck and stay there--but that would eat up fuel. Peking was marginal as it was. Open fire--that was suicide. Banshees sported four 20-millimeter cannon and a Westinghouse jet that could fly rings around the Superforts.

"Unidentified lead bomber...this is Lieutenant Joe Cooper. U.S, Navy, VF-22, off the Bon Homme Richard. You are surrounded and outgunned. I say again: this mission is unauthorized. You are ordered to change heading per my command. Acknowledge now...or I'll open fire."

LaSalle was more than willing to call their bluff. Tony Scopes began to squirm uneasily in his seat.

"Keep cool, guys...keep your cool. They're bluffing. They know we're Americans--"

But he never got to finish the sentence. A flash of tracers streaked across directly in front of the bird cage. Warning shots.

Scopes twisted violently in his co-pilot's seat. A burst of flame out of the corner of his eye--he yelled.

"It's Sherman, skipper...he's hit! The sons of bitches hit him!"

LaSalle craned over to see. Off their starboard wing, Flagpole Four was streaming flame and smoke and oil and fuel from both portside engines. Chunks of metal flapped and peeled off through dense black smoke.

Randy Sherman's voice was wild, strained, breaking radio silence. "I'm hit! We're hit...Flagpole Leader, this is Four...multiple hits, both engines...I'm losing them--"

Before LaSalle could respond, half of Four's port wing split off and went cartwheeling aft, trailing debris. Instantly, the B-29 with the Victorious Vicki pinup girl on her nose, went into a flat spin, her nose swinging around, diving, the entire aircraft heeling over like a dying animal.

As LaSalle and Scopes watched in horror, Victorious Vicki careened over and plunged seaward, her airframe rotating like a gyro, trailing fuel and flames in a crazy loop of smoke.

"God---get the hell out!" Scopes yelled to the doomed plane.

"Flagpole Leader to Flagpole Flight!" LaSalle shouted over the radio, "stay together. Stay tight and keep off the guns!"

"General--" it was Don Jacobs--Flagpole One, Hellzapoppin'--"they're firing on us too--Jesus!" Off their port wing, Hellzapoppin', jerked away and peeled off on its own, oblivious of LaSalle's order. "--top gunner's hit and I've got stabilizer damage--"

"We've got to do something!" Scopes yelled.

My God, LaSalle muttered to himself, they're firing on their own planes!

"If we break formation, we'll be sitting ducks!"

"If we don't fire back--we'll be dead ducks!" Scopes came back.

LaSalle knew he was right. "Maloney...all gunners...open fire. Warning shots...just keep 'em away from me"

"An idea?"

"Maybe," LaSalle tightened up his harness. "Flagpole Leader to flight...on my mark--"

"Unidentified lead bomber...change heading on my command...NOW! If you do not change headings right now, you will be fired on again."

Five thousand feet below, the flaming cartwheeling wreckage of Flagpole Four had disappeared into the cloud deck, plummeting straight down for the East China Sea.

LaSalle got on the radio again "--Leader to flight, on my mark, execute the split! Execute Flagpole! You're on your own boys--Mark! Break, break!"

LaSalle grabbed a hold of the wheel and turned her to port in a steep bank. "Engineer, give me max power--!" He pulled the wheel back, just on the edge of a stall, as Bouncin' Betty strained skyward, seeking shelter in a low-hanging cloud deck just above them.

The huge bomber shuddered and vibrated, clawing for altitude. Ahead, a pair of Banshees turned and streaked directly for them. Maloney, the top gunner, let fly a volley of fire from the .50 caliber machine guns. Tracer fire stitched a line across the sky, quickly returned by the Banshees. LaSalle pulled the wheel back further, fighting an incipient stall, as shrapnel tinkled off the fuselage and the windscreen. Two thousand yards ahead, the Banshees pulled out of their dive and thundered away in opposite directions.

Good job, Maloney, thought LaSalle. The top gunner had driven them off, maybe made them think twice about approaching Bouncin' Betty.

Agonizing seconds later, they pulled into the lower cloud bank and lost sight of the action. LaSalle leveled them off at twenty-two thousand feet, then nosed the aircraft over into a shallow dive.

Scopes was aghast. "Skipper, if you drop down now, we'll be back in view again--"

"I just wanted to shake 'em off. We've got to get down on the deck fast. It's the only way. It's the last place they would ever look for us."

"With this load, we'll never have enough fuel to get back up to altitude."

"Trust me, Tony...I know what I'm doing. We've got to lose these jokers first."

Flagpole Leader began a steep dive, heading down blindly through the clouds. Scopes sucked in his breath and tightened his harness.

They dropped through intermittent cloud banks, hearing staccato crackle over the radio. Flagpole Four was already down...their target had been Tsingtao, the Red Chinese navy base on the coast.

The radio crackled then erupted in shouts and curses. "I'm hit! We're hit--goddamn, we're hit bad...feather that engine now!--"

It was Flagpole Two--the Superfort called Eight-Ball was piloted by Kit Carson, heading for Port Arthur--now a victim of the Navy attack too.

LaSalle got on the circuit. "Flagpole Two, how bad is it?"

Carson's voice was even but strained. "Bad enough--Jesus, we got Banshees swarming all around us--damaged rudder, no pitch control, ailerons are sluggish, number four engine on fire, and we're streaming fuel and debris everywhere. I don't know, Leader...I just don't know--"

"Hang in there, Kit...just stay with it. Let the plane go where it wants to. Can you lose 'em...pull into a cloud or something?"

A shrill whistle, then more static--

"Unidentified lead bomber...this is Foxtrot One. Come about immediately. My next pass will be for real. I am authorized to engage and shoot you down if necessary." Foxtrot One was beginning to sound like a broken record.

Not a chance, pal. I'm on your side, but you just don't know it.

LaSalle's stomach was churning. It was hard...there was nothing he could do. "Flagpole Two, execute Flagpole option. Do whatever you can. Leader...out"

LaSalle glanced over at Scopes. The co-pilot's face was white.

"We're on our own, Tony."

"Yes, sir. With the U.S. Navy trying to shoot us out of the sky."

"Flagpole Four, maybe Two gone. That leaves just us and One."

Scopes tried to be optimistic. "Don Jacobs can handle himself. Hellzapoppin' and Bouncin' Betty. Between us, we can still kill a helluva lot of Red Chinese."

LaSalle was easing the bomber out of her shallow dive, leveling off below thick clouds. They had popped out of the murk right into the middle of a driving rainstorm. The ride was bumpy, teeth-jarring, until he managed to trim the plane for the lower altitude. Strong crosswinds were streaming in from the west...he had to crank in a ton of rudder, but they managed to stay more or less on course.

"Peking and Shenyang, Tony--that's all we've got bombs for now. If Hellzapoppin' can take out Shenyang, that'll put a huge crimp in the supply situation inside Korea. Shenyang's the Grand Central Station of the People's Liberation Army. And if we can get Peking, it'll be like cutting off the head of the dragon. The head and the guts...that's what we're after. We can still make this work."

"If you say so, General."

LaSalle ignored the remark. For the moment, they seemed to have lost their pursuit. He was reluctant to use the radio anymore, for fear of giving away their position. A quick check with the navigator, Lieutenant Claxton, established them at one hundred and twenty five miles due east of the coastal city of Nantong, a little north of the Yellow River estuary and the huge conurbation of Shanghai. Level now at four thousand feet, slogging through heavy winds and driving rain, but with decent fuel reserves, LaSalle ordered Duke Lanham, the engineer and weaponeer, to cut back the Wright Cyclones to sixty percent. The shudder began to die off and soon Bouncin' Betty began to settle down, though still riding turbulent waves of air pockets up and down like a Coney Island roller coaster.

LaSalle and Scopes began to take stock of their situation.

"Well, it's a good thing we talked out the Flagpole maneuver," Scopes said. "Now it's happened. Every man for himself. I just hope Hellzapoppin's got enough fuel to make Manchuria. They've got the farthest to go. Think they'll make it?"

LaSalle clenched his teeth, forced his fingers to relax on the wheel. "They have to, Tony. It's that simple. They have to."

Scopes was studying the gray murk, scanning the skies uneasily for their pursuers. "I don't know if Itazuke can still track us or not. Maybe the carrier caught us on their radar. Those Navy guys seemed to know right where we were...almost like they were waiting for us."

"Yeah, and I don't particularly want to see them again either." The germ of an idea began to form in the back of his mind.

Scopes had a quizzical grin on his face. "General, I've seen that look before. What's going on in that feverish mind of yours?"

"Just a screwball idea...and it might just work too."

Scopes shrugged. "So let's have it...I'm fresh out."

LaSalle cleared his throat, looked out the birdcage at the thickening soup they were flying into. "Tony, you and I both know those Navy boys aren't going to give up. They've got their orders. They're going to send up the whole damn fleet's worth of jets, if I know them, trying to cordon off China and force us out into the open. Force us to make ourselves visible, while we're still over the ocean. We can't let that happen."

"I'm with you so far."

"Well, think like this: who are the better pilots for an intercept like that: U.S. Navy jet jockeys or Red Chinese?"

"We both know the answer to that one. I'd put my money on an Annapolis teenager with pimples over any slant-eye in the sky."

"Right. So we don't want to stay out here, over the ocean, any longer than necessary."

"Yeah, but according to Rudy, we don't make landfall for another two hours, somewhere near Tientsin, as I recall."

"True...but that's if we don't turn west now. Head straight for the coast, stay low and head north over China building up our altitude until we make Peking and bam!...drop the bomb."

Scopes squinted in pain. "Pretty risky, isn't it, General?"

"Risky...what the hell have we been doing the last ten minutes...jinking all over the sky like some goddamned fighter plane with an atom bomb in our belly? Can't be much riskier than that."

"What about the Chinese? They got jets too, you know. They're called MiGs."

LaSalle was using his right hand to illustrate the maneuver. "The way I see it is we turn west, and head inland, right into Chinese airspace but low, below their radar horizon...say fifteen hundred feet. I'll have to check on our fuel usage at best power settings for that, but my intuition tells me it's doable. Once over dry land, we take a sighting on the sun--if we can ever find it again--and re-establish a good course north to Peking to hit our primary. Remember, we can still hit Tientsin...that's our secondary." LaSalle shook his fist at the air. "But we're not going to miss. Peking's the target. I already made a promise to Chiang Kai-shek."

Tony Scopes took a deep breath. He stared straight ahead. "You're the boss. I'm game. But we better get that bomb unarmed pronto. Remember she's set to go at eighteen hundred feet altitude."

LaSalle said, "That settles it." He opened up the intercom circuit, speaking to the whole crew. "Pilot to crew...listen up. We've had a change in the game plan. It's the fourth quarter and we're driving for the touchdown. But the defense is stiff. We've got to try a new play--"

Three minutes later, as Bouncin' Betty made a sweeping left hand turn, right into the teeth of eighty knot headwinds, and began dropping down to only two thousand feet above the wavetops, Duke Lanham throttled back the four engines to sixty percent power and fiddled with the mixture for best range. Rocking and rolling through the turbulence of a cyclonic depression a hundred miles off the east China coast, Flagpole Leader was now alone, completely cut off from contact with Flagpole One and the rest of the world.

The coastline of Red China was less than a hundred miles ahead.

The birdcage was quiet as Lanham and Haggerty, the radioman, made their way aft through the tunnel to the bomb bay again, this time to un-do the arming procedure they had just completed an hour ago.

Tense minutes ticked by, as the weaponeer and the radioman, braced themselves on the swaying, swinging catwalks, extracted the arming tools and proceeded to de-energize all the timing and fuzing circuits, isolated the detonators and the X-unit, then unscrewed the bomb casing trap door. Gingerly, timing their movements to the rhythmic oscillations of the catwalk, shivering in the whistling dimly lit cold air, they removed the tamper and core plugs, then did the same with the initiator and completed safing the bomb, by stowing the critical pieces in their special containers racked on the bulkhead.

When they were done, Lanham and Haggerty wiped sweat from their eyes and giggled like schoolgirls playing hookey.

"Really gets the heart pumping, doesn't it, Duke?"

Lanham coughed nervously. "Let's get the hell out of here. I'm beginning to detest this place."

"Amen to that, pal. We just wrote a new chapter in how not to disarm an atomic bomb."

"Yeah," said Lanham, hoisting himself through the tunnel opening, "Groves and Oppenheimer would faint if they saw what we had done. We didn't miss anything, did we?"

"Not according to the checklist," Haggerty muttered, scrambling through right behind him.

"Well, what the hell...if we did, we'll never get blamed anyway." That brought more nervous chuckles.

Up in the cockpit, Lanham told LaSalle the bomb had been safed. "I taped over the baroswitch ports, just to be sure."

"So we can go below two thousand, without being incinerated into fly ash?"

"Yes, sir."

LaSalle eyed the altimeter. He nudged the wheel forward. Bouncin' Betty continued her descent. The next five minutes seemed to last an eternity. But the Superfort made it through and LaSalle finally began to breathe again, when he leveled them off at twelve hundred feet.

"Skipper," it was Claxton, "I make the coastline as less than ten miles ahead."

And before a minute had passed, through squally showers flecked with snow, green-brown rice paddies materialized into view below them. A line of whitecapped breakers defined the shoreline. Moments later, they were completely over dry land, cruising along in bumpy, wind-driven snow and rain at little more than a thousand feet.

The entire crew was silent for many minutes, each man aboard lost in his own thoughts.

They flew on for twenty minutes, in tense solitude, every eye riveted to the gray, murky sky, scanning for MiGs, and to the ground. Mile after mile of rice paddies and marshland cut with rectilinear hedgerows of stone passed below them. Columns of smoke issued skyward, twisted like knots of rope, from mud and thatch towns and villages, each huddled around estuaries and broad tidal flats thick with vegetation. A pall of smoke and thickening fog hung low, helping to mask the sound of the bomber as it rumbled across the soupy delta country of Jiangsu Province.

LaSalle became increasingly restless, nervously fidgeting with altimeter settings and trim tabs on the wheel. Bouncin Betty hung just below the thickest cloud deck, passing in and out of fog banks for longer and longer periods of time. Visibility had been poor since landfall; now it was worsening by the minute.

"No way we're ever going to be able to shoot the sun from below this crap," he muttered. After some discussions with Scopes and the navigator, he decided it was time for a change.

"Give me some power," he told Lanham. The engineer tweaked the mixture and nudged the throttles a hair forward. The engines groaned and the aircraft began vibrating more noticeably.

LaSalle executed a blind right turn onto compass heading three four five, nearly due north, and set them on Claxton's best guess for a Peking intercept course. Claxton had been pleading for something to sight on for the last hour.

"Hold on to your underwear...I'm going to either punch out of this abysmal weather or climb high enough to take a sun sighting and get you a good course."

They were okay on fuel for the time being, but the long climb up to bombing altitude of thirty thousand feet, which would have to begin soon, would tell the story. It was a real but unstated possibility, with every passing minute, that Bouncin' Betty would never have enough fuel to make it to Japan, after the bomb was dropped.

"At least, there's one thing good about going inland," Tony Scopes observed. "Those Navy boys decided not follow us, didn't they?"

The cockpit crew got a small laugh out of that.

They flew north by northwest for awhile, and the terrain became some hillier, soft rounded humps lining the horizon to the west. But the weather stayed solid and Claxton grew more and more impatient, not knowing exactly where they were.

"General, we could miss the target by two miles or two hundred miles....I just can't pin it down any better than that."

Finally, LaSalle gave in. They needed a good fix and soon, to have any idea where they were. It was risky, but they had to begin their bomb run climb soon anyway. The risk grew with each foot of altitude they gained...the risk of radar detection and intercept by Red Chinese MiGs.

LaSalle hauled the control yoke back and the B-29 struggled like a pregnant cow against heavy, snowy air, slowly clawing for altitude, bearing its eight-thousand pound bombload north, ever north, toward a rendezvous with the Communist capital city, Peking.

Thursday, 2-1-51

Kuntsevo dacha compound, near Moscow

5:10 a.m.

Josef Vissarionovich Stalin was in a foul mood. Inside the huge log cabin dacha nestled in the snowy birch woods two kilometers off the Uspenskoye Highway outside Moscow, the Protector of all the Russias was chain-smoking sulfurous Georgian cigarettes and nervously pacing the great room, kicking at maps and papers, taking an occasional swig from one of the many bottles of Tsinindali and konyak, and waiting impatiently for Zhukov to show up. A fire snapped in the stone fireplace and bear's heads glared down at him from the paneled walls, trophies of hunts from winters past.

Stalin appreciated none of them now, as his anger boiled to a frenzy. Angrily, he kicked at a dry bottle and sent it clattering across the floorboards, crashing into the fireplace stone.

Outside, a blizzard was raging. The great room lights were dim and a steam radiator clanked in one corner, adding more smoke to the haze that already hung in the air. A pair of soft knocks on the door interrupted his building fury.

"Vaitee!"

The door opened and it was Marshal Georgi Zhukov, greatcoat and fur shapka dusted with snow. Fodin, the valet, helped him out of his coat and exited quietly. Zhukov rubbed his hands together for warmth. He was dressed in winter browns, chest resplendent with medals and ribbons. Stalin waved him to the samovar on a stainless steel cart nearby, still steaming with hot tea. The Marshal of the Soviet Union helped himself, freshening the bitter liquid with a healthy dose of brandy.

"It's bad, Georgi Konstantinovich," Stalin muttered, teeth clenching a cigar. "I've been getting reports all day and night from the Far East."

"The worst," Zhukov agreed. He laid a small zippered satchel on the divan, opened it and spread out more papers for Stalin to peruse. But the Generalissimo wasn't interested in sitting down to read.

Stalin stalked about the room like a dervish, listening glumly as Zhukov recited the news from the Far East. The Gallant Flag mission had been launched, despite the efforts of Beria's man Trofimenko and their Red Chinese comrades.

"Our fighters managed to locate a flight of American aircraft off the east China coast," Zhukov went on, "but the contacts were not the bombers we expected. Our own planes were attacked without provocation by the Americans, too. All but two of our fighters were shot down. The remaining two were damaged and have limped into Chinese airfields near Antung."

Stalin kicked at a pile of loose maps. He was furious, at the perfidy of the Americans. "This proves that Truman means to attack and start a world war! The Americans have missed no opportunity to prevent us from stopping this atomic mission. Truman says one thing and does the opposite."

"So it would seem," Zhukov agreed.

"Very well," Stalin said darkly. "If Truman wants war, then he shall have it!"

The two men retired to a table by the radiator, going over the disposition of Soviet armored forces in East Germany.

"Operation Magadan is in place, Josef Vissarionovich, and ready for your command to commence operations." Zhukov's thick finger laid out the deployments on the map. "We have five platoons of T-34 tanks here--opposite the American Third Army and the British Argyll Regiment, just across the Fulda Gap. A total strength of four tank and two motorized rifle divisions in revetted positions in these forests, all the way from Schwerin down the Elbe River to Ohrdruf, here--"

"Konev is ready?"

Zhukov smiled, revealing gold caps and tobacco stains on his front teeth. "Straining at the leash. He wants to bloody a few American noses...there are scores to settle from 1945."

"Good. And the planes?"

Zhukov consulted some notes. "Dal'naya Aviatsiya Second Air Army has already staged eight Tu-4 bombers into two bases, Federovskaya and Yuzhnoye, both in the north of the Ukraine. The 'special equipment' is also ready, at Schweinfurt, in Germany. On your orders, Marshal Donets will authorize the bombers to fly on to Schweinfurt, and begin loading the bombs. Eight targets are designated, six in England, one in Germany, and one in France. The Americans will get a taste of their own medicine."

Stalin pored over the maps, puffing vigorously on the cigar stub. He seemed satisfied. Zhukov had worked all night gathering intelligence for the maps and reports. He began to relax slightly; though one could never be completely off guard in Stalin's presence.

"Give me the orders," Stalin said. Zhukov passed over a folder with red-bordered official documents, stamped with the seal of the Red Army STAVKA (Supreme Council). The Generalissimo scrawled his signature, then handed the folder back.

"There, that's done. Now Konev can have his little revenge."

Zhukov snapped the folder shut. He had what he needed. In less than two hours, forward elements of the Red Army 20th Guards Tank Division would roll out of their revetted positions in the Thuringian Wald and cross the Fulda Gap, assaulting American and NATO positions that had been hardened and fortified heavily since the German surrender in May 1945.

Stalin and Zhukov looked at each other, knowing full well that the scribbled signature on the orders meant only one thing: the world was about to be plunged into war once again.

Zhukov asked, "Shouldn't we wait to see if our Chinese friends can intercept and shoot down the Americans?"

"No, " Stalin said. He sank back on the sofa and closed his eyes, his face wreathed in cigar smoke. "I want to move now, while the element of surprise is still with us. Truman won't be expecting us to be so bold. He thinks he has the Soviet Union cowering in fear. But he is sadly wrong."

Stalin suddenly sat up abruptly, his mind perfectly clear and sober at the prospect of armed conflict. The world was a jungle and only the strongest would survive.

"Tell Konev to send in his tanks now."

A thousand miles west of the Kuntsevo dacha, the commander of the First Platoon, 20th Guards Tank Division, winced as he read over the new orders for the hundredth time and peered through the glass of his periscope at the misty forest road ahead of them.

What on earth did Comrade Stalin think he was doing?

Major Yuri Alexeyevich Biryuzov had commanded a platoon of T-34 tanks for the last four years, and had served under Marshal Konev in the great drive on Berlin in the spring of 1945, the glorious Anti-Hitlerist Fatherland War. Ever since, he had been proud to serve as a tank officer with the 20th Guards Division, stationed for most of the postwar period on a commandeered dairy farm near the city of Jena, famous before the war for its Zeiss optical works. Life had been good for Soviet tank officers in occupied East Germany. Plenty of food, German Riesling wines and an abundance of madchen from which to choose an evening's entertainment.

Now Stalin and Zhukov were trying to throw it all away on a mad thrust against the Americans, parked just across the inter-German border in division strength themselves.

It was crazy.

Biryuzov sighed and ordered his platoon to start their engines. They had been parked for several nights now, alongside a heavily forested road near the West German border, revetted deep into the woods, covered with snow and frost, freezing, and waiting. Just waiting.

Instantly, a deep earth-rattling thunder rumbled through the birch and linden trees of the wald, as sixteen V-12 500-horsepower diesel engines roared to life, belching great black clouds of smoke and soot.

Biryuzov snapped down the hatch on his thirty-two ton commander's tank, and signaled the driver to move out. The assault plan called for them to roll right down the highway, a distance of some ten kilometers and breech the border outpost at the end of the road. Once past the border post, the platoon would leave the Ohrdruf Highway and set out across the country. Their first objective was a Bundeswehr depot twelve kilometers west of the border, a marshaling point and repair works for several platoons of American Pershing and Sherman tanks. Biryuzov knew the Americans were conducting maneuvers in the forests on their side of the border even now.

The plan called for the First Platoon to capture and destroy as many enemy tanks as possible, while they were being refueled and refitted at the tank park. It was vital to the assault plan that Biryuzov's tanks engage and eliminate as many American tanks as possible, while other T-34 platoons would follow him through the breech and fan out through the countryside. The success of Magadan was predicated on finding and tying down the Americans in this sector before reinforcements could be marshaled.

Once this was done, Biryuzov's platoon were to roll forward another twenty kilometers and assist in seizing and holding a key highway junction near the West German town of Lichthorst.

First Platoon covered the distance to the border post in less than fifteen minutes. A cold light fog had enveloped the forest, masking their approach. As his lead T-34 approached the checkered arms of the border gatehouse, Biryuzov's heart was racing. Though he was a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, the prospect of going into battle and facing the Germans and the Americans was fraught with danger.

We are not ready for another war, he told himself quietly, peering through the periscope at the approaching gatehouse. But Stalin and the Party had decided otherwise.

The thundering column of T-34s crested a slight rise and bore down on the West German gatehouse. Inside the guard shack, the early morning detail awoke to the sounds and smells of a full-scale armored assault. Yelling and scrambling for weapons, the guards opened fire on the Soviet column with small arms, to little effect. The lead Russian tanks closed the distance rapidly.

Biryuzov was thankful, for his conscience, that the Germans had at least fired on them first. He barked out a single order over the platoon radio circuit.

"Strelyaht! Pobyeda! Victory to our glorious forces!"

An instant later, the huge 85-millimeter main gun boomed. A cascade of rounds buried the enemy in smoke and flame.

Seconds later, the outpost gatehouse was a pile of smoldering ruins.

Thursday, 2-1-51

Blair House, Washington, D.C.

4:45 a.m.

Admiral Bill Leahy gently shook the President out a deep snoring sleep, standing in deep shadow from lights poring into the upstairs bedroom. Leahy had bad news: the Russians had just attacked several border posts along the inter-German frontier. The cable he had just snatched off the printer at his office across the street in the Executive Office Building indicated that the Soviets appeared to be moving sizeable forces into the gaps they had just breached.

Hurrying across the icy street, Leahy prayed to God this was all a mistake and not the start of World War III.

"How bad is it, Bill?" Truman blinked hard in the light, glanced at the clock, and came fully awake, as he sat up on the side of the bed.

"Bad enough, Mr. President. Overnight, we got intelligence, visual and radio traffic, of Soviet movements into the Fulda Gap."

"Across the border?"

"Yes, sir. SHAPE confirms from Brussels, too. We've got elements of the First Armored on the roads around Ansbach and Fifth Corps is already directing them toward Lichthorst and the area. This could be the big one, sir."

Truman glowered, rubbing his eyes. "Damn. Stalin's a weasel. Back in Missouri, farmers shoot weasels every chance they get. What else have you got for me?"

Leahy rifled through a handful of telex messages. The National Military Command Center at the Pentagon had been feeding them to the White House Communications Office all during the night. Leahy had come in just after two a.m.

"More details, sir. News is sketchy at the moment, but some things are firming up. There's growing evidence that the Russians are moving across the border in division strength. SHAPE's already got F-84s and F-86s from Rhein-Main and Wiesbaden in the air, trying to get us some recon pictures."

Truman hunted around for his robe. Thank God Bess is back home. Harry Truman hated like the dickens to waken the First Lady for anything short of Armageddon. The woman had the wrath of God Almighty if she didn't get her full eight hours of sleep every night.

Leahy and Truman padded downstairs to the President's second-floor study and ran into Felipe, the night steward.

"Make us a few pots of coffee, Felipe," the President said. "Some toast and doughnuts too. We'll be in my office."

The Puerto Rican cook's assistant, a seaman first class with the Navy, said, "Yes, sir. Right away. Jelly and frosted both?"

"The works," Truman told him. "We'll need all the sugar and caffeine we can get this morning. Come on, Bill. We've got some phone calls to make."

Still clad in monogrammed robe and slippers, Truman led Leahy in making phone calls for the next fifteen minutes, summoning a full war council to a six a.m. meeting at Blair House.

Truman phoned up General George Marshall, his Secretary of Defense. Marshall was still living at Fort Myer, across the river, retired from the Army now but still revered by everyone.

"George, get over here fast as you can."

Marshall had been up all night, most it at the Pentagon. He had an uncanny nose for trouble and had sniffed plenty of it the night before. He had bunked overnight in a small hideaway bedroom off his huge office in the E-Ring. His voice was tired and haggard.

"Mr. President, I recommend a war mobilization be authorized for all U.S. and NATO forces in Europe, right away."

Truman closed his eyes. This couldn't be happening. "Is it that bad?"

"From all indications we see here, Mr. President, it's even worse."

The council got underway at 6:15 in the morning. Outside, light snow framed the blazing lights of Blair House in a portrait of urgency. A long line of official vehicles had taken over most of the north lanes of Pennsylvania Avenue. A few had even pulled up on the sidewalks in front of Lafayette Park. District police and U.S. Park Police were re-routing nosy commuters and early bird journalists away from the area entirely.

Even in the icy winds, small knots of pedestrians had begun to gather at street corners. By some well-developed, inner sense of alarm, Washingtonians sensed trouble and saw their fears confirmed in the bright lights of Blair House so early in the morning.

Harry Truman called the meeting to order, scowling around the small coffee-stained table at his Joint Chiefs, Generals Vandenberg, Collins and Cates and Admiral Sherman. Opposite the uniformed officers sat the rest of the nation's national security establishment: the SecDef General Marshall, General Walter Bedell Smith of the CIA and Dean Acheson, Secretary of State.

"Gentlemen, we're facing a very serious situation in Germany this morning. Looks like Stalin's got an itch and he's trying to scratch it. George-?"

Marshall reviewed the latest intelligence, eliciting explanatory or corrective comments from "Lightning Joe" Collins and Vandenberg, as to current force dispositions.

"Mr. President," said General Omar Bradley, the CJCS, "it is the unanimous opinion of the service chiefs that we must act quickly here. If the Russians continue to move division size forces into Bavaria and the Wurzburg sector, we'll take heavy casualties trying to root 'em out later. We need to seal off the border gaps and plug the holes now."

"The Air Force is already staging B-29 and B-36 units for immediate launch from our bases in the U.K." Vandenberg added, "principally Mildenhall, Lakenheath and Greenham Common. They will be airborne and en-route to authorization points within the hour. We're also scrambling everything we can at Rhein-Main and other bases in Germany, trying to interdict the Russians before they get off the main highways."

Bradley agreed, "Once they disperse into the woods, we'll never find 'em."

Truman motioned for Bradley to pass over a sheaf of orders. He scanned them briefly, signed two and passed one back. "General, I'm authorizing the Army to intercept and stop, with all necessary force, any Russian units that cross the border. As for the Air Force--" he turned to Vandenberg, "we want to be careful what we do here. I don't want to make any decisions that can't be reversed just yet."

Vandenberg said, "Mr. President, time is short and--"

Truman thumped the table with a fist. Coffee mugs jumped, spilling hot liquid on papers. "Dammit, General, I want to know the full import of what the Russians are doing, before we start dropping atom bombs on them. Haven't I made that point clear enough? I'm authorizing you this and only this: call all your nuclear bomber units--the B-29s and B-36s to maximum alert...just like you've already done, without my approval. You are authorized to load and arm the weapons. But you are to send no more aircraft than have already been launched into the air. It's too provocative."

"Mr. President, the Russians have already--"

Truman clenched his teeth, gritting out his final orders. "The bombers are to stand by on the runways, fully fueled and armed, until such time as I give the order for takeoff. Furthermore, you are to recall any bombers already launched and position them the same way. Is that clear?"

Vandenberg's lips tightened. "Yes, sir. Perfectly, sir."

Truman slurped some coffee, eyeing his advisors over the rim of the cup, trying to take their measure. No question: the Chiefs were ready to go to war with the Russians. It might yet come to that. Truman wondered if the country was ready.

"Now, tell me about your target priority list, General."

Vandenberg consulted some notes. "We have fifty five atom bombs, mostly Mark V and VI's in Europe at the moment, sir. The target list includes all Soviet Long-range Aviation airbases in the western U.S.S.R., as well as Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad, major factory complexes at Gorki, Sverdlovsk, Minsk, the shipyards at Kaliningrad, the naval bases around Murmansk and even half a dozen Red Army bases in the Ukraine and Byelorussia. We have more than enough bombs to lay waste to Stalin's capacity to make war, even sustaining normal attrition in our bombers and accounting for air defenses."

Truman rubbed his eyes. "In other words, we can make the rubble bounce as many times as we want, is that it?"

Vandenberg reddened. "Yes, sir. We have that capacity, sir."

"What about casualties?"

"I can answer that," Marshall cut in. "War games and studies have centered around figures of anywhere from fifty million to a hundred million, depending on the precise mix of targets. Obviously, if we directly target the Party and military leadership in the cities, casualties will be higher."

"Obviously," Truman repeated. "What's to keep the Russians from doing the same...and coming after us, this group right here?"

No one said a word.

The President had made his point. "George, and Admiral Sherman, get with the Coast Guard on this. I want our airspace and coastline defenses up to snuff. Just in case Stalin decides to make retaliatory strikes. Maybe it won't come to that, but we have to be prepared."

"Of course, Mr. President. I'll see to it right away."

"One more thing--" Truman leaned forward, on his elbows, pushing his glasses back up his nose, "George, we have to stay on top of this thing, moment by moment. I want situation reports forwarded to me here at Blair House every two hours, at least for today. If I'm not available, give them to Bill Leahy. Oh, and Dean--" he turned to Dean Acheson.

The Secretary of State sat up a bit straighter. "Yes, sir?"

"Where is the Soviet Ambassador today?"

"My understanding is that he is at the Soviets' Long Island compound. 'Consultations', I believe they call them."

"I want to see him. Today, say this afternoon. Bring him to Blair House and send one of our aircraft from Bolling if you have to. I want to have a few words with that son of a bitch, nose to nose."

"I'll see to it at once."

Truman dismissed the meeting but requested Marshall and Acheson stay behind. When the room had been cleared, the President inquired about Gallant Flag.

Marshall's face was grim. "Mr. President, the news is bad there too. All attempts by the Navy and the Marines to stop the launch at Mishida Island failed. At least four of the bombers got away, apparently to friendly bases in Formosa."

Truman was white with fury. He squeezed the back of his chair so hard his knuckles quivered and turned blue. "I see. And have the bombers been located on Formosa?"

"No, sir," Marshall said evenly. "We have radar and visual intelligence indicating that four B-29s with Mark VI atom bombs were launched from Luzhou airfield on Formosa and are now presumably en route to Chinese and Russian targets. We were not able to contact the Chinese and get their cooperation in time."

"This is incredible," Truman seethed. "Why was I not immediately informed?"

"Because, Mr. President, at the same time we had indications the bombers were in the air, the Russians made their move. It was my decision, sir...a matter of priorities."

"George, those stupid insane bombers may just pull the trigger I'm trying so damn hard to stop from pulling. They're all Stalin needs."

"Mr. President, the Air Force and the Navy are hunting them down right now--Admiral Sherman says he's got every available aircraft in the air. Same with Rosie O'Donnell and the Air Force. We'll find them."

"I'm glad you're so sure...I'm not." Truman crossed his arms, made a decision. "Both of you come with me. Let's go back to the office. I want to place a call to General MacArthur right now, try and talk some sense into the man. Maybe the bombers can be recalled from his end. If Mr. Brass Hat will listen."

"If not--" said Dean Acheson, "it'll trigger a world war for sure. We've got to get control of events."

"That's what the hell I'm trying to do," Truman said.

Back in the President's cramped office, Truman sat down and jotted down notes to compose a telegram to Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.

"Give me some help, boys. We've got to strike the right tone and get this off fast. Before all hell breaks loose."

The three men spent the next ten minutes throwing out ideas and debating the proper tone to take. Inside of half an hour, a rough draft was ready, scribbled out in Truman's nearly illegible handwriting.

Acheson and Marshall took turns reading the draft, first to themselves, then out loud. Truman sat back in his chair, and closed his eyes, letting the words come.

In the telegram, the President took full responsibility for any damage that might be caused by the Gallant Flag aircraft. He expressed his wish to contain that damage and not let the situation escalate out of control into another world war. In particular, he wanted the Communist dictators to know that the President of the United States had never authorized such an atomic strike, despite what they might think. Gallant Flag was portrayed as an unauthorized action by renegade mutinous officers--Marshall pressed strenuously to have that word deleted but Truman wouldn't relent--including General Douglas MacArthur. Truman promised that MacArthur would be summarily sacked and if necessary court-martialed if the bombs fell.

"Harsh words, Mr. President," Marshall said. "These two men are our mortal enemies."

"I know that, George. But enemies or no, we've all got to act like statesmen now and not let events overtake us. We've got to reason our way out of this mess." He didn't tell them that he was furious at himself, for letting Marshall and especially J. Edgar Hoover talk him into letting the plot go on so long, just so the Bureau could build up evidence against MacArthur and break the back of the Soviets' American spy ring. That had been a mistake. Maybe a fatal one.

Now the plot had gotten out of control. He had underestimated Doug MacArthur again.

Harry Truman glared back at George Marshall and Dean Acheson as they made final touches to the telegram. He only hoped he could survive the coming political firestorm that would surely follow, when he finally did sack MacArthur.

If, by some chance, they all lived through the firestorm of war the next few days, Truman was certain beyond doubt that another firestorm would soon follow. This one might be even harder to survive.

There was no longer any question in his mind that General Douglas MacArthur would have to go. The real question was: would he?

Truman didn't want to cross that river just yet.
CHAPTER 31

Thursday, February 1, 1951

Over Northern China

10:10 a.m.

Major Lyle Kitchens scanned the snowy terrain below as the MiG-15 jet trainer banked hard and started climbing skyward at nearly four thousand feet per minute. Below them, the crosshatching of runways at the Anshan People's Revolutionary Air Base quickly disappeared below the clouds. Lieutenant Wu Hu-ban stoked the Klimov turbojet to maximum thrust and the jet streaked toward its assigned altitude. According to Wu, they would make 30,000 feet in less than seven minutes, then take a vector from the Ground Control station at Tientsin.

After that, Wu and Kitchens would go hunting.

Wu had briefed him on the details of the MiG-15 an hour ago, then received the latest intelligence on the presumed positions of the American bombers. There wasn't much to go on...intermittent radar contacts, snatches of radio intercepts, guesswork and hope.

According to radio traffic intercepted by a PLA Navy cutter cruising off the east China coast, at least one of the B-29s had turned west and entered Chinese airspace. If true, that plane could be a lot closer to its target than before. The intercepts had been forwarded up the chain of command, all the way to Corps Headquarters in the capital, then on to the Central Military Commission. Peking was the presumed target.

Lieutenant Wu and the First ("Red Wind") Squadron of the Sixth Revolutionary Air Army at Anshan had been assigned to locate this B-29 and blast it out of the sky.

Leveling off at nearly 30,000 feet, Wu contacted Tientsin Radar and got a vector to turn due south, which he executed promptly. The rest of Red Wind Squadron followed and soon the four MiG-15s were speeding across the broad alluvial delta flats of the Yellow River, the sun-drenched mirrored surface of the East China Sea off to port. Tientsin Radar had told Wu to anticipate a low-level intercept. There were scattered reports, and visual sightings, coming out of the Tsinan and Jiangsu Districts south of them, indicating a large four-engine aircraft maneuvering north at less than a thousand feet altitude.

North...that was the key fact to Wu's mind. It could only mean Peking.

That could complicate things, Wu thought, as he settled in for the ride. This horse doesn't handle so well at low speeds and altitudes. He scanned his instruments, checking heading, altitude, airspeed and fuel. The Russian fighter had a limited range, at best eight hundred and fifty miles if he sweet-talked her and watched his maneuvering. The two-seater they were in now, the MiG-15 UTI , was worse. He'd be lucky to get seven hundred and fifty out of this beast.

Their best hope of snaring a lone aircraft flying low to avoid radar was to stagger altitudes. Array his squadron at eight thousand foot intervals, like a bookshelf, and hope they'd get lucky. It wasn't standard procedure and Regiment would have his hide if they found out, but it seemed like their best chance. Wu knew that half the PLA Air Force was in the air over eastern China this morning. Still, a single plane was a long shot at best.

Wu got on the radio. "Red Wind Squadron, this is Leader. Let's spread out, comrades. Red Wind One, you drop down to twenty five thousand. Red Wind Two, go another ten thousand feet below that, to fifteen. Three, you drop down to five thousand. Maintain position and stay in contact. Keep your eyes open. The capitalist bandits could be anywhere from here to Nanking."

The rest of the squadron acknowledged and peeled off, to take up their new positions. In minutes, the squadron was a layer cake in the sky, wheeling southward across the tawny ribbon of the Grand Canal and its surrounding checkerboard of rice paddies and fields, looking for a speck in the heavens.

A speck that could incinerate Peking, if they didn't find it.

A few minutes later, Red Wind Squadron was transferred to the ground control station at Suchow. A necklace of silvery lakes glinted up through the mid-morning sun as Wu took the new vector. Along with a course change came startling news from the dispatcher. Wu sat up straighter.

There were visual sightings, and radio intercepts, said Suchow, of a furious air battle several hundred miles east of them, over the East China Sea. Indications were that the Russians and the Americans had clashed in aerial combat. Both sides had been trying to intercept the B-29s, but wound up engaging each other instead. Suchow added more:

All but two of the Soviet planes had been splashed; the survivors were damaged and their pilots had made emergency landings at airfields in Manchuria. Radio intercepts showed the Americans claiming to have downed two, possibly three, of the B-29s.

Two, maybe three? Wu sucked in a deep breath. What had their targets been? If it was true, that still left two planes to account for. One was the target Red Wind had been assigned, an infernal ghost of a bogey that ground radars couldn't seem to pinpoint. All during the last hour, intermittent contacts had been made, and Suchow was trying desperately to square these with ground spotters and informed guesswork from Regiment about the probable course of the Americans.

The other plane must still be over the ocean, presumably still heading north. Where? What was the target of that plane?

Lyle Kitchens had listened to the exchanges. He spoke no Chinese, so he had to rely on Wu to translate, which he did sporadically, as time permitted.

"The group must have split apart, Lieutenant," Kitchens surmised. "Planned or not, the planes separated onto individual courses. That's pretty daring, flying right into Chinese airspace." The germ of an idea began to form in the back of his mind. Only one man, of all the men he had encountered dealing with Gallant Flag, would have the balls to do something like that.

"Lieutenant, I've got an idea."

Wu's voice crackled over the intercom, in accented but passable English. "Major, Regiment didn't assign you to fly with Red Wind Squadron to go sightseeing. What is your idea, please?"

Kitchens could feel it. "I'm not a pilot. I don't know beans about jets or aerial combat or intercepts or anything like that. I'm a grunt, just a soldier. But I think I know who's flying that B-29 we're chasing...the one inside Chinese airspace."

"And who is this mad pilot, Major?"

"It almost has to be General Clayton LaSalle. Key man in this whole conspiracy. I think there's a damn good chance he would have taken a mission like this one, with Peking as a possible target."

Wu shrugged; Kitchens could see the gesture even around his seat back. "That is interesting news, Major. But it doesn't help me find the plane and shoot it down."

Kitchens' mind was racing. "Maybe it does. If LaSalle's flying that bomber, and we can get close enough, there's a chance, maybe a remote chance, but worth a try, that I can contact him on the radio. Maybe talk the general out of completing this insane mission."

"That seems a distant hope, at his point," Wu said. Red Wind had broken out of scattered cloud cover now and the sky was clear and hard bright blue all the way to the southern horizon. Off to port, the low green humps of the Shantung Hills broke up the seamless bowl of the sky. Below, twisted ribbons of smoke identified scores of towns and villages, pasted onto the chessboard grid of mile after mile of fields and paddies.

"Maybe," Kitchens admitted. "But I've met LaSalle before." He recalled the rainswept tarmac at Yokota Air Base, outside Tokyo, when Robert Blount had pointed out the general arriving on a courier flight from Andersen-Guam. "He's a pompous, arrogant, trigger-happy asshole. But at least, he's an American soldier, same as me. We've both sworn the same oath, to the same flag and the same Constitution. It's worth a try."

Wu was skeptical. "Major, if by some miracle of the heavens we locate this plane, my orders are to shoot it out of the sky. We won't be taking the time to have conversations about patriotism."

"Just get me in radio range," Kitchens asked. "And give me a chance. What do your orders say about having an American B-29 bomber land in one piece at one of your airfields?"

Wu mulled that one over. "They say nothing. And I don't believe this general you speak of would ever do that. It would be treason. He would be shot."

"Maybe in your country, pal. And maybe in mine too. My point is that maybe our two countries can work out some kind of deal--" he knew he was walking a fine line here, but then how many CID officers wound up riding in the back seat of a Chinese MiG-15, chasing down American bombers? There were no standard procedures for what he was doing; he was making them up as he went along.

Wu was still skeptical but willing to give it a try. "In my country, Major, we do not deviate from procedure. It's dangerous to your health."

"I hear what you're saying, pal, but there are no standard procedures for any of this."

Wu seemed to consider that. "Then we must do what we feel is...right." The very idea sounded strange to the Red pilot. Ever since he'd joined the People's Liberation Army, other men, superior officers and political cadres had decided what was right.

Now it was up to him. And this odd American.

Red Wind Squadron flew on, running low on fuel, taking new vectors from Jiangsu Radar and other stations. They maneuvered left and right, zigzagging across the clear skies of Jiangsu and Anhui provinces, with nothing to show for it, until Wu became increasingly irritated with the commands, and shouted back at the ground dispatcher "make up your damn mind, comrade--we are running out of fuel up here!"

Contacts and sightings were sporadic and fleeting, a glimpse through clouds here, a ghost of a speckle on someone's scope there. No doubt the Americans were very low, still, though according to what Wu knew, the bomber would soon have to start climbing to make its bomb drop over the target.

It was an odd request the American major made. A trick? Perhaps, but some inner sense of respect for the American made him think not. He glanced down at his fuel gauge...less than four hundred pounds. Maybe half an hour, if Control didn't stop sending them off on fruitless duck hunts in the sky. Wu hoped the bomber's final target actually was Peking. That would give them time to catch up.

If the target was Shanghai or Tientsin or some other eastern city, the final bombing run could already be under way. All they could do now was fly on until their fuel bingoed, taking vectors based on the best available contact and hope for the best.

And when the Klimov jet underneath them finally flamed out from fuel starvation, the MiG-15 would become a 2200-pound glider and begin its earthward plunge. Either they would locate an nearby field flat enough to pancake in to a hard landing, or failing that, Lieutenant Wu Hu-ban and his strange passenger would wind up meeting their honorable ancestors a lot sooner than they had planned on.

Wu didn't tell Kitchens what Regiment had assigned as his real, final orders. If the American B-29 managed to evade all attempts to shoot it down, Wu was to use his MiG to ram the bomber off course. He was to sacrifice everything, if need be, in a final suicidal maneuver to prevent the bomber from releasing its payload, or ever reaching Peking.

At Kitchens' urging, Wu contacted the local Ground Control station, a squalid thatched roof and mud brick hut on the outskirts of a town called Quanjaio. The hut was surrounded by terraced fields of cotton and tobacco. In the very center of one field, a tall transmitting tower loomed over families of local farmers, laboriously culling and wrapping tobacco leaves onto wooden carts. Curing sheds lined dirt paths around the edges of the fields.

The request soon blossomed into an argument with the dispatcher, who insisted that such a request would have to be approved by the Regimental headquarters in Hefei. As the station was on maximum alert, no runners could be spared.

"Please to consider making this request tomorrow. Perhaps we will have more time then."

Wu stifled his rebuttal and switched off Quanjaio.

"Useless horse manure. Major--" Kitchens could hear the sound of a decision grinding its way through Wu's thick head. "--what radio frequencies would this bomber use?"

Kitchens had been racking his brain for that very piece of information. Truth was, he didn't really know. All he could do was guess.

"Let's try several, Lieutenant. Try 580 megacycles first...we'll expand outward in jumps of fifty megacycles from that."

"I'm patching you through to the same channel I use. I'll have to dial from up here." Wu flipped on the radio power and selected another channel. Then he tuned as Kitchens instructed him. "Major, you are connected. Go ahead..."

Kitchens lightly cleared his throat. If there is a God in Heaven, please let Him help me find those guys quick--

There was no guarantee that any of the frequencies selected would be correct. Or that LaSalle would even be listening. Or that the MiG's radio would have enough power or be tuned right or that they would even be within range. Lyle Kitchens could think of a dozen other reasons why this would never work.

But they had no other choice. Time was fast running out.

"This is Major Lyle Kitchens, U.S. Army...to American B-29 commander flying over China. Major Kitchens to American B-29 commander flying over China...."

Thursday, 2-1-51

Over North China

10:45 a.m.

Staff Sergeant Mort Haggerty hunched over the BC-348 radio set, closing his eyes, trying to snatch the fragments of words he thought he had just heard from the ether. It had been there, snippets of English, he was sure of it. Then it was gone. He turned the tuning dials left and right, nudging them with flicks of a finger, while boosting power, even twisting the antenna a fraction left or right. What the hell was it that he had heard?

Had he really heard it after all?

Haggerty was about to give up and return to his task of finding Chinese radio stations out of Peking for them to home on. Then, it came through his headphones once more, this time startlingly loud and clear—

"—ican B-29 commander, now flying over—"

Haggerty snagged the frequency quick, jotting it down, then thumbed backward until it caught and centered in the band.

"—is Major Lyle Kitchens, U.S. Army...I am broadcasting to the American B-29 commander now flying over China...acknowledge please...acknowledge this transmission if you hear my voice—"

Sergeant Mort Haggerty's blood ran cold. He switched to intercom channel, and called up to the cockpit.

"Skipper, I've got something—"

"What is it, Mort? Chinese hit parade?"

"No, sir...I think you'd better hear this—" Haggerty transferred the feed to the intercom circuit. All throughout the plane, Kitchens' frantic tone could be clearly heard.

"This is Major Lyle Kitchens, U.S. Army investigator...I am broadcasting to the American B-29 bombers now flying over China...acknowledge this transmission if you hear my voice...this is Major Lyle—"

Up in the bird cage, Clayton LaSalle listened to the voice for a few moments, his eyes occasionally snagging his co-pilot Tony Scopes, who was equally perplexed.

"What the hell is that, General?"

LaSalle sneered. "Old Red trick, that's what. They've used it over Korea too, trying to lure some of our bombers closer to MiG Alley."

"He sure sounds American."

"Could be a recording. Or even a POW, forced into making the call. I've heard of that happening too."

"So we ignore it?"

"Like a mosquito bite. Reds know we're here. They're just trying to smoke us out, make us do something to reveal our position." LaSalle scanned his panel, took a peek out the windscreen. Bouncin' Betty was climbing bumpily but steadily through eight thousand feet now, several miles east of the muddy liquid ribbon of the Hwang He River, rising through broken cumulostratus clouds toward their final bomb run altitude of 30,000 feet. The silvery hills of the Taihang Shan to the west bracketed rising smoke columns, indicating villages and towns in the foothills of the mountains. "No real American would try to talk us out of striking the enemy. Hell, Tony, we're at war with the friggin' gooks. I wish we had more than one bomb."

Scopes decided not to raise the matter again and went back to his instrument scan. LaSalle had the controls, not trusting this part of the mission to the autopilot. Scopes figured there was no use in pressing the General anymore on the matter. LaSalle was like a bomb himself. When he was released, he went straight to the target. But it was peculiar and damned unnerving to hear such a red, white and blue voice on a frequency that should have been filled with Communist propaganda or heroic workers' ballads.

LaSalle checked with the navigator, Lieutenant Claxton.

"Rudy, can you pinpoint our position yet? We should be clear of these clouds in another two or three minutes."

Claxton's voice was harried. "I'm trying, General. Plane's rocking and swaying so much, I can't hold the sextant still. I should have something in a few minutes."

"Well, hurry it up. We're drinking fuel like crazy. We're only going to get one chance at this."

Several minutes later, Claxton radioed up with his best guess. "General, I make us about 114 degrees 30 minutes East, and 38 degrees North. That big town out to the left should be Hengshui, if I'm reading the map right. We're steady on heading three four oh degrees, maybe about three hundred eighty...three hundred eighty five miles south of Peking."

"Give me a course check. I want to zero our heading right into the heart of the target. Lieutenant Egan's using the Forbidden City as his visual cue for the drop."

"Ah...just a sec..." there was static on the line, then Claxton came back "—General turn right to heading three five five degrees. Hold that course. We got a sixty knot crosswind off the nose but that should put us right over the target in about an hour and fifteen minutes."

"Good enough," LaSalle executed the turn.

"Uh-oh," it was Scopes. "Looks like we got ice forming on the wings."

LaSalle turned and saw the problem for himself...a glistening sheen of ice reflecting sunlight streaming down through holes in the clouds. "We may have to drop down a bit, to get out of this air. I'll take us back down to five thousand for awhile. At least, until we pass these mountains."

"That'll help us hide awhile longer too."

The problem with the low altitude, LaSalle well knew, was that it was eating into their fuel reserves. According to the engineer's calculations, Bouncin' Betty still had enough fuel to make the target okay, with a slim margin. After that, LaSalle knew there was little chance they could turn around and make it to either South Korea or Japan.

In the back of his mind, Clayton LaSalle knew what had to be done. He'd been ignoring the answer for the last hour but it was there nonetheless, waiting to bite him. After the bomb drop, assuming they survived that, they would have to turn due east and make a speed run to the coast, ditching in the Yellow Sea. Before he did that, though, he was damn sure going to contact whatever air-sea rescue forces he could. In this kind of winter weather, the crew wouldn't last five minutes in the freezing seawater.

He wasn't thrilled about the prospect, even less so at the need to tell the crew about it. But it could be done. A month and a half ago, after taking Lucky Lucy up North into Manchuria, even nosing into Soviet airspace, he'd had to ditch in the same ocean. He figured he could do it again, especially if it meant putting eighty kilotons of bad news right into Chairman Mao's lap.

Once they were rescued, they'd have to take their chances with U.S. military justice but LaSalle was guardedly optimistic. MacArthur was a living legend, practically a force of nature. SCAP would protect them.

Anyway, it was a hell of a lot better than being a Red prisoner.

"Pilot to crew...listen up." LaSalle decided it was best to let the boys know what was in store for them. "This bomb run is going to be no picnic...I guess you've figured that out already. The engineer, Sergeant Lanham, tells me we're not going to have enough fuel to make dry land after we drop. So South Korea's out. Japan's out. We're going to have to do this the hard way. We're going to get wet on the ride home. But—trust me on this—it can be done. I've done it myself. And it'll feel a damn sight better while we're bobbing around out there in the ocean...knowing we just made radioactive rubble out the enemy's capital city. Target's coming up in eighty minutes. Everybody knows what has to be done. Stay focused and I'll keep you posted. Pilot, out."

LaSalle switched back to the cockpit circuit. "Sergeant Lanham?"

The flight engineer's voice crackled back, "Yes, sir?"

"I want you and Haggerty to get the bomb armed again. Get back there and check her out, make sure we came through all that maneuvering okay. Check the shackles too. I don't want the damn thing hanging up when we drop. We're staying above two thousand feet for good now. Both of you get back there and do it now."

"Right away, sir." Behind them, Lanham unbuckled himself, and squeezed around the gun turrets, picking up Haggerty in the rear. The two crewmen scurried quickly through the tunnel to the aft bomb bay.

It's the bottom of the ninth inning, LaSalle muttered to himself. And the big slugger's about to step up to bat.

He heard again the pleading voice of the English-speaking man on the radio, the gook claiming to be U.S. Army Major Lyle Kitchens. LaSalle smiled and snorted, ignoring the voice.

Bouncin' Betty was now through twelve thousand feet, and climbing nicely, handling the headwinds just fine, thank you very much. By now, the bomber would be making big bright blips on somebody's radar scope. He could just picture the gooks scrambling down below, twittering like birds, trying to figure out what to do. But time was running out for them.

Kitchens' voice kept up an incessant chatter in their headphones and LaSalle grew tired of the trick. He turned the volume down.

"Tony, those gooks are clever, I'll admit. Damn good impression, if you ask me. But it won't work. Navigator: estimate time to commence final turn and bomb run."

From the navigator's station behind them, Claxton's voice was quiet but firm. "One hour exactly, General. Sixty minutes on the button, if my figures are right."

Thursday, 2-1-51

Sinjiang Province, Western China

11:00 a.m.

Mao Tse-tung silently studied the steep forbidding escarpments of the Kuruktag range as the Russian Ilyushin transport circled for a landing at the airfield. For Han Chinese accustomed to green rice paddies and the gentle rolling hills of Hunan and the teeming cities of the east coast, the sun-blasted wasteland of the Sinjiang might as well have been the far side of the moon. Desolate, parched, empty scrubland wrapped in the stern embrace of the Tien Shan Mountains, Sinjiang was a bleak and barren quarter stashed away in the remotest corners of the Chinese mind--another planet devoid of life or promise or even people.

Which is why the Party and the Army had decided to build a remote mountain outpost beneath the foothills of the rough uplands two years ago. In this age of atomic warfare, such a redoubt would ensure that the brain and heart of the Party and the country's leadership cadres would survive anything the Americans could throw at them. Indeed, in the tense and anxious days following the October 1949 founding of the People's Republic, there was plenty of intelligence that the Americans and their Nationalist cronies on Formosa were planning a return invasion to throw the Reds out once and for all.

The invasion had never come but Mao had no doubt of the outcome had the imperialist stooges tried such a move. The Long March back in '37 would have paled in comparison.

Mao had decamped from Peking as soon as word had come from radar stations on the Jiangsu coast that the American planes were coming. He had refused at first, but Zhu De had insisted and Lin Piao wouldn't take no.

The leadership has to survive, they had told him. Go to Bukarik. It's out of range for the American bombers. We'll re-group for the coming chaos. It will be just like the caves of Hunan all over again, forming up the Red Army, marching back east in triumph.

The trip was sealed when Stalin had agreed to come by train and meet them at the outpost.

So Mao had boarded the plane, with his top military and Party leaders and evacuated to the emergency government command post that had been hacked out of caves in the bowels of Shih Ho mountain. The westbound flight had taken nearly seven hours. On board, Mao had pored over maps of Korea and the front lines, tense, nervous, chain smoking Red Dragon cigarettes, sweating and swearing at everything his commanders were telling him.

The news was not good.

The general strategic posture in Korea of the Chinese Peoples' Volunteers was in grave danger, Zhu De had said. The first battles of the new American general Ridgeway, something the American press had labeled Operation Killer, were causing horrendous casualties. Marshal Peng was trying to hold his lines but it was becoming hopeless. The battered, overstretched CPV forces were reeling back northward toward the Han River.

"At this rate," Zhu said, "the Americans will re-take Seoul in another two weeks."

Mao was furious. He stormed up and down the cramped aisles, waving his arms like a startled hawk. "Then counterattack, comrades! What's the matter with you all? We have to counterattack...have you forgotten the simplest lessons of our own war with the Nationalists!"

Zhu was hesitant. "It's not that simple. Peng's supplies are stretched thin...the Russians haven't delivered all the trucks Stalin promised. And the Americans are getting better at finding our coolie trains and bombing them."

Mao was red with anger. He sat down heavily in a nearby seat, glared out the windows at the Kuruktag. The plane was on approach to Bukarik's tiny airfield.

"Don't worry about Stalin, comrades. I'll discuss that when we meet. He's supposed to be in Bukarik this afternoon...coming by armored train across the border."

Zhu De seemed lost. He stared down at the maps unfolded on the seats as if they were Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Mao noticed the look. He and Zhu had warred together for years. Zhu had practically created the People's Liberation Army, stitched it together from warring tribes and factions.

"What is it, old friend? What's eating you now?"

Zhu looked old. His broad flat, pig's nose barely holding up rimless spectacles. Behind the glasses, his eyes were red and watery.

"I worry, that's all. What if the American bombers get through. What if China is atom-bombed? Millions will die. It will be a catastrophe."

Mao nodded. "China lives for catastrophe. It's all we know. Don't fret...it's a few bombs. Bigger than most. And Stalin's already said publicly he will move in Europe if the bombs drop. Seize all of Germany. Millions may well die...millions died at the hands of the Japanese. But China will survive. Look...I want you to make plans. You're a good planner. A good strategist. Make plans for an attack on Formosa. No one will expect that...in the midst of this attack, the glorious Chinese revolutionary soldiers march triumphantly onward, against all odds, bringing the Nationalist bandits to heel."

"With what...paper divisions? Half our strength is tied down in Korea, helping the garlic-eaters."

But Mao was already on to other matters, conferring with Lin Paio, Chou En-lai and others, deep in animated conversation. Zhu watched forlornly.

Didn't he remember that the American Seventh Fleet was now in Formosa waters? It was suicide to take on the Americans on two fronts, despite Mao's rhetoric.

We're not ready for this, Zhu told himself. We're not ready to cross the Formosa Strait.

Despite his misgivings, Zhu De decided to occupy himself with making plans anyway. Maybe he could find a few straggling divisions hung up on trains or still marching north to help Peng. Somewhere in south China, among all the millions of the coastal provinces, perhaps manpower could be made available. Give them all a rifle and a canteen and send them on.

Zhu snorted in disgust. Mao was an idiot. Combat ready army divisions weren't created out of thin air. And it was going to take a hell of a lot more than inspiring oratory to re-build China after atom bombs had decimated the Middle Kingdom.

A thousand miles northwest of Bukarik, an armored, heavily guarded train snaked its way across the snowy wasteland of the eastern Kazakhstan desert. Aboard was Generalissimo Josef Stalin, en route to the clandestine meeting Mao so urgently wanted.

Stalin watched the gargantuan sentinels of the Tien Shan glide by his window in the cold hard blue desert air. Sunlight glinted off something high up the nearer slopes...a tiny ice-crusted lake, a spring-fed oasis of life in an otherwise lifeless scrubland of salt flats and stark hills.

Stalin was quiet, pensive, thoughtful. He knew that Zhukov's preparations were done in eastern Europe and that the initial assault forces under Konev's command had already crossed the inter-German border and engaged American forces.

Just in the last hour, an angry letter had come by telegram from Truman, threatening massive retaliation if the Soviets didn't pull back, even as he apologized for dropping atom bombs on the Chinese. As if to back up the threat, Stalin had received later intelligence reports from Beria indicating America's Strategic Air Command was now loading atomic devices aboard B-29s at their bases in England and Turkey.

The Defender of all the Russias was sure this was a bluff. If Truman means to have war, he shall have it. But on our terms, not his.

The ultimate goal was quite simple: not domination of western Europe but completing the defeat and occupation of Germany...unifying Germany as a single Communist state.

Shortly after noon, the train crossed the Russia-China border and after making his way laboriously through a high, snow-covered pass in the Tien Shan, finally pulled into the deceptively bucolic little village of Bukarik. A convoy of cars was already waiting in the crude station as Stalin stepped onto the platform.

He met Mao on the platform, surrounded by a platoon of associates. The dictators embraced perfunctorily and said little as the convoy pulled out of the station, heading for the command post. The entire complex had been tunneled out below a decrepit monastery of crumbling gray stone, perched on the slopes of Shih Ho Mountain like a lion's head. All around the compound, a fence had been hastily erected, vigilantly patrolled by Chinese soldiers in mustard-yellow cotton jackets and cloth caps. On the hillsides beyond, goats and llama grazed stolidly, their herdsman cloaked in the dull red wraparound chuba robes common to the Sinjiang.

The monastery had been abandoned for years, but dusty robes of long-forgotten Buddhist dialectics still hung along the walls of the foyer. Beyond the columned entrance, a rickety open-frame elevator took the dictators sixty feet below ground, to a Map Room, hardly larger than any of the passenger cars of the Russian train. Spartan, brightly lit, the room was dominated by several tables pushed together, now draped with red damask cloth and covered with maps.

For the next hour, Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-tung coordinated something like a strategy for dealing with the crisis.

Mao smoked and stalked the room like an amorous bull, grabbing aides by their arm sleeves, pressing demands on Stalin, who sat in one corner, still as death, absorbing the tactical details before him.

"If war comes," Mao was saying, "China will take advantage of the situation to seize Formosa. We'll put Chiang out of business for good this time...finish off what we couldn't two years ago."

Stalin's moustache barely twitched. Tea steamed from a cup, untouched, on the table in front of him. "Comrade, we'd better be certain the situation is stable in Korea before that happens. The Soviet Union can offer additional weapons, more supplies and planes to help out."

"And we need them. Gratefully, we'll accept any help from our fraternal brothers in revolution. We need them soon. Already, we're still waiting for the supplies you promised before."

Stalin's face darkened. His eyes followed Mao as he circled the room. "We do have commitments to fraternal allies in Europe, as well. You've got to be patient."

Mao exploded. "Patient! How can I be patient when American bombers are even now flying over my country, ready to drop atom bombs on my people? Listen...I know all too well what patience is...we--all of us here--learned patience in Hunan, when we're starving and picking bat shit off our heads in the caves, trying to make an army out of what was left of our people." Mao stopped suddenly, leaned across the table, thumped the map in the general vicinity of China. "You see this map...all of this is rightfully ours. All of it once was China, until the imperialists and colonialists and other leeches took it away. For your information, we're even now planning a little invasion to the south, a move in force into Indochina, to recover our lost lands."

Stalin counseled caution. "The Soviet Union will not be able to support you in that. We need every weapon and man for when the western Allies counterattack in Europe."

As they talked, Zhu De brought in additional intelligence from the radar tracking stations in the east. Mao scanned the reports.

"We have information from one of our navy cutters that some of your planes and the Americans dueled in the air not so long ago."

Stalin nodded, taking the report. "I was informed on the train. Indications are that three of the American bombers were shot down...by the Americans."

"It's a trick," Mao insisted. "False information to make us lower our guard."

"Perhaps, but it says here that one of the bombers has turned west and entered Chinese airspace. It's been spotted heading north."

"Peking is the target, you can be sure of that, comrade. We're already tracking it. Truman and MacArthur would like nothing better than to level our great capital city."

Stalin was thoughtful, studying the ocean areas of the map, tracing possible courses with tobacco-stained fingers. "There must be another plane still over the ocean, then. Where is he headed?"

"We have many fat targets in Manchuria," Mao said. "But Peking is the prize...I'm sure of that."

"How can you be so sure?"

Mao puffed up his chest with a huge sigh. "Because I know how MacArthur thinks. We're alike, he and I. We both know the value of symbols. War is nothing but psychology and deception...win a battle in the enemy's mind and you will never lose on the battlefield. MacArthur wants China back in the arms of the imperialists. Peking is the head. When you want to kill a duck, you cut off the head. The rest of the body is yours. MacArthur thinks China will be like a duck. But he's wrong. China is a snake...ten times as dangerous when the fangs are cut."

"You may not be able to go back east for a long time, if the bombs drop."

Mao shrugged. "We have survived the Japanese. We have survived the Nationalists. We will survive this. Even a single bomb over Peking will surely kill millions and leave us with even more rubble. But the snake won't die. If Peking is lost, we intend to re-establish our capital at Nanking, right where old Chiang Kai-shek plotted schemes with his warlord cronies. The biggest problem is this: can we maintain control of the countryside from there? If Peking goes, I'm sure old Chiang won't wait even a second to send his own troops across the strait and invade the mainland again, probably with the Americans behind him. It will be general war, just like before, fought over the carcass of China." Mao started pacing again, jabbing at the air. "But this time, we will prevail. There's no going back to Boxers and opium wars for China now."

Stalin was philosophical, sipping at the tea. "If general war comes, there aren't any guarantees. Only death is certain. Both Russia and China have endured much from the fascists and the imperialists. If we can endure a little more, a little longer, our enemies will exhaust themselves and the world will be prostrate. Ready for the final revolution foreseen by Marx and Lenin."

"Now that's a world," Mao said, hoisting up his own cup of tea, "that I can toast."

2-1-51, Thursday

Aboard Flagpole Leader

12:00 noon

Bouncin' Betty had just cleared twelve thousand feet over the sprawling city of Jinan, with the broad Yellow River delta of western Shandong Province stretching from one horizon to the other, when all hell broke loose.

"General--" it was Staff Sergeant Ronnie "Slim" Givens, the rear gunner, "looks like we got company. I count five, seven...twelve...maybe more MiGs, four o'clock and closing awfully fast!"

Seconds later, a silvery streak thundered across the path of the bomber, passing less than a hundred yards away, and arrowed into a cloud bank on their port side. Slim opened up with his 20-millimeter cannon, stitching a line of tracer fire across the sky, but it was too late. The MiG was by and gone in a split second, no doubt already wheeling about for another pass.

"Jesus Christ!" Scopes yelled.

LaSalle was already banking the huge bomber left and right, trying to evade the next pass.

"We're sitting ducks!" he said. "I've got to get us out of here...Slim...keep 'em off my tail, will ya?"

The staccato brrrrp! of the tail cannon was Givens' answer. "I'm trying, General...but the sons of bitches are all over the place!"

It was true. Bouncin' Betty had somehow blundered into the middle of a big pinwheel of MiG jets, each one peeling off for a screaming guns pass, coming at them from every point in the sky.

LaSalle swerved and jinked as best he could, but the B-29 wasn't made for aerobatics and she was sluggish, still climbing through twelve thousand feet when the MiGs jumped them.

"Look out--!" Scopes ducked involuntarily as two MiGs made a scissors pass from port and starboard, guns rattling smoke puffs. They each passed less than a hundred yards over the birdcage. Twenty-three millimeter rounds laid down a seam of smoke 'petals' across their path; somehow, they escaped any hits. Scopes prayed out loud for a miracle.

"Get on the remote guns!" LaSalle ordered. Scopes unbuckled himself and eased aft to the gunner's station behind the cockpit. Twin four-gun turrets, on the top and bottom of the fuselage were slaved to a gun sight and firing trigger. Scopes eased his way past the engineer's panel, then squatted beside Claxton, the navigator. He took hold of the handgrips and the turrets swiveled under his command. Mechanical linkages in the sighting blister overhead helped him track the furball developing outside. He caught a slivery glint arrowing out of the sun at two o'clock and sighted in.

It was a MiG all right, barreling down from above them. Five thousand yards out, his cannon erupted in a spit of flame and smoke. Scopes squinted in the bright sun and swung all four turrets around, tracking...tracking...leading the son of a bitch just so...NOW!

He squeezed the triggers for all he was worth. Four .50-caliber machine guns spat a stream of lead, arcing through the cloudless blue at the onrushing speck. The speck bloomed like a mad dream, then wobbled. There! A puff of smoke, then another. Scopes yelled out.

"Got 'em, skipper....pegged the bastard--!" More smoke, then the speck disintegrated in a ball of red flame. Scopes saw the cartwheeling wreckage coming right at him. He ducked out of the sighting blister and hit the deck, just as metal shrapnel and pieces tattooed the top of Bouncin' Betty, ripping holes in the fuselage skin, peppering the birdcage and unzipping a top panel like stiff canvas. A deafening clatter vibrated through the entire aircraft as the aluminum skin rattled and flapped in the airstream.

"God Almighty--" breathed Claxton, pulling himself back into his seat. "Hey, Major...next time don't wait so long, okay?"

Scopes paid him no attention. He had already stuck his head back up into the sighting blister, scanning the skies for more MiGs. There were plenty.

Where the hell had they come from? LaSalle figured once he had started his final climb, somebody's radar had painted them. Put enough MiGs in the air and get a few lucky vectors--it was bound to happen. Now they were caught in the net.

He swerved and jinked as best he could, but it wasn't doing any good. Givens and Scopes managed to pick off a few more, but like hornets swarming for the kill, Bouncin' Betty had attracted three more MiGs for every one they tagged. Despite all their waggling and maneuvering, two more Reds put a line of cannon rounds through the bomber, both in screaming guns passes that seemed to be their favorite tactic. The last one had been close, damaging the rear stabilizer--Givens' reported it was "shot up like a backyard fence post"--and now he was fighting the yoke, struggling to keep them trimmed and level in pitch.

"I'm losing control..." he muttered. Scopes was still back at the gun turret sights, spraying the sky with rounds...smoke had started to filter into the cockpit from somewhere...a fire? "--no elevator, no pitch...it's real sluggish...Tony, you better get back up here...this is gonna take two of us--"

Scopes squeezed off a few more blasts, then banked the weapons and came forward, slipping back into the co-pilot's seat.

"I need help with the controls...elevator's sluggish."

"You still got aileron?"

"Yep. Rudder too. But we need to get the hell out of here--"

Scopes peered out at the terrain. The sky was a bright, hard cloudless blue. But off to starboard, an elbow of low hills wreathed in fog and cloud was visible. Some of the peaks were poking above the clouds, a bank moving onshore from the Yellow Sea.

"No where to go but down, far as I can see, General." He pointed to the peaks, then scrambled to pull up a map he had stashed under his seat. "Shandong Hills, probably."

LaSalle saw them. "Best way to ditch these bastards is to go low."

Scopes shook his head. "What about fuel? We just burned hundreds of pounds climbing this high."

"No choice," LaSalle decided. They both ducked as another pair of MiGs screamed across the windscreen. Bouncin' Betty shuddered as more rounds hit her across the vertical stabilizer and portside wing. "Let's do it--"

It took both of them to ease the yokes forward. Bouncin' Betty groaned and bucked, then nosed over gently into a shallow dive. LaSalle twisted the yoke slightly, putting a slow roll into the dive, a flat and slow corkscrewing spin, trying like hell to keep the MiGs from getting more shots at them.

"I'm hit...I'm hit....ah, shit...sweet Jesus....that hurts like--"

It was Givens...the last pass had nabbed him.

"How bad?" LaSalle called back.

They could all hear the groans on the intercom. "My leg, sir...shot up pretty good...I can still hold the trigger but there's blood all over the place...and the window's shot out...I got dirt and debris swirling around...can't see a thing--"

Staff Sergeant Mort Haggerty was closest. The radioman could make the tunnel in seconds. "Mort...get back there...see what you can do. We need that gun."

Haggerty was already unstrapping. "On my way, General." He hoisted himself into the tunnel and scrambled aft.

Down they went, the B-29 in a slow-rate flat spin, nosing over steeper and steeper. Through six thousand feet, LaSalle and Scopes hauled with all their strength, trying to level them out. They had made a steep diving starboard turn, aiming for the thick fog now flowing between the terraced peaks of the hills.

"How tall are those mountains?" Scopes wondered.

"Doesn't matter...we're going down there. Friggin' Reds will never find us in that crap."

"And we may not have enough fuel to climb back out," Scopes muttered.

Gradually, with sweat and groaning effort, they got Bouncin' Betty leveled off into a shallower dive.

"Jesus, this ain't no fighter, General--"

"She is now," LaSalle grunted.

The MiGs continued the attack, though with less and less effectiveness. Approaching the fog bank and the hills poking above, the enemy seemed uncertain, unwilling to drop much lower. But the last guns pass did the worst damage.

"We're holed, General," said Scopes. "Right smack in the middle of the port wing. Looks like fuel--"

"Roger that--" came Duke Lanham, the engineer. "Losing fuel on number two and three tanks, going fast, I'm going to have to shut down number four engine now--"

"I see something!" yelled Haggarty, stuffed into the rear gunner's station with the wounded Givens. "Fuel or oil...streaming out. It's all over everywhere...port side!"

"Shut her down!" LaSalle commanded.

"We're losing fuel fast, skipper." Lanham again. He toggled through a bank of switches on the engineer's panel. "Trying to cross-pump now...but it's not working very well..."

"Must have got the pumps too."

"Here we go--"Scopes muttered. Involuntarily, he squeezed his seat arms. Ahead, the fog bank was coming up fast. And a line of terraced hills stuck up above the line of murk directly ahead.

The cockpit was silent for a few minutes, save for the airstream whistling through the bullet holes and the incessant banging of the top fuselage panels. They slipped into the fog, LaSalle keeping his eyes riveted to the altimeter. He leveled them out completely, pulling with Scopes' help, to an altitude of two thousand feet.

"Can't see a thing...I hope there's a gap in those mountains--" the co-pilot muttered. He stared ahead, expecting at any moment to see the side of a mountain materializing into view.

LaSalle was quiet. Fighting the aircraft, dodging mountains, losing fuel, he forced himself to take several breaths, flexing the kinks out of his neck and shoulders.

"Dead ahead--"

"I see it--"

Mist-shrouded green terraces of tea and rice fields suddenly loomed directly in front of them. LaSalle grabbed the yoke and jerked it hard right. At first, Bouncin' Betty kept right on course, causing Scopes to join the effort. The two of them, yanked harder on the yoke, making a tighter turn. The B-29's shredded wings bit deeper into the cold, moist air.

"Gonna...be...close...." LaSalle gritted out.

After what seemed like forever, the huge bomber began a slow but noticeable roll to starboard.

Tony Scopes stopped breathing. They cleared the steep slopes by less than five hundred feet. Below their wings, farmers and peasants in conical straw hats glanced up, wondering at the massive American bomber with the Stars and Stripes on its side.

"Whew...too close for me, General--" Scopes laughed, wiping beads of sweat from his eyes.

"At least we lost our friends. Keep your eyes peeled...we'll stay down here for awhile."

Haggerty re-appeared at the mouth of the tunnel, with Givens half-bandaged crawling out behind him. "Don't go any lower, General. Remember...the bomb's armed and fused to blow at eighteen hundred feet."

LaSalle glanced at the altimeter. It read 2150 feet. "Thanks for the warning, Sergeant. But it can't arm itself until released."

Haggerty was helping Givens into the radioman's seat, strapping him in. The kid's left arm was a bloody mess, held together with strips of canvas and batting. His face and hair were soaked with sweat and blood. Shards of metal coated his lips, which were dripping blood on the radioman's console.

"True enough," Lanham put in, "but I wouldn't want to risk it. Those shackles let go, even if the bomb bay doors don't open...and we'll be vaporized in an instant. You gotta remember, General...it's the release that activates the timing circuit and the radar altimeter. We go below the setting and that baby'll blow for sure."

LaSalle's stomach suddenly twisted up in a great big knot. "In training, they told us there were two inputs required to detonate."

"True enough, sir...the bomb fusing system needs a time value from the timing circuit, which is usually set for sixty seconds. Gives us a safety backup, so we can put maximum distance between us when she drops. And the air pressure value from the barocircuit is also a backup...makes sure we don't detonate before the preset altitude. But the 'Archies'--that is, the altimeters, that's what really controls the firing altitude."

LaSalle swallowed hard. "And none of this happens until the shackles release? Isn't that right?"

"Yes, sir...that's how it's supposed to work."

"Well, thank God for quality workmanship...we're still here."

"General," said Scopes, eyeing another line of peaks off to their left, "how long you planning to stay down in this crap?"

LaSalle eased them right with a shallow bank, steering a middle course right between two peaks that looked like coolie hats. Rings of fog swirled around both of them. "Rudy," he called back to the navigator, "you'd better get your calculator out. You too, Duke. I need fuel, rate of climb and heading...get me back on course to Peking. And make it fast."

Claxton set to work at his navigator's station. After a few minutes on the slide rule, he had some answers. None of them were good.

"General, I make our position about two hundred and fifty southwest of Peking. Right along the northern edge of these hills is the Yellow Sea coastline. Recommend immediate left turn to heading three two two degrees. We'll be over the mouth of the Yellow River in a few moments, if we ever break out of this junk. That heading will take along the coast to just south of Tientsin, then put us on a beeline right to Peking."

"Fair enough, " LaSalle said. "Duke, we got enough fuel?"

"Barely, skipper. I'm showing six thousand pounds left. Number four's shut down, so that helps. But we still have to climb to drop altitude. That'll eat up time and fuel. I make us with about two thousand pounds at drop point."

Ouch. LaSalle winced, doing some ballpark math in his head. "That hurts. We've got to be at thirty thousand to drop. We need the altitude and distance to get away from the blast and the shock waves. What about the leak?"

"Getting worse, skipper. I've crosspumped what I can, but one of the pumps is shot. And the leak's getting worse. We've got enough to climb and make the target. After that--" Lanham shrugged, staring at the dials, willing them to tell a different story. "We'll be lucky to make the coastline."

"Okay...understood," LaSalle muttered. Making the target was uppermost in his mind. After that, one way or another, he'd get them the hell out of Dodge and over the ocean. They'd have to take their chances after that. "Give me a best rate of climb for fuel conservation...that puts us over the target at the right time."

"Got it right here--" Lanham called up a few figures and LaSalle listened carefully.

"I don't see as we have much choice, General," said Scopes. "Two hundred miles from the target. We got the fuel to get there. We got the bomb."

"Yeah, and every moment's delay allows the Reds to slip a few more divisions into Korea. And more American boys die. We're going in."

"Skipper," it was Haggerty, the radioman, "got that weasel on another channel now. The guy claiming to be an American--"

LaSalle and Scopes listened derisively to another round of radio chatter.

"--this is Major Lyle Kitchens, United States Army--"

Scopes snorted. "More like Mao Tse-tung's army."

The crew had taken to calling the Red Chinese trickster "Major Outhouse." It had been Duke Lanham's idea. "He's so full of shit, it's pitiful," the engineer had explained. Major Outhouse had thereafter become the butt of a long line of caustic jokes and catcalls.

After getting a few more much-needed chuckles from Kitchens' plaintive radio calls, LaSalle called up Lanham.

"Duke, give me climb power on Numbers One, Two and Three. We're going to pull out of this stew for good. And Haggerty, how's Slim doing back there?"

Haggerty checked his semi-conscious patient. "Stable. But he's still bleeding. I'm trying everything I can."

"Let the navigator take over for awhile. You go aft and man that rear gun. And stay on your toes."

"Yes, sir." Haggerty waited until Lieutenant Claxton squeezed around the turrets, then hauled himself up and aft through the tunnel. Claxton continued dabbing at Givens' facial lacerations and wounds with canvas and torn-off strips of flight suit material.

LaSalle got on the intercom. His voice was firm. "We're going to thirty thousand feet, men...making our final heading change now. Peking's about an hour away at this point. Bombardier, I'll let you know when you can have the aircraft. I want everybody awake and eyeballs out. Watch for MiGs. It's a cinch we'll catch some flak on the approach too. Hopefully, we'll be too high for them to get a bead on us." He wiped some grime from his face and swallowed hard. His throat was dry. God for some coffee and a sandwich now.

"It's gonna be a rough ride all the way into Peking."

LaSalle dialed down the volume on Major "Outhouse's" increasingly desperate voice. When Duke Lanham had finished fiddling with the engine mix levers and tweaked the throttles forward, LaSalle and Scopes grabbed their control yokes and pulled mightily, fighting the dense choppy air and the elevator damage and the fuel leak and the whistling, swirling wind in the cockpit.

Foot by laborious foot, Bouncin' Betty shuddered and struggled and clawed for altitude.

2-1-51, Thursday

Over the Yellow Sea

12:10 p.m.

"Jesus, they're our guys!" Lieutenant Colonel Don Jacobs stared out the side window of Hellzapoppin at the formation of U.S. Navy F2H Banshees that had just taken up station off both wings. "What the hell--"

Then their radio headsets crackled with static.

"Air Force bomber, this is Eagle Eye, VF-22, off the Bon Homme Richard. You are flying an unauthorized mission. Repeat, you are flying an unauthorized mission. On my mark, turn right heading one one oh, and descend to fifteen thousand."

Jacobs was damn sure Flagpole One was not going to be deterred now, not when they were within two hours of their primary target at Shenyang, Manchuria.

"Eagle Eye, this is Flagpole One. This is a secret mission, photo-recon, over enemy targets up North. We have priority tasking, straight from SCAP. Negative on heading change."

"Flagpole One, this is your last warning. On my mark, make your heading change as directed. If you fail to comply, I am authorized to use my guns."

Friggin' cowboy, Jacobs thought. Navy jet jocks were always hotheads. "No way," he muttered to his co-pilot, Major Rob Bettis.

"Looks like they mean business, Colonel," Bettis worried.

Jacobs called up his rear gunner. "Granger, you ready on the 20?"

Granger had already drawn a bead on the lead planes of Eagle Eye, a movement not unnoticed by their pursuers. The rear gunner's station mounted paired .50-caliber machine guns and a 20-millimeter cannon.

"Got 'em in my sights, boss. Just say when."

"Hold your horses. I'm going to try and talk our way out of this."

It was a long shot but it was preferable to duking it out with eight Banshees.

"Eagle Eye, Flagpole One. We are on a priority mission, under SCAP tasking, to gather intelligence." At least it sounded good, he figured. "Stand down now. These photos are urgently needed."

The reply, when it came, was unmistakably Navy--a line of tracer fire across their forward windscreen, like opening up a lid over the sky. Eagle Eye had just let fly of volley of 20-millimeter fire.

"Holy shit, they're attacking!" Bettis was wide-eyed as the lead Banshees made a scissors pass right in front of them.

In defense, Jacobs put Hellzapoppin' in a shallow twisting dive. Granger opened up on the pursuit a second later, ripping off burst after burst of his own 'twenty'. Wary of closing too soon, the Banshees scattered like ducks, twisting and jerking all over the sky.

The next few minutes was a furball in the sky, an alley fight with the faster, more nimble Banshees probing and diving at the bomber, while Hellzapoppin' kept them at arm's length with strategic bursts from her own guns. Just keeping a more or less constant heading while swerving and banking to avoid the Navy gunfire kept Jacobs and Bettis busy; that and stealing worried glances at the fuel gauges. Shenyang was at the outer limits of their fuel range. Every gallon of fuel used up fighting off the Banshees was one less gallon they'd have to get up to their target and get away.

As it was, Jacobs knew from a navigation check with Lieutenant Moore a few minutes earlier that one of the Gallant Flag targets was dead ahead, less than thirty minutes away. Port Arthur was a key naval and shipping port on the Liaodong Peninsula, jutting out into the Yellow Sea. Nominally assigned to Flagpole Two, "Kit" Carson's Eight-Ball, it was now an open target. The Navy had already apparently splashed Carson's plane and crew an hour before, from what Jacobs could judge from radio traffic.

He still wanted to hit Shenyang. It was a vital Red base in the middle of Manchuria. But Port Arthur was a viable alternative. Now, with the Navy nipping at their tails, it might be their only possibility.

Jacobs and Bettis had put Hellzapoppin' in a series of shallow dives, aiming to throw off the Banshees' aim as much as he could. With Granger dealing lead at their rear, and the top and bottom turrets slamming rounds as fast as their remote-controlled turrets could swivel, the carrier jocks would have their hands full just getting in close enough.

His best hope was that Eagle Eye would eventually bingo his fuel--it was a cinch they were a long way from any carrier, even the Bon Homme Richard didn't trawl around in these waters--and call off the attack. With any luck, they would be free and clear to continue on into China, and make their primary target a hill of radioactive dust in less than two hours.

"Rob, we better get the techs back to the bomb bay," he muttered, uneasily eyeing a gathering fist of Banshees circling for another guns pass. Hope to God Granger sees 'em. "Finish up arming early. We may have to go for secondary."

"Right." Bettis ordered Tech Sergeant Bob Petty, Flagpole One's weaponeer, and the radioman, Staff Sergeant Joe Bock, to head aft, through the tunnel.

"And hurry up, will ya? If we can't shake these clowns, skipper's going to divert to the secondary. We'll be over target in less than half an hour."

That didn't give the techs much time to complete the final arming procedure. Petty and Bock scrambled through the tunnel in a hurry.

Five minutes after they had set to work, gingerly inserting the initiator plug, then the plutonium core, Hellzapoppin' suddenly shuddered and shook her tail like a wet dog. The impact threw Bock off the upper scaffolding and he just managed to snag hold of a

strap along the bomb bay wall. He lurched out into space around the side of the huge Mark VI bomb and swung back and forth like a pendulum. Hellzapoppin swiveled and twisted and jerked like a mad dog, then rolled hard to the right.

"Arrrrggghhhh--" Bock was momentarily pinned against the bulkhead of the bomb bay by the shifting weight of the bomb. "--my.....arrrrggggg...it's my leg--"

"Hold on--" Petty scrambled around the catwalk and braced his back against the same bulkhead. With all his weight, he pressed his feet against the bomb, trying to nudge it away far enough for Bock to get free. It was nine thousand pounds against two hundred and it was hopeless. Petty grunted, then just as he pushed again, the bomber rolled back the other way, and the bomb shifted again.

"--aaaahhhh--" Bock pulled himself up and over the rail onto the catwalk, numb and pale. A series of shudders sent them both sprawling, followed by the rip of cannon fire rattling through the belly of the plane. Twenty-millimeter rounds sliced into the bomb bay, while their tool box clattered off the arming panel and spilled its contents onto the bomb. Unseen by either man, some of the rounds had shredded hydraulic lines around them, smashing a valve and actuator that cycled the bomb bay doors. The hydraulic fluid had nowhere else to go and now pushed at full force into the door actuator cylinders.

As if on command, the bomb bay doors cycled open right below Petty and Bock's feet.

"Mother of God!" Bock breathed, still nursing bruises and lacerations from being pinned by the huge bomb.

At nearly eighteen thousand feet, the open bomb bay doors sent a gale of cold freezing air swirling into the bomb bay. Bock and Petty were flattened on the catwalk by the force of the wind. White fog formed instantly, coating everything, then bit by bit condensing out as droplets, spraying a fine mist throughout the chamber. Sparks arced at the arming panel as the wind tore loose wiring to the detonation and timing circuits. More sparks popped and hissed around the still-charging X unit, the huge bank of capacitors that sent the first pulse to the detonation cord.

And down below the swaying Mark VI bomb, the sun dappled brightly off the wavetops of the Yellow Sea, nearly three miles below them.

Joe Bock scrambled backward from the edge of the catwalk but the mist had dampened the metal and he lost his footing. Petty grabbed for the radioman--they'd come through Primary Flight and Weapons schools together in Texas only six months before--but he was too late.

Bock skidded beneath the rail. He clawed for a long, agonizing two seconds at the bomb casing tail fin, at the open 'trapdoor', at struts in the bomb shackle H-frame, at anything he could reach, but his hands found only cold air. He thumped on the side of the bomb with an audible oomph, struck the back of his head on the top of the bomb bay door, and pitched headlong out of the aircraft, cartwheeling like a child's doll into the slipstream. Fully in view for what seemed like eternity, Bock flailed and jerked, windmilling in the air, as his body plummeted seaward, finally becoming a blurry dot against the immensity of the ocean background.

Bob Petty swore, uttered a quick prayer, and squeezed his eyes shut.

Dear God, let it be quick...please just let it be quick--

He was about to return to the plutonium core, still in its lead-lined container strapped to the wall, when Hellzapoppin slammed sideways violently. More cannon rounds detonated almost directly below the belly of the plane and the concussion slapped Petty backward like a fist. He crumpled to the catwalk, lunging blindly for anything he could grab. His fingers tickled something--it turned out to be an upper sway brace, torn loose in earlier maneuvering, now clanking against the bomb and the bay doors. The air burned and he tasted acrid smoke from the shell that had gone off.

Petty staggered back to his feet--not an easy thing--as Hellzapoppin was bucking like a stallion-and dug grit and dust from his eyes. He looked around the bomb bay and tried to take stock of the situation.

Bock was dead. The skipper was still jinking and twisting to throw off the Banshees, making his job all the harder. The Navy boys were still shooting at them, taking chunks out of their fuselage with each pass. If Skipper couldn't lose them, or Granger and the other gunners didn't clobber a few of the bastards, they'd be minus an engine and in deep shit in no time.

Petty figured their only hope was to fend off the attack long enough to make the Navy jocks bingo their fuel and turn away. That and the fact that they were fast approaching Chinese airspace, with every prospect of a rude greeting from a couple dozen MiGs when they got there.

This is not a very nice neighborhood, Petty thought. Grimly, he braced himself against the freezing gale-force winds and set to work.

The arming procedure was not quite finished...the plutonium core still needed to be inserted and a few wires connected, plus he still had to untape the barosensor ports around the perimeter of the open 'trapdoor.' Must not forget that, he told himself, as he struggled with the special tongs to extract the semi-spherical ball of gray metal plutonium from the wall.

He was in the process of swinging himself against the gusting wind when Hellzapoppin took a mortal blow, and the entire aircraft slewed first left, then right like a freight train on a curve. The tongs banged against the bomb and the plutonium core slipped away, falling out into the sky.

Petty stared in horror at the sight, forgetting even to breathe for a moment, until the thin air forced him to.

"Shit...shit shit shit---"

Up front in the birdcage, Don Jacobs knew Flagpole One was lost when Banshee's rounds sliced through engines three and four, and a fuel line erupted in a ball of flame, blowing off half of their portside wing. The aircraft immediately jerked into a tight, flat spin, pinning the cockpit crew against the windscreen glass. Jacobs and Bettis were thrown violently forward. The co-pilot was slammed into unconsciousness by the force of the turn.

Hellzapoppin could no longer stay in the air. Losing lift and control, the huge crippled bomber began a corkscrewing, ever-deepening plunge into the ocean eighteen thousand feet below.

In his dying moments, Tech Sergeant Bob Petty knew only one thing. They were losing altitude fast and they bomb was not yet fully armed. He had promised the skipper he'd get the bomb armed. Now he'd let them all down.

To Bob Petty, failing his buddies was even worse than dying.

Petty struggled against his own dimming consciousness and the centrifugal force of their accelerating spin to make his way over to the arming panel. If he could arm the thing before they dropped below two thousand feet, the 80-kiloton device might just go off.

What am I saying...the core's gone--

At the very least, they could take a bunch of those hotshot Navy boys with them. And there was just a chance they could get close enough to Port Arthur to do some damage there.

But the core...it's--

Fighting for consciousness, fighting the spin force, and the frozen toggles on the arming panel, now covered in frost, fighting the onrushing hurricane now flowing into the bomb bay, Petty strained to make good the final connections.

But he was destined to be too late to make any difference. The last pass of the Banshees, a screaming all-out guns dive with 20-millimeter rounds stitching the sky, had carved up the birdcage into a million glassy fragments, at the same time holing fuel tanks in the starboard wing and shredding Number Two Engine, which promptly exploded in a black geyser of smoke and flame.

Hellzapoppin had been mortally wounded and her entire cockpit crew was dead. This fact would have mattered little to Tech Sergeant Bob Petty even if he had known it. Still blinking blood and ice crystals out of his eyes, slipping away into death, he was desperately trying to splice some wires from the detonators to the batteries, bypassing the now-trashed X-unit of capacitors, when the frigid wavetops of the Yellow Sea came rushing up at him through the open bomb bay doors.

Petty saw from the corner of his eye the crest of a wave break over the doors a split second before Hellzapoppin slammed into the ocean with terrific force, splintering into a million pieces.

Petty died instantly, crushed by the weight of the collapsing plane.

And Flagpole One's Mark VI atom bomb never detonated.

2-1-51, Thursday

Peking

12:20 p.m.

Stan Benecky swung his crutch around and hobbled over to the panel, where the radio tech was fiddling with dials.

"Let me, Sarge...I used to mess around with ham and amateur radio. I'll make sure this gook doesn't get any ideas." Benecky pulled up a stool and scowled at the technician, who quickly averted his eyes and concentrated on his dials. Benecky brandished the burp gun in his face, just in case. The technician had a long horsey face, and Benecky had taken to calling him Lucky.

Now in control of the radio station on the outskirts of Peking, the two Marines were watching carefully as their hostages fiddled with the transmitter and controls, trying to change the station's frequency. Lou Skiles had managed to get across what he wanted: the station was to start transmitting on a frequency of 8300 cycles.

"I heard a little about this from a fighter jock I knew at Wonsan. Son of a bitch flew Corsairs. Made his living bombing and strafing the gooks from treetop level. He said his radios operated at 8000 cycles, more or less. I figure we try that first."

"Sounds good to me," Benecky said. He studied every move the technician made, then grunted and gestured when he wanted the gook to try something else. "Think the bomber boys use that frequency too?"

"How the hell should I know? I'm an infantryman. I have no earthly idea what radio these flyboys use. But we've got to start somewhere. Even if it doesn't work, it keeps these clowns occupied."

"Till we think of something else."

After ten anxious moments, they had managed to communicate what they wanted and the Red Chinese Army technicians went to work, glancing furtively at the Marines, and at the door and shuttered windows every chance they got.

Expecting company? Benecky thought. But he too glanced around nervously. At any moment, he half expected the doors to be knocked down and a few platoons of Chicoms to come bursting in.

The station turned out to be a rather low-power affair, part of the capital's neighborhood propaganda broadcast system. Racks of tapes lined one wall, below the shuttered windows, which when parted, Skiles found out, gave a knee-high view of the street and hordes of vendor carts and rickshas huddling at each corner. Speeches by local bureaucrats, martial music, even a few tapes of Tommy Dorsey and Duke Ellington filled the racks. In halting fashion, the lead technician had indicated the station served not only the surrounding neighborhood but several large collective farms nearby.

Through sign language and proddings with the barrel of the burp gun, Benecky ordered Lucky to test the transmitter. "Send a test message," he growled, pantomiming the action with his hands and mouth. Lucky seemed to understand.

Skiles put on a set of headphones. Lucky threw a few switches, then rotated a large dial, watching carefully as a needle on the instrument above swung steadily to the right. Skiles quickly nodded.

"I've got something...a tone here."

Benecky nudged Lucky and mimed talk with his fingers. Lucky sweated and spoke a few words, nervous, stumbling.

Skiles nodded vigorously. "I heard him. Loud and clear. We're on the air."

"Yeah, the Peking Marines Amateur Hour."

Skiles took a quick peak out the shuttered front windows. His face darkened.

"Couple of trucks outside. Looks like a company of soldiers. More than a platoon, anyway. Infantry...they're dismounting, forming up. Looks like they might try to crash our party. Hurry up, will ya?"

Benecky snatched the headphones and shoved Lucky aside with his burp gun. "My turn now, pal." The technician retreated to a corner, huddling with the others, eyes wide. Benecky took the microphone and adjusted its height, clearing his voice. Skiles watched as more trucks pulled up along the street, disgorging more infantry. He tensed up, slid from the window to the door and peered out into the corridor, as Benecky started speaking.

"This is Corporal Stan Benecky, United States Marine Corps, broadcasting in the clear to American bombers approaching Peking. If you can hear my voice, home in on this signal. Let my voice guide you to the target...this is Corporal Stan Benecky--"

Skiles had become increasingly unnerved by the forces gathering outside. He crept down the corridor and hung back in the shadows, nudging open a door to watch. Outside, guttural barks and commands filled the air...sergeants lining up their troops, from the sound of it. Once thing Lou Skiles knew was what a sergeant's voice sounded like. It was the same in any army.

Through the walls, he could hear Benecky broadcasting, chattering away like a real ham. He wondered who else might be listening in. The thought of Benecky's Jersey accent bellowing out over rice paddies while peasants bent to their backbreaking labors was almost funny. But Skiles didn't have time to laugh. The situation outside was getting grim in a hurry.

Watching the troops receive their orders, then disperse on the run by squad, he realized what was happening. Slowly but steadily, the station was being surrounded. As if to confirm his suspicions, he heard voices filtering back up the corridor from the back entrance by the alley. More troops and coming fast. He expected them to burst in at any second.

They didn't have much time. Skiles quickly ducked back into the studio, scribbled out what was happening and gave it to Benecky. The Corporal nodded, even as he talked but kept up a steady patter to the microphone, relating the story of his life, the story of their capture, imprisonment--he had some choice Jersey words for the 'Mayor' of Camp Seven, Liu Si-lingh--the story of how they escaped and the crazy trek across half of Manchuria.

"--and so the very first time I ever kissed a girl was with Esther Simpson, or maybe it was Sampson...whatever, hey, she was a hot one, I'm telling you. Her Dad was rich as sin...lived in Saddle Brook, worked with some fancy law firm. Esther...now there was a piece--I mean a work of art--"

Skiles snorted. Benecky had finally found his calling...he'd have to be shot to death to get the microphone away from him now. He slipped back outside and went down to the back door, where he had heard voices filtering in from the alley.

Before he could reach it, the door slid opened. He stood there for a long moment, face to face with three gooks, nearly as startled as he was. It wasn't clear who started firing first.

Skiles scrambled backward, spraying the hall with fire, as he cut and ran to the studio. A bbrrrpppp of rounds cut through the air, stitching a line of plaster out of the walls. One round clipped him in the back of the leg and he pitched forward with a heavy grunt and landed on his side. He winced in pain, instinctively grabbed for his leg and took another hit in the side, in the stomach. Bleeding bad, he pulled himself toward a closet, swung open the door and torqued himself behind it, diving to avoid another burst from the enemy.

For the next minute and a half, Lou Skiles managed to hold off the intruders. Shouts and clattering footsteps sounded all around the building. It was just a matter of time before the Chicom squad was joined by others, from both doors. He could be easily flanked, was already pinned down, separated by a good twenty feet of open hallway from the studio door. He could only imagine what was going on inside. But through the gaps in gunfire, he could still hear Stan Benecky chattering away, faster than ever, like he was stuck in the ON position, the mike glued to his lips.

That boy always did like to talk.

Somehow, he had to protect the studio as long as he could. Benecky's voice might be out there on the airwaves over China, helping some goggle-eyed bomber pilot make his bomb run. He decided the best thing was to try and make a dash for the studio, barricade the place and let the sons of bitches have it when they tried to storm the room, as he knew they surely would...gooks were like ants--all they knew was swarming and yelling like Indians.

He got to one knee, already he was feeling faint from blood loss, and silently calculated the steps it would take to dash up the hall, and lunge for the studio door. At any second, the front door might crash open and he'd be cut down in a hail of gunfire. But better to die with his buddy than alone stuck in some laundry closet with pails and brooms and mops.

He sucked up his breath, and fell stumbling out of the closet, pitching and diving and clawing for the studio door. The last five feet took an eternity, but the barrage of rounds that sliced through his neck and chest from the squad now infiltrating the building, did not.

Lou Skiles died quickly, his twitching body riddled with 7.62-millimeter rounds, carved up by so much spurting blood and tissue that when he finally stopped heaving and lay still, the first soldiers to arrive weren't sure exactly what they were looking at.

Sergeant Lou Skiles never made it to the studio door. He died with his outstretched right hand exactly twenty six inches from the handle, frozen reaching up in the air for the handle he would never find.

A Red Chinese soldier saw the battered Timex watch exposed on the wrist of Skiles' upraised hand and stooped to help himself. His buddies squeezed by, surrounding the studio door, handmotioning each other instructions for how to begin the final assault.

Through the thin walls, Stan Benecky chatted on, his thousands of radio listeners captivated by the salty dialogue of the kid from Hackensack.

The force outside the studio had now swollen to several platoons worth, and Benecky could clearly hear their whispered commands, their heaving breath, the carbines and burp guns and bandoliers clanking through the walls.

"--and so my friends, the end of my time draws near..." he had started to speak faster, like the New York pros who rattled off soap and soda commercials like verbal machine guns--"please hurry up you guys, home on my voice...I don't believe this show will be on the air much longer...just come to Mama and show me what you can--"

And the door burst open before the sentence was done.

In five minutes of solo broadcasting, Corporal Stan Benecky had insinuated himself into several thousand minds and hearts across the southern environs of Peking, a fresh blast of novelty that no amount of red-faced scrambling by the officials could hush up. Now his brief career as a radio personality was over, cut short in a hail of gunfire.

Red Chinese troops poured into the studio firing at will, pumping rounds at anything that moved. The studio technicians were cut down and died in a heap in the corner where they cowered, shouting, pleading but to no end.

Benecky himself was nearly sliced in two, thrown from the chair by the impact of several hundred high-velocity rounds. He died instantly, in mid-sentence--

Several hundred miles away, Flagpole Leader was still struggling to climb, having finally made it to minimum drop altitude of 25,000 feet. The sound of gunfire and the subsequent flat tone of a live carrier wave instantly grabbed the attention of General Clayton LaSalle, who had spent the past few minutes chuckling over the latest Red hoax to come over the airwaves.

He glanced sharply over at his co-pilot Tony Scopes. "Jesus, that sounded real enough."

"Too real," Scopes conceded. "You figure the guy was legit?"

"Hard to say." LaSalle scowled, peered ahead at the flat swampy terraces of southern Hebei, coastal marshlands fast approaching. "Gooks are clever. They know we're here. I suppose they'd try just about anything to trick us."

"Gunfire too?"

"You can do all kinds of things on radio. Look at the Phantom, stuff like that."

"I suppose. But that chap sounded just like some of the jarheads I know. Just like a Marine."

"They could have turned one of their POWs. We don't what kind of brainwashing they're using on those poor guys."

"Coastline coming up, General." Lieutenant Claxton's voice was up several octaves. The kid was getting excited. "That's Tientsin, off to the right." They had all noticed the dirty haze of a huge port city hanging over the shoreline.

"How far to target, Lieutenant?"

Claxton paused, then spoke up. "I make it at one hundred and four miles true, sir."

LaSalle sat up straighter in his seat. "This is it." He opened up the intercom to the rest of the crew. "Men, target's less than twenty minutes ahead. Stay on your toes. Eyeballs out. Watch for company. And secure all loose gear. When we drop and turn, this baby's going to shake, rattle and roll like nothing you've ever seen." He switched back to the cockpit circuit.

"I'm opening the bomb bay doors in ten minutes. Bombardier, on my mark, commence your run."
CHAPTER 32

Thursday, February 1, 1951

Over North China

12:30 p.m.

Top Gunner Pete DeLong loved to whittle while he sat enclosed in the cramped rear gunner's station aboard the B-29. He'd been whittling on a particularly colorful duck the last few weeks and the end was now in sight. Just a little more off the tail, 'poof' up the feathers and the side coat, maybe a few shavings off the bill, and she'd be ready. DeLong often whittled away on pieces like the duck during long over-water missions, when there wasn't much to do or see. Bouncin' Betty's former pilot, Major Hixson, had once found a pile of wood chips and shavings in the floor of the compartment and confronted DeLong about it.

DeLong told him the truth and Hixson, realizing it was the kid's way of dealing with the stress, let it go. "Just don't let Sergeant Wilkins see that," he said, referring to their ground crew chief. "The man likes his B-29 clean and neat. He finds that crap and he'll chew your ass up one side and down the other." Hixson didn't have to add and keep your eyes open up there.

DeLong didn't have any trouble doing that. He was from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, way back in the piney woods in the foothills of the Smokies, and whittling came naturally to him. He had, by all accounts, unique talents for a B-29 gunner: the ability to keep a sharp lookout for enemy aircraft closing on the bomber, the ability to put a slug of accurate 'dead nuts' cannon fire through the enemy's cockpit at incredible distances, and through it all, the ability to carve and whittle realistic likenesses of duck and fowl while at the same time being shot at from thirty-thousand feet.

'Slim' DeLong was a man of multitudinous talents, as Hixson often had said.

He had just polished off the last of the feather details when he looked up and caught a glint of something underneath high cirrus clouds in the distance. Instantly alert, he squinted, holding off the sun with his hands, and confirmed what he had first suspected. He got on the intercom to the cockpit.

"Top gunner to pilot. General, just spotted four MiGs closing fast, dead behind us, maybe a couple of thousand feet above our altitude."

LaSalle seemed distracted. "Roger, that...keep your eyes open. I've got to stay at this altitude...Lieutenant Egan will be taking control of the aircraft in about five minutes."

"Understood, sir...I'll keep 'em busy." He cycled the action on the 20-millimeter cannon, priming the weapon for use. Then, for good measure, he swiveled the twin barrels, drawing a bead on the enemy, just like hunting ducks back of Fox Hollow behind his Papa's cabin.

Come to Papa, he muttered. Just come on in to Papa... I've got a nice little dinner of lead buckshot for you...open wide and come on in the house....

One hundred and eighty feet forward of DeLong's station, the cockpit crew of Flagpole Leader was busily preparing the aircraft for the bomb run.

"Now at twenty-six thousand feet..." LaSalle muttered. "That's about all I can give you, Lieutenant. It's taking both of us back here to hold her in pitch."

Lieutenant Ken Egan was a barrel-chested, mustachioed man from Seattle. He'd run a small fishing fleet before the gooks invaded South Korea. He had re-upped rather than be drafted by the Army--he'd flown Superforts with LeMay's Twentieth Air Force in '45. Egan was the bombardier. He sucked in his breath, trying to keep his eyes on the Norden bombsight. Bouncin' Betty was living up to her name, shuddering and bucking in crosswinds as LaSalle and Scopes fought stabilizer damage trying to keep her level and at altitude.

It was like trying to thread a needle on a roller coaster.

"I'm trying to get a bead on ground landmarks, General, but between the clouds and all this banging around, it's damned hard. I see the reservoir at Daqing...at least, I think that's what it was. That would put us about fifteen minutes out, at this airspeed."

"Slim just informed me we've got MiGs on our tail. I'll try and keep us level on this heading, but it's like she wants to dive and twist at the same time--"

Scopes grunted, straining with both hands on the yoke. "Yeah...Betty seems nose heavy...how many steaks did you eat last night, Lieutenant?"

Egan didn't respond. He pressed his eyes to the reticule, letting the hazy marshlands of Hebei pass by, counting off seconds from the reservoir, the last recognizable thing he had seen. This was not going to be easy. The primary target was the Forbidden City complex in central Peking. Right now, he couldn't tell for sure whether their current heading would even take them over Peking.

Just a mile or so off, and it won't make a hill of beans difference, he told himself. Beyond that, Flagpole Leader's mission might be a wash, incinerating a lot of buildings and people but leaving the Red Chinese leadership intact. Ken Egan didn't want to have to face Clayton LaSalle if that happened.

LaSalle knew he couldn't hold their altitude and heading much longer, even with Scopes helping. The elevator and stabilizer damage was too severe; Pete DeLong had confirmed that half an hour ago, from the rear gunner's station. In fact, they were lucky to still be airborne. Nonetheless, they had made it this far, against all odds, and LaSalle was proud of his men and determined to finish the job. Gallant Flag had been his baby from the start, his and Paul Craft's, and even the Old Man had sent word that blunting the Chicom offensive short of Pusan depended vitally on them. Absent some kind of relief from the relentless push south by hordes of Red armies, the whole Korean peninsula might have to be evacuated to save what was left of the Eighth Army. LaSalle was no quitter. If Bouncin' Betty still had an ounce of lift in her, he'd get the payload to the target and drop the bomb.

What happened after that was up to the gods of air warfare. The gods and General Douglas MacArthur.

LaSalle focused on the altimeter and concentrated on keeping the aircraft level and stable. All they had to do was hold this course for another fifteen minutes and Mao and his cronies would be dust, glowing like fireflies when all the rubble had stopped bouncing.

"Here they come!--" It was DeLong on the radio. A split second later, the top Twenties opened up, slicing the skies with deadly fire. Even as DeLong tracked his targets, two silvery MiGs thundered by, passing less than two hundred feet on both sides of the plane. Black puffs of 20-millimeter peppered the sky after them.

The next few minutes were a blur of diving MiGs and the sound of canvas ripping as DeLong blazed away. LaSalle and Scopes ducked and strained at the controls, keeping wary eyes on each enemy plane as it screamed out of nowhere and blasted across their windscreen.

"How many?" LaSalle yelled.

"Still just four!" DeLong called back. Then: "Blammo! Powweee!...Bagged the bastard!--"

And it was true. Just alongside Bouncin' Betty's portside wing, a ball of flame erupted into view. Smoking wreckage of the MiG cartwheeled past them, plunging earthward in a tight spiral. Moments later, the wreckage impacted a snow-covered terraced field in a plume of black smoke.

"Good work, Slim!" Tony Scopes yelled. "Let 'em have it!"

Then, the radio crackled with sharp hisses and static.

"--is Major Lyle Kitchens, United States Army, to the commander, American bombers flying over China. Do you read me? Acknowledge this transmission if you hear my voice--"

LaSalle was startled when the voice of the Red trickster "Major Kitchens" sputtered through his headset again. Thought we got rid of that joker. To his amazement, two MiGs had eased up alongside the bomber, keeping formation in level flight, and keeping their distance, now several thousand yards out.

Bouncin' Betty's top and bottom remote Fifties opened up, with Pete DeLong the doing the honors.

Tracer fire arced out and caught the starboard MiG abeam of its wings. Smoke puffed, then fuel streamed aft and caught fire. An explosion rocked the jet and it peeled away, trailing smoke and flames. It disappeared into low-level clouds and was gone.

"Hold your fire...hold your fire...this is Major Kitchens...right alongside of you. Look out your windows!"

LaSalle thought he had seen every trick the Communists could throw at them. But some inner sense told him this was different.

"Gunners, cease fire...hold your fire for a moment--"

DeLong was aggrieved. "General...I got the bastard dead to rights, in my

sights--"

"Hold your fire, I said!"

"Yes, sir."

Sure enough, when he looked more closely through the side window, he saw a man waving his arms from the backseat of the MiG. It was a two-seater, the first he had ever seen. What the hell--

"American commander...I'm waving my hands...can you see me waving my hands? I am Lyle Kitchens. Acknowledge if you can see me."

This is one hell of a stunt, LaSalle told himself. Friggin' Reds will try anything. He kept radio silence, stared icily out the windscreen.

Kitchens' voice grew more plaintive. "My name is Major Lyle Kitchens...I know you can see me from where you are. I don't know your name...possibly General Clayton LaSalle--"

LaSalle froze, bit his lip.

"Don't answer, General," Scopes muttered. "It's got to be a trick."

"--whoever's flying the plane...I am an Army Criminal Investigation officer. I know about your mission--" the madman in the MiG's backseat had finally stopped waving his arms. "--this mission is illegal. Unauthorized. This case has the President's attention."

"Yeah, I'll bet," LaSalle swore under his breath.

"-you are to break off this attack at once. Orders from the Commander in Chief. Break off at once and return to base."

LaSalle didn't want to hear anymore. "Egan, you got anything down there...you recognize anything?"

The bombardier's shoulders seemed to shrug. "A few things, General...but the maps we had aren't very good. I got a river, some roads. They're all heading north...probably Peking, I'm guessing. A few towns. Looks like truck traffic directly below us."

"I'm giving you the aircraft in about two minutes." He clenched his teeth, flexed his arms and neck, now aching from holding altitude against the downforce of the damaged stabilizers. "Soon as we lose these creeps. Pete, your guns ready?"

"Sighted in, General. I can bean that joker just like Bob Feller. Anytime you want."

"Hang on--"

"American commander...you've got to listen...what you're doing is illegal. The President has ordered you to break off the attack. The Chinese have promised safe escort out of their airspace, without incident, without shooting. But you've got to stop now--before it's too late--"

LaSalle turned the radio off with a snort. "I've heard about all I can take from this weasel. Rudy, give me a hack. Where the hell are we?"

Lieutenant Claxton pored over his maps, frantically laying out course segments with his dividers, fumbling with his slide rule, furiously scribbling way points and numbers. "Best I can make out, General, we're about forty miles from drop point. I got intermittent visual on what I think is the Great Wall, and some deserts west of us. Terrain features are hard to see in the fog down there. My calculations are kind of iffy--"

"Best guess, then, Navigator!" LaSalle snapped.

"Forty two miles southeast of drop point. On heading three three five."

"Good enough." Even as LaSalle replied, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the portside MiG disappear.

"He's dropping back," DeLong told them. "Way back and climbing. Want me to tag him?"

"Blast the son of a bitch!" LaSalle ordered.

A second later, the twin twenties stuttered shells up into the sky, hosing the MiG with 20-millimeter rounds, but just missing. The Chinese pilot jinked left and pulled up steeply, roaring across the top of the fuselage. Ahead he zoomed, then banked hard right, still climbing, setting up for a gun pass.

DeLong kept up and finally managed to tag one of the two MiGs that had been following them. The cockpit glass blew off in pieces and the MiG dipped, then curved downward into a death spiral, flaming out of control through the clouds.

"Bingo!" yelled DeLong.

"Another notch for the tree," said Ronnie Givens, keeping score on the bulkhead up front, still nursing wounds.

Suddenly, like a distant mirage, Scopes saw something. He sat up straighter. Through breaks in the clouds ahead, the brown clotted haze of an ancient city was beginning to peek through. Fingers of smoke scarred the skies, shearing off in high-level winds like fists aimed at the heavens.

"General, look ahead....it's gotta be the target."

LaSalle squinted through the birdcage. Peking. My God, at long last, Peking. His heart thudded in his rib cage. The culmination of so many months of work, now at last...the target was in sight.

Five thousand yards behind Bouncin' Betty, Flight Lieutenant Wu Hu-ban had made up his mind. He'd given the odd American Army officer every chance to talk the bomber pilot out of the attack. A waste of time and fuel. He had his orders. Now it was time to do what duty required.

He dropped his MiG behind the bomber, then peeled off to port, banking hard left and climbing for a diving guns pass on the Americans.

"What are you trying to do?" Kitchens hardly needed to ask. "--give me a few more minutes, Lieutenant. Just a few more minutes--"

Wu was determined. "There is no more time. Peking is ahead of us."

As they settled into position, angling in on Bouncin' Betty's tail from above, Kitchens saw the vast urban web of the ancient city. Peking was a mirage on the horizon, there, yet not there. A dun and sand-colored rats' maze of walls, tiled roofs and dusty streets, on the edge of a great desert.

"--I'm sure I can get to this guy...one more minute--"

Wu slid them over and dove at four hundred fifty knots directly at the rudder of the bomber. "You talk, Major. I will shoot."

Bright muzzle flashes erupted from the B-29's top 'Twenties', peppering the sky with flak. Concussive bursts rocked the MiG as it bore in on the American plane. Wu steepened the dive. At two thousand yards, he depressed the gun trigger on his stick, fully expecting a deadly stream of lead from the MiG's 23-millimeter portside cannon.

Nothing.

Wu pressed harder, then banged his fist on the switch. Still nothing. The guns were jammed. He rockered a toggle over, tried the starboard-side 37-millimeter. Still nothing.

He swore into his face mask.

Behind him, Kitchens held his breath, then realized something had happened. He keyed his mike.

"--American bomber commander...this is your last chance...you will be shot out of the sky if you don't turn away. I repeat, break off your mission. This mission is not authorized--"

Wu made a screaming pass at the bomber without firing, jerking them hard left and around for another pass. Three more MiGs had joined the fray.

"Red Wind, this is Hunan...what's wrong...why didn't you fire?"

Wu was furious, swinging them around for another attempt. "My guns jammed. I'm making another pass. Fall in behind me. Aim for the engines. We've got to get this bastard now!"

Wu's jet circled the formation and lined up for another try. This time, Wu took dead aim on the rear gunner's station, intending to smash the gunner once and for all. He closed steadily, the other MiGs from Hunan Squadron in trail, several thousand yards behind.

If I don't finish the pirates off, the others will. He bore in, fighting wake turbulence, struggling with the stick to keep them level....holding...holding...and jammed a thumb on the trigger.

Again, nothing.

Almost at the same moment, Pete DeLong tagged Wu's left wing with a 20-millimeter round. The MiG rocked wildly, dropped, rolled and ducked, waggling like a wounded pigeon. Shrapnel cracked the windscreen, shredding the forward cockpit. Wu cried out, holding his right arm. The flak had sliced into his suit. Blood flecked the glass, streamed back and splotched Kitchens' canopy too.

"I'm hit--" Wu cried. With his good left hand, he pulled left, negating the approach and banked around for another run.

"Don't worry, comrade--" it was Hunan. The next MiG jockeyed through the flying debris and let fly a volley of fire at the bomber. "I'll finish him off--"

"No! Wait--" Wu wanted to try something. "Keep that gunner occupied! Keep him off me!"

"What are you--?"

But Wu was already lining up Bouncin' Betty for a different kind of attack. His orders from Squadron were specific. Wu was going to follow them, ramming the huge bomber off course if he had to. He wasn't going to let a band of capitalist thugs get a crack at Peking, not while the MiG was still flyable. His windscreen was cracked and cold air whistled into the cockpit, swirling debris and blood everywhere. His right arm and shoulder were numb, still bleeding. But he could fly the MiG with his toes, if he had to.

Somehow, some way, he had to turn the American bomber from its course. If the bomb went off before that--

"Major, brace yourself. I'm going to ram the bastard with my wings, knock him off course. Once I get him heading away from the capital, I'll pull out and let the rest of the boys finish him off."

Kitchens was nearly speechless, wondering if he had heard right. "You're

what--?"

The trick would be to thread his way through the curtain of machine gun fire put out by that damned top gunner. Somehow, Hunan had to keep him occupied. The same thought had occurred to Hunan, almost at the same time. He and East Wind positioned themselves for covering fire, taking turns swooping like mad hawks from the rear, blasting away at the gunner stations.

While East Wind and Hunan made scissors passes across Bouncin' Betty's rear, Flight Lieutenant Wu Hu-ban eased the throttles of his Klimov turbojet steadily forward, gradually closing the distance. Five hundred yards behind, buffeted in the wake of the bomber's props, he dropped them lower and veered off to the left, dodging fire from the bottom turrets, then taking several rounds off his rudder. The MiG wobbled, became sluggish, but somehow, he still had control. It was mushy, though--probably a cable had been sliced somewhere.

Wu drove them forward, right below Bouncin' Betty's portside wing, then pitched up hard.

The collision jolted both aircraft, knocking skin pieces and cowling parts into the slipstream. The MiG waggled. The B-29 rocked slightly, the difference in masses clearly evident.

"Lieutenant--this is crazy...why don't you--"

Wu paid no mind to the American. He had already shut off the radio, so Kitchens couldn't warn his countrymen what was coming. He didn't trust Kitchens, never had. He decided to try another jolt.

Again and again, Wu pitched the MiG up hard, bumping against the underside of the bomber's wing. Each impact tore off more skin...rivets, jagged pieces of fuselage, engine cowling. Chunks of metal flapped crazily in the slipstream and the MiG was getting the worst of it. Wu tried to slam his right wing up to avoid crushing his own cockpit windscreen. Eight feed behind him, Major Lyle Kitchens was hunched forward against the seat straps, sure that Wu would smash them both completely on the next try.

Each bump did a little more damage, gradually forcing the B-29 out of level flight, forcing the American pilot to fight for control, damping out the waggling with abrupt jerks and turns. Each bump nudged the bomber a little further off course. Each bump made it all the harder for the bombardier to set up the aircraft for its final run.

Trying to slip in and around the bomber while avoiding the huge props of its engines and the staccato brrraaappp of the bottom gun turret was a ticklish operation.

This is nuts! Kitchens gritted out. He had given up on the radio, figuring that Wu had long ago cut him off. Now he was helpless, a prisoner of a suicidal pilot, slamming two planes together at three hundred miles an hour, twenty thousand feet over the outskirts of Peking.

After each grinding slam and backaway, Wu craned his head up to check the damage. He knew he didn't have much time left. Already, the brown haze of the city was thickening--early winter duststorms off the Gobi often swept in on the continental jetstream--and the endless maze of huts and houses, tenements and apartments, mountains of wartime rubble and seething masses, was more and more prominent through the murk below. Something like five million people inhabited this region, all crowded into an antheap that stretched across the eastern fringes of the desert for mile after uncountable mile.

Wu knew he needed to do some real damage on the next bump or back away and let East Wind and Hunan try guns passes again. Then on his last look, he spied the beginnings of some serious rear elevator damage. It gave him an idea.

They slid back aft and Wu banked them hard into the B-29's elevator panels. Once, then again, he repeatedly slammed his right wing into the surface, shearing off pins and chunks. At one point, he nearly severed the MiG's right wing itself...they careened like a broken fan blade between the elevator and the wing, bouncing hard, twisting, rattling, bobbing and weaving, while Wu fought his stick and struggled to get them under control again. When he looked back though, the bomber's entire rear elevator and lower rudder was steadily disintegrating before his eyes.

The bomber shuddered and bucked like a wounded animal, throwing off fragments and wreckage of flight surfaces and skin panels and severed hoses and cables. Wire and conduit flapped crazily around the impact holes. Bit by bit, critical parts of the bomber's control surfaces flew off into the slipstream.

Wu did not know that the last impact had damaged sway braces in the bomb bay. The eight-thousand pound Mark VI bomb, now loosely suspended from a single pair of shackles, swung like a massive pendulum inside the bomb bay. Unseen, two cables jerked out of their connectors, effectively telling the bomb's fusing system that the bomb had now been released, though it was still partially secured inside the bomb bay.

When the second cable had been pulled free, the result of the bomb's ponderous swaying, the timing circuit in the fusing system was activated. A clear monotone pulse was sent into the aircraft's radio intercom, sounding the alarm in every crewman's headset.

Now armed, with the timing circuit steadily counting down the seconds, the fusing system needed only two more inputs to divert current from the fully charged X units to the exploding wire detonator harness. One was the altimeter reading from the 'Archie' radar in the tail cone of the bomb casing, an input that would tell the bomb when a height above ground level of 1750 feet had been reached. The second input was a backup, and a safety measure. This input was a simple air pressure reading from the barosensor ports that had been untaped three hours ago by Duke Lanham.

With either input, the X-unit would discharge its full store of electrical energy and detonate the bomb.

"I'VE GOT TONE!" screamed Tony Scopes, hearing the alarm sound through his headsets. The bomb was still in the bomb bay, still attached, barely, to its shackles. But somehow, the damn thing had become active and was counting down. Scopes' blood ran cold and his face paled white.

"Tone...tone...tone!" LaSalle acknowledged. His heart skipped ten beats. "What the hell!" He was momentarily flustered, eyes spinning from instruments to window to MiGs to Scopes and back to the instruments. Another slam, and Bouncin' Betty wobbled and shook like a wounded horse.

"She's gone active...she's on timer--!"

LaSalle felt his feet drop out from under him. The aircraft jerked and pitched nose over. He grabbed the yoke and pulled, but it wouldn't budge.

"Jammed, Tony! Controls are jammed--"

"We're going down--"

"Bastard must've got the elevator...no pitch...no elevator---I can't pull her up! Slim...top gunner!...you see anything back there?"

But DeLong was dead, sliced into bloody pulp by the last MiG onslaught. His lifeless body, what was left of it, hung like loose drapes over the sizzling barrels of the twin Twenties.

"General--" it was Egan, the bombardier, "I'm showing bomb drop--"

"Bullshit...the bomb's still back there...it's hung up somehow--"

"How did it--?

"Who the hell knows!" LaSalle extended his feet, Scopes too, straining with all they had to free the control yoke, and pull Bouncin' Betty out of her steepening dive. The aircraft began a slow bank to port, the dive accelerating...they had already passed sixteen thousand feet, and her nose was coning around in a tightening spiral. Below the birdcage, clearly visible through murk and fog, the ground was a checkerboard of walls and hovels and mud huts and dirt paths and teeming foot traffic and donkeys and carriages and horses and carts. The open lattice of a radio tower flashed below them. Then another.

They were plummeting earthward, not quite out of control, but powerless to pull out. And the bomb's altimeter and barometric switch was set to go off at 1750 feet.

LaSalle was grim, his arms straining. "Lanham...Egan...somebody...get the hell aft. We're stuck in a dive and the bomb's fused but it's hung up."

"General--" Egan stuck his head up from the bombardier's bay, "if we've got tone, that means the timer's working. It doesn't mean it'll go off...at least not yet."

LaSalle grunted, angrily flexing the yoke. It was no use. Already, the bomber had pitched over far enough that he could stand on the rudder pedals. They too were jammed, worthless.

"What the hell do you mean, Egan--"

The bombardier's face was shiny with sweat. "The altimeter circuit, sir...the Archies. That's what sends the final signal. That's what detonates the bomb. That and the barosensors. If we can stay above the set altitude, she won't go."

LaSalle had a grimace pasted on his face. His neck muscles bulged, Scopes too. Both men were out of breath. "Setting is--what: two thousand feet?"

"About 1750, sir. We stay well above that, and she won't blow."

LaSalle gave up for a moment, wiping sweat from his forehead. "Easier said than done, pal. Get back there. Take Lanham, take whoever you need. Any chance you can get rid of that tone, stop the timer?"

Egan was already squeezing up, scrambling through the cockpit on his knees. "I don't know, sir...I'll try." He disappeared up the tunnel, the weaponeer Sergeant Lanham crawling in after him.

"Try rocking the ailerons," LaSalle said. Tony Scopes was still pulling hard on the yoke. "Maybe we can unstick something, shallow out the dive. Bank hard one way, then hard the other."

"I'm up for anything...if it works, General."

LaSalle eased the yoke left, trying to roll the huge bomber belly first, swerve onto a different angle. "We gotta stay up...got to stay above two thousand feet..." He banked harder, letting the wings take a deep bite of the thickening air, now showing eleven thousand feet on the altimeter. Bouncin' Betty groaned and fought back, and the maneuver caused a slight stall on the downside wing. The dive steepened. Now, frantic, LaSalle and Scopes slammed their control yokes hard the other way, clawing for lift, anything to shallow out their plunge.

Nothing seemed to work.

Even if they can safe the bomb, he realized, we're going down. They'd have to ditch somewhere down in the outskirts of Peking. Take their chances. Maybe it would be better--

While the Americans fought to save their dying bomber, Flight Lieutenant Wu had managed to stagger behind them and stay airborne, but the MiG was severely damaged. A six-foot stretch of their starboard wing had been sheared off, and Wu had to crank in a lot of rudder and stick to keep them level. Their own elevators were sluggish too; Hunan had coolly informed them that half the rudder and port elevator had been shot away. Pieces of metal streamed aft, along with a fuel spray now glistening on top of the wing. Even the Klimov engine had coughed on the last bump, nearly unstarting and flaming out. Only quick work by Wu had put them back into clean air. The engine sputtered and something banged in the compartment below their feet--a turbine blade, maybe? But he'd stayed lit and seemed to have enough power to maintain lift and barebones control of the plane.

"Lieutenant, looks like they're going down." Kitchens' voice was sober, quiet. "Maybe we better get out of here. I don't know what that bomb might do when they hit."

Wu agreed. At least, he had managed to steer the bomber away from the heart of the capital. Central Peking was now off to their right, a shimmering mirage of turrets and towers on the horizon. Wu had managed to bump the bomber hard enough to direct it northwest, miles away from the heart of the city.

"We're going in to finish him off," said East Wind. The MiG rocked its wings and dropped down, setting up a huge circular pass to dive onto the plummeting bomber, one final gun pass, a final stab in the belly of the beast.

Wu disagreed. "Not necessary, comrades. He's finished. And we don't know what the bomb might do. If it goes off--"

Inside Bouncin' Betty's bomb bay, Egan and Lanham had been joined by the radiomen Haggerty. The three men braced themselves, fighting the spin and the gyrations and shuddering whips of the fuselage, as the bomber tumbled earthward. Fierce winds swirled up through the open doors. Below, a tawny, chaotic jumble of roofs and dirt paths loomed larger and larger.

Egan was first to the arming panel. Right away, he saw the problem.

"The timing cable--!" he yelled. "--got to get it re-connected--"

"It's too late!" Haggerty waved him back.

"As long as there's tone, we can do it...." Incredibly, Egan climbed over the catwalk rail and leaped atop the bomb casing, clinging desperately as Bouncin' Betty swung and bucked on her downward plunge. The Mark VI banged against the sway braces and struts, sending a shriek of tortured metal as its eight-thousand pound weight pulled on the remaining support. A single pair of struts secured the device to the bomb shackles at its tail cone. The bomb swung around the bomb bay in time with the aircraft gyrations, thumping and banging into bulkheads in all directions.

Haggerty and Lanham reached out, trying to snake the whipping cable over to Egan's outstretched hands. Each time the bomb swung back, they leaned as far out over the chasm between the bomb and the catwalk as they could, and each time, another shudder pulled Egan and the bomb away, slamming them against another bulkhead.

How much more can those braces take? Lanham wondered.

Haggerty plugged a nearby headset into the radio jack. "General, what's our altitude?"

LaSalle's voice was thin, strained, haggard. "Under six thousand, Mort. Why?"

"The Lieutenant's trying to re-connect the timing cable before--" but just at that moment, the tone ceased. All headsets were silent. Only the roar of the wind swirling around the open bomb bay doors, and the struggling drone of the engines filled the air.

"Jesus--"

"Shit...the tone stopped--" Egan's heart stopped as well and he froze in position, riding the bomb around the bay like a toppling gyro.

A few seconds worth of eternity passed. Egan looked up at Lanham. "Well...we're still here!"

"General says we're now at six thousand feet...and still dropping." Lanham's face was pale white. "Tone's gone."

Egan was grim. "Timer's zeroed out. The next input she'll look for is--"

Lanham understood immediately. "Right. The altimeter. If we can disconnect Archie--"

Egan was already clinging by his fingers to the tail fins. He slid cautiously, timing his move with the rotation of the bomb, and sat astride the thing facing rear, like a rodeo rider.

"I need tools! TOOLS, men...right now!"

Haggerty was already digging in the box, pulling wrenches and screwdrivers, passing them to Lanham who leaned over the open gap and handed them to Egan. The bombardier wiped perspiration from his eyes, tried to steady his hands.

If I can just get into this panel...get the power wiring pulled...and cutoff Archie from sending a signal to the detonating relays--

His hands flew, fumbling with the wrenches, scraping and clanging against the dull gray-green casing, trying to make the damn things fit, trying to catch a moving target. Every time he got a bead on the screw, Bouncin' Betty bounced again, rolling and banking, all the while descending, ever downward. Had to be below five thousand now...he had to get Archie isolated before they reached the preset altitude...at 1750 feet, the baroswitches would kick in too, but the radar altimeter would start getting ground returns well above that, if it hadn't already--he couldn't remember the range spec, but it didn't matter now--

As soon as Archie saw a ground reflection, a reflection off anything--even a swinging bomb bay door, a man's foot, a piece of bulkhead--that equaled 1750 feet, the signal would flow like death itself along the wiring harness to the detonator circuit.

Frustrated, Egan banged his hands on the access panel. He hadn't been able to turn a single screw...now, the wrench slipped from his hands, slipped and went tumbling through the gap, out of the bomb bay, out into space, space rapidly closing in on the crew of Flagpole Leader.

"I can't do it!" he screamed. "Goddamn it...I...just...can't...do....it--"

"Power, Lieutenant--" said Lanham, trying to think, hanging on hard to the bulkhead as the aircraft rolled again, flattened out for a moment, then resumed its plunge. "Cut the power--the cabling to the detonators...isolate the X-unit. Archie sends a signal but the capacitors don't fire...no detonation--"

Egan was near tears, flinging tools left and right, digging frantically for anything that would work. "I don't think I can get inside the damn thing..." he yelled as the Mark VI took him on another jaunt around the bomb bay, a loose pendulum careening out of control.

It's just a matter of time, Haggerty realized. He sat down on the narrow scaffolding, folded his knees under his chin.

"Three thousand feet, boys--" LaSalle firm voice sounded through his headset. "How about it? Do we have a safe bomb or not?"

Haggerty didn't have the courage to respond. He watched glumly, his heart skipping beats, as Egan and Lanham fought gravity, wind and the gyrations of an eight-thousand mass to pass tools back and forth, banging and clawing at the access panels, their faces a growing mask of terror, as the ground rushed up at them in slices of view around the edge of the bomb.

It's no use.

At that exact moment, Lieutenant Ken Egan sat back, his wet black hair plastered to his forehead, eyes wide, mouth quivering. The same thought had passed between all of them. Lanham fell back gasping to the catwalk, clung to a strap and his eyes met the Lieutenant's for a long second.

They said nothing. There was nothing to say.

LaSalle's voice crackled in Haggerty's headset, near panic..."Two thousand feet...I think we can shallow her out, she's starting to lift a little every time I bank...Mort, Egan, what the hell's going on back there--?"

Less than half a mile below the open bomb bay doors, Ken Egan caught a final glimpse of the onrushing ground as the bomb swung back against Bouncin' Betty's hard left bank. It slammed the catwalk, buckling a rail, then the weight of the bomb yanked another sway brace free of its mount, and the Mark VI hung by the slenderest of metal threads.

Egan saw all this, and had, in the last second, the pleasure of admiring the pattern of roads and houses below, a beautiful pattern of stitched seams, he told himself, like a delicate embroidery, like his grandma's afghan quilts, all colors of threads and lace. A most remarkable pattern.

Still fused for airburst, the radar altimeter known as Archie had been emitting a steady stream of pulses for the last forty seconds. When the return pulses came back within a specified time interval equaling a height above ground level of 1750 feet, a small capacitor in the circuit discharged its current into a box of relays nearby. The box was effectively the brains of the huge bomb. One by one, energized by this pulse, relays began closing, setting in motion a chain of irreversible events.

Another small capacitor in the relay box, charged in flight by the batteries when Duke Lanham had completed the arming procedure, discharged its current into a bundle of electrical cabling wrapped and tied down around the primary Comp-B charge inside the Mark VI device. The cabling transported the capacitor's current to wires surrounding the sphere of high-explosive detonators that ringed the plutonium core. There were thirty two detonators in all, small lengths of wire that would be explosively vaporized by a powerful surge of current from the primary capacitor bank, known as the X-unit.

A cascade of spark gap switches now triggered the capacitor.

All thirty two detonators fired with microsecond precision, sending thirty two shock waves spreading inward toward the core of the device. Each shock wave met other detonation waves, combined and concentrated into a rapidly collapsing spherical pressure wave that crossed to the aluminum pusher shell, vaporizing it as the wave passed. The pressure wave rocketed the pusher shell inward, crossed next to the heavy uranium tamper, liquefied and vaporized the tamper, moved this material to the uranium shell of the core, hammered the uranium shell inward across a minute air gap to the plutonium ball levitated within the exact center of the whole assembly.

At that precise moment of maximum compression, with the rapidly vaporizing mass of uranium and plutonium having gone supercritical, the shock wave, now shaped by special grooves in the beryllium shell at the center of the plutonium ball, sliced through that shell and began mixing beryllium with polonium plated onto the ball of beryllium on the inside. Here, alpha particles from the radioactive polonium knocked off a dozen neutrons from the beryllium. These twelve neutrons were ejected into the surrounding supercritical mass of uranium and plutonium. A runaway chain reaction began.

Eighty generations later--a few millionths of a second--X-radiation from the furiously heating fission fireball hotter than the center of the sun escaped the plutonium core entirely, beginning to ablate the blast shield lining the inner casing of the bomb. Moving outward from the cauldron inside, the radiation now swelled rapidly into the interstices of the casing. Just as the uranium shell had served as a tamper for the initial supercritical chain reaction, so now did the thick outer casing of the Mark VI serve as a tamper for the entire complex explosion, holding it together a few microseconds longer to give the fuel more time to react, but strong as the casing was, first bomblight from its outer surface revealed the breakthrough of the developing explosion long before the mass had time to even swell, much less to move.

Once the explosion had broken through the bulbous forward casing, it expanded in seconds to a blinding white hot fireball, nearly a mile in diameter, rising over the rolling dusty plains south of Peking like a second fiery sun.

The fireball was easily visible, even in the gauzy glow of a midday sun, for fifteen miles in every direction, rising in seconds to heights in excess of twenty-thousand, then thirty thousand feet, concentrating the blast force and heat of its eighty-thousand tons of TNT equivalent explosive yield in an expanding pyre of death and destruction, searing and obliterating all living matter below and out to a distance of several miles in a few eyeblinks.

Sixty-two miles away, Sergeant Chan Hsun Li of the Thirtieth Regiment, People's Capital Militia, was overseeing a small force of broomsweepers. Their task was to keep the cobblestones in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace clear of snow. Sergeant Chan was a dedicated detail commander and worked his charges hard that morning, mindful of the baleful gaze of Mao Tse-tung glaring down at the them from a massive poster on the side of the huge gate. Beyond them, the vast Tien An Men opened out onto broad Chang An Avenue. Throngs of midday bicyclists and rikshas droned along the avenue.

The light in the sky seemed brighter even than the sun, though it was too far east to be the sun, for that time of day, just after noon. It was an odd apparition, a pulsing, throbbing pearly white and red glow, concentrated at first, then more diffuse, then it faded after about ten minutes, lost in the hazy glow of the afternoon sun.

One of the sweepers had said the sun exploded.

In Chan's eyes, the comment was as descriptive as anything else he had heard that morning. Knots of people began to gather, talking excitedly. A distant rumble had been heard by someone, as if an earthquake had erupted in the sere brown hills of south Hopei province, and was inexorably rolling northward.

Sergeant Chan didn't know what to make of the ghostly light. He let the sweepers converse for awhile, then nervously herded them back to work. Snow had begun to fall again, and their duty was to keep the cobblestones clear.

Then someone pointed out that the falling snow looked oddly dirty.

Flight Lieutenant Wu and the rest of the squadron, including Hunan and East Wind, were in level flight fifteen miles north of the detonation, when an unearthly light erupted all around the horizon. It was a fearsomely bright flash, brighter than a thousand suns. Moments later, the first of several shock waves hit the formation.

Wu's MiG jet had been limping back to An Shan Air Base, its starboard wing partially chewed off in a jagged line from the final impact with the B-29's elevator. The shock wave, traveling outward from ground zero at the local speed of sound, instantly flipped them upside down.

Wu fought the stick and the controls for a few moments, gradually righting the aircraft and easing them back into a semblance of level flight, although only two thousand feet above the ground. Blood had drained from Lyle Kitchens face in the heat of the maneuvers, as he watched the Red Chinese pilot struggle ahead of him.

Then came the reflected ground shock wave, several waves in fact, less strong, but viciously buffeting the two-seat jet trainer, nearly rolling them on their back again. Kitchens braced himself securely with his hands and feet, tightened his shoulder and lap straps, and let his eyes drift toward the inferno rising behind them.

A vast boiling fist of a mushroom cloud had formed on the horizon, incinerating everything in a five-mile radius, killing thousands of farmers and goatherds and artisans and potters and cobblers and shopkeepers below, with blast overpressures, heat and fire.

Kitchens shielded his eyes, realizing that for all the devastation now occurring, the bomb had gone off outside Peking, in the countryside. Ultimately the main parts of the Red Chinese capital had escaped the worst damage.

Maybe, just maybe there would be some consolation in that.

As Lieutenant Wu struggled with the MiG's damaged wings, trying to steer them somehow through gusting crosswinds and turbulence back to An Shan, Kitchens could only stare in wonder at the heaving, throbbing face of the mushroom cloud, now spreading outward in a cruelly beautiful purple and red ring, as it lofted thousands of tons of soil into the atmosphere.

"Holy Mother of God," was all he could say.

2-1-51, Thursday

Hickam Field, Hawaii

2:30 p.m.

George Marshall studied the massive brown flanks of Diamond Head as the Air Force Constellation turned onto final and made a barely perceptible landing at Hickam Field. How much history had the old mountain seen in the last ten years? The Pearl Harbor attack. Carriers and submarines going off to fight the Japanese across the Pacific. Now this...a meeting with another force of nature.

George Marshall wasn't looking forward to the encounter with General Douglas MacArthur.

He had brought the Army Chief of Staff along with him. Lawton "Lightning Joe" Collins was the kind of man even MacArthur would respect, a man with unassailable combat credentials, a man who'd faced torrential fire from Nazi gunners on Omaha Beach just six years before. If anyone could bring MacArthur to heel, it was Lawton Collins.

The huge Connie lumbered over to the ramp and the pilot chopped her engines. Marshall and Collins were met at the bottom of the stairs by the Air Force base commander, Colonel Steve Gould. Gould was worried.

The three of them climbed into a Jeep and headed for the Ops building. "Just got a wire from Tokyo, Mr. Secretary," he told Marshall. "Far Eastern Air Forces, the 31st Strategic Recon shop. One of their WB-29s over the Sea of Japan saw something. They reported it right away."

Marshall barely listened, preoccupied with the President's instructions. He had come to Hawaii at the request of Harry Truman. Officially, the reason for the meeting was to confer with SCAP--General MacArthur--on strategy as to how to deal with the growing power of the Red Chinese sweep into Korea. Unofficially, he had also come to Hickam Field to slap MacArthur's hands, to haul the Supreme Commander back into line, to lay down the law straight from Truman's lips, as to what he could and could not say in public.

"Nobody but the President makes policy, gentlemen," Truman had warned them all on a cold, blustery Washington day a week ago. "If General MacArthur can't agree with that, then he'll just have to go. Make him understand that, George."

Marshall figured he'd have an easier time climbing Mount Fuji.

"What kind of 'something', Colonel?"

Gould had a log sheet ready to consult. He held it tight against the wind, as the Jeep speed toward Operations. "A bright light to the west...a flash of light, they called it. Just on the horizon...apparently inside China."

Marshall mulled that over. "An explosion?"

"Maybe, sir. Funny thing is the report coincided with reports from an Army survey unit at Kadena. They were making soil strength measurements early this morning...new barracks or something--and all of a sudden, they got some wild readings on their gauges...some kind of seismic disturbance in the area."

"An earthquake?"

"Very possibly, sir. The whole Far East is prone to them. But when they triangulated the location of the ground waves, it looked like the epicenter was in China. North China."

"So what's the catch...they have earthquakes all the time over there."

"They do, sir. But we backtracked the time of the disturbance. It was the same time the weather recon guys saw that flash."

Marshall felt a sudden chill run down his spine. The SecDef glanced over at Collins. The Army chief was pale. They both knew perfectly well that a 'seismic disturbance' could well mean an atomic detonation inside China, especially since somebody had seen a bright flash. The question was where? And if an American atom bomb had indeed gone off inside China, what would the Chinese do about it? What would the Russians do?

Marshall took a deep breath, as the Jeep pulled up to the glass doors of the Ops building. "Colonel, where's your S2? We'd better have a look at what the Intel boys have got."

Gould led them inside. "It's in the basement, sir. Follow me."

On the nine-hour flight to Hickam from San Francisco, Marshall had already learned of the launch of the Gallant Flag aircraft from Formosa. The news had sickened him and he'd spent much of the flight in silent, grim contemplation of what was to come, dark, even apocalyptic thoughts had swirled inside his head. Collins had wanted to talk, play bridge, do something, but seeing Marshall's dark mood, had opted to keep his distance.

Intel reports radioed up to the Lockheed Connie Marshall flew in told of several aerial engagements. Reports were that all but one of the Gallant Flag bombers had been shot down. But one aircraft, thought to be commanded by General Clayton LaSalle himself--Marshall knew the name, knew he was one of Rosie O'Donnnell's boys from the 19th Bomb Group--had turned west in the middle of the fight and headed inside China. The bomber was now lost to pursuit. Presumably the Chinese had either tried or succeeded in intercepting the B-29.

Now he wondered. Marshall exchanged desultory salutes from the ranks of the S2 shop. Even though he wore civvies, everywhere he went, the Secretary of Defense was still widely respected as 'General Marshall.' He had long since given in and snapped off quick furtive salutes as easily as he took a breath. Gould introduced him to the Photo and Signals sections, then steered him toward a large map of the Pacific Basin, mounted on one wall.

"We've got Red deployments all up and down the Soviet coast, General," Gould was pointing out. "Spassk-Dalniy, Petropavlovsk, Vladivostok, you name it...Ivan's got about a hundred and ten long-range Tupolev bombers in the air right now, so far as we can determine. Right now, they're circling pre-defined orbit points, still inside Soviet territory, or over the ocean. Just waiting, we think. Waiting for orders. We've got our own assets from Yokota, Johnson, and a few other bases up there too, keeping them company."

Marshall scrutinized the map for a few minutes. In the back of his mind, he sensed a dangerous gathering of forces, a convergence of human mistakes and miscalculations. He didn't like what he saw on the map.

"Telephone message for the Secretary, sir--" a lieutenant had appeared with a scribbled piece of paper. Gould took it, gave it immediately to Marshall as if he had been stung. The SecDef scanned the message.

"The President...on line one--" he turned, searching out a phone.

"This way, sir." Gould directed him to the section supervisor's cubicle, where Marshall picked up the receiver.

Harry Truman's voice was distant, tinny. "George, glad you made it. You've gotten the latest, I assume?"

"I was just in the middle of a briefing, Mr. President."

"Ike just sent me more information from Europe. It's not good."

"This is the day for bad news, sir."

Truman went on. "Looks like the Russians have made further moves." He explained intelligence from sources in Denmark and Norway, the sighting of fleets of Soviet bombers off Norway's North Sea coast. "We're all on pins and needles here, George. But one good thing: looks like the Soviet thrust into West Germany has bogged down. They put damn near half an armored division through the Fulda Gap but they've run into stiff resistance around some place called Lichthorst. Weather's terrible, too, so that helps. But it's the bomber formations off Norway that worry me."

Marshall had paled at the news. "Me too, Mr. President. The Soviets normally use the Tu-4 bombers only for atomic tests or very heavy bombing missions."

Truman seemed hesitant. "Well, what do you recommend?"

"Mr. President, this will be a stiff test for NATO. If we can hold the alliance together in something like this, we'll know we have a good foundation. I recommend a maximum alert across Western Europe. Scramble every air defense fighter in the UK and France we can get our hands on. Try to intercept those Russian bombers if they approach NATO airspace. It's Britain they're after...our SAC bases, most likely. Mildenhall, Greenham Common, places like that."

Truman agreed. "I'll issue the necessary orders to General Bradley right away."

The conversation turned to the upcoming meeting with MacArthur. SCAP did not yet know that Truman was still in Washington and that Marshall would be the one to meet with him.

"I want Mr. Prima Donna to voluntarily resign his command," Truman was saying. "Either that, or he'll face arrest, court-martial, and public humiliation."

Marshall winced at the prospect. "Mr. President, I don't think that's good policy...not at such a critical time in Korea. The UN forces are facing an increasingly desperate situation with the Chinese. We've lost Seoul again, and the 38th Parallel and Joe Collins says we're hanging on by our fingertips. Now that Ridgeway's in charge of the Eighth Army, the forces in the field need firm and decisive leadership to prevent a total rout."

Truman wasn't convinced. "MacArthur's part of the problem, George. Where was he when the Chinese came poring in? Hell, it wasn't three months ago the man spoke to me at Wake Island and insisted the Chinese were no threat at all. Now, everything's changed. Plus the man's insubordinate as hell, issuing ultimatums to the enemy like he was Alexander the Great. Running his own foreign policy out there...we can't have that."

"No, sir--" Marshall knew it was best to let Harry Truman blow off steam. "But if General MacArthur is removed from office now, we could be facing a situation even more dire than we did last summer at Pusan. We could be pushed completely off the peninsula. Especially, if the Russians enter the war."

Reluctantly, Truman agreed. "But with Stalin testing us in Europe, I don't want Douglas MacArthur stabbing me in the back in the Far East. For now, I'll rescind my orders that he be arrested and court-martialed for his part in Gallant Flag, if it can be proved. But I'm not giving an inch on one point."

"Yes, sir, Mr. President--"

"Douglas MacArthur must be held fully accountable for his mistakes and misjudgments in Korea, especially for stretching the directives he's been given. I want him on a tight leash, General," Truman warned. "And if and when we can stabilize the front in Korea and kick the Russians back where they belong in Germany, I intend to get rid of Mr. Brass Hat myself, one way or another."

Truman hung up and Marshall gingerly put the phone down as if it were a live grenade. He looked at Collins, shrugging. "Joe, my distaste for Washington politics grows more and more every day."

Both men knew full well that Truman wanted to neutralize MacArthur's political ambitions and extract some kind of concessions that would help the Democrats in 1952. Marshall regretted ever volunteering to fly out to Hawaii and be the President's hatchet man. Censuring a theater commander in wartime conditions was always a distasteful business.

"We'd better get to work, General," he told Collins. "SCAP will be here in a few hours. I don't like walking into the lion's den unprepared."

Collins thought the same way. "The sooner we get this over with and get the hell out of here, the better I'll like it." He shook his head sadly. "You think he'll really can MacArthur?"

"In a heartbeat," Marshall said. Not that SCAP didn't deserve it, too. But a sitting commander, with troops fighting and dying in the field--

It was politicking that made the whole business taste sour. He knew the best thing for Truman and the Democrats politically in Korea would be for a quick stabilizing of the line and some crushing defeats of the Red Chinese on the battlefield. Toward that end, Marshall had high hopes for the new strategy announced by Ridgeway, an upcoming assault plan called Operation Killer. He knew the operation had better work.

The UN, maybe the whole world, was fast running out of time and space.
CHAPTER 33

Thursday, February 1, 1951

Tokyo

5:50 p.m.

Paul Craft knew it was time to get out of Tokyo. Shortly after lunch, he had grabbed a car from the motor pool and driven out to Atsugi Air Base. Prowling around the PX and the O Club and the locker rooms of Base Operations, he picked up hints and whiffs and scuttlebutt about "some wild-haired unauthorized bombing mission over China." What he heard wasn't good.

Putting all the pieces together, he had figured out that the balance of the Gallant Flag force had gotten away from Mishida Island and somehow made it to Formosa. LaSalle had regrouped there, and the mission had launched. The exact details were sketchy but rumors had it that all but one of the planes had been shot down. Craft was stunned to hear reports, whispered hurriedly among knots of pilots dressing down in the locker room, and along the bar at the O Club, of a single bomber which had evaded all attempts at intercept and incredibly turned west, flying into Chinese airspace. The plane hadn't been heard from since.

It could only be Clayton LaSalle, Craft thought, nursing a Kirin beer at the end of the bar. He wanted to ask more questions, but decided against it. Only LaSalle had the balls to try something like that.

Now things were getting a little warm around the Dai Ichi. MacArthur had already left for Hawaii aboard his personal C-54 transport, Bataan, ordered to a mid-Pacific conference with the President. With the Old Man gone, Paul Craft felt a vacuum, and more than a little exposed. His own secretary at G3 had told him only an hour ago of inquiries from Army CID agents, inquiries as to his whereabouts.

"I told 'em you were in the field, running down contracts, General," the Lieutenant had said. Craft had thanked the kid. At least half of it was true.

CID. Criminal Investigation Department. Craft rolled the words around his tongue. Probably that Kitchens guy Washington had sent over...the one everyone treated like a leper.

No question about it. Without MacArthur around, he was vulnerable. It was time to become scarce. He was surely on somebody's hot list for questioning, if not arrest. Ranier was already in custody. No telling how much the Czech physicist had told them. It was best to get out of town, while he still could.

Craft decided a quick trip down to Manila was best. SCAP's Civil Affairs section ran contracts all over Luzon, hiring Filipino firms to build barracks, add on to commissaries fix roads, the works. He figured he could plausibly make a trip down to Clark Air Base and check out things for G3. "Pinky" Wright would question it. But now was not the time to let proper channels get in the way.

Craft went quickly back to his office on the Dai Ichi's fifth floor. He had to get rid of all the Gallant Flag evidence in his office. He opened the small safe below the credenza and retrieved a small folder of papers. These he stuffed in his briefcase.

He left the office and ran headlong into Lieutenant Smalley, coming in with a question.

"Uh...Lieutenant..." Craft put on his official flag-rank officer's face. "--Lieutenant, I've got a meeting with some staff from the 24th Infantry. Over at the Natani. I'll be gone all afternoon--" and he barged past Smalley without a second glance. The Lieutenant was left with his mouth open, ready to ask a question that never came.

Craft dodged late afternoon traffic on the Hibiya Dori and walked briskly to his quarters at the Imperial Hotel, directly across the street from the Dai Ichi. Inside the small, spare room, he stuffed everything remotely incriminating into a briefcase, then grabbed a handful of clothes and packed everything into a set of small bags. He burned what he couldn't take with a cigarette lighter, and flushed the ashes down the toilet. Twice he froze, hearing heavy footsteps outside in the hall but it was just Maroney, the linebacker-sized major from Government Section, staggering back from an afternoon at the American Club.

He made a few quick phone calls to Air Transport Service at Atsugi, arguing and pleading, then managing to secure a seat on the twice-weekly mail run down to Clark in the Philippines. He knew several staffers at Sixth Army in Manila. It would be a hell of a lot easier to lose his pursuers there than in America. He even had a sort of a pretext for going: a courtesy call on Major General Joe Blankenship, Sixth Army's G3. Together, they'd follow up on SCAP orders to improve the readiness of the U.S. garrison to support anti-Communist counterinsurgency efforts in the islands. All nice and neat and mostly legit.

Craft hurried out of the hotel and snagged a car.

He drove himself through heavy traffic to Atsugi, constantly checking in the mirror, sure he was being followed. Paranoia? You couldn't be too careful. Inside the terminal, he checked his bags and grabbed coffee and a sandwich at the shop, then wandered aimlessly around the place, always aware of anybody following too close. Once, he was sure he had spotted the tail, but it turned out to be nothing, just a pair of sleepy-eyed captains waiting for the red-eye back to the States.

He sat down, ditched the coffee and forced himself to relax, thinking about Manila. How long could he stay? A few days? A week? Suspicions would eventually catch up. He'd have to move on. But where? The thought of island-hopping around the Far East, one step ahead of the MPs didn't appeal to him. He had to have a plan.

Fatigue and anxiety took its toll and Craft's head lolled a bit, as his eyes grew heavier. An insistent voice buzzed in his ears...the public address, he imagined. Calling for boarding. Air Transport C-44 to Manila was now ready for boarding.

His eyes fluttered open. Immediately, he started...a ring of officers had formed around the chair. He sat up abruptly, trying to focus--

"General Craft, you're under arrest. By order of the Chief of Staff, you will please stand up...keep your hands where I can see 'em--"

Craft shook his head. It was a dream. But it wasn't. He was face to face with General Lawton Collins. "Lightning Joe" was grim, deep furrows in his forehead. Like a poster, only more real.

He shook his head, stood slowly. It was "Lightning Joe" Collins. What the hell was the Army Chief doing here in Tokyo?

"Son, I'm sorry..." Collins was saying. "Sorry for the Army and sorry for you. You'll have to come with us."

Collins was surrounded by four white-helmeted MPs. He recognized a second officer. Gilruth...something or other. One of the rats, the basement dwellers at the Dai Ichi. The 10th Military Police Company had been relegated to the 'dungeon' of the Dai Ichi almost from the first day MacArthur had moved in.

"What is this all about--" Craft was too stunned to make more than a meek protest. He was sure he had spotted the tail. He hadn't seen any of these men.

Collins and Gilruth led the convoy, while the MPs surrounded Craft and guided him out of the terminal.

"Serious charges, General. Serious charges."

Outside, Craft was handcuffed and placed in the back seat of an Army sedan. He was driven to an empty hangar on the opposite side of the base, away from Base Operations and the terminal and main hangars. The sedan was followed by two others. They had to wait at a runway crossing, while the C-54 bound for Manila taxied out into takeoff position. Craft watched as the plane lumbered down the runway and disappeared into late-afternoon fog, headed south.

"General," Collins muttered from the front seat. "The game is up. Your little operation's over. It failed. Men have died...good men. It's a black day for the Army." Collins stared straight ahead at the hangar fast approaching. "A damn black day for all of us."

Craft was thinking fast. "General MacArthur, sir...the General can explain everything. We were carrying out his express orders--"

The Army chief raised a hand. "Son, for your own sake...keep your mouth shut. I'll see to it you get competent counsel." His shoulders slumped and he sighed. "I don't think even Doug MacArthur can help you on this one."

Inside the hangar, he was marched to an office and rudely seated at a staff conference table. Collins, Gilruth and two more officers joined them. Collins unlocked a satchel, pulled out a sheaf of papers.

"These are the charges, General Craft. After this arraignment, you'll be confined. I'll arrange a hearing with the Judge Advocate General's office tomorrow morning. You'll meet your counsel then."

"General--if you'll just let me explain--"

But Collins recited the list over his stuttering objections, raising his voice when he had to. Craft gave up. His blood ran cold at the charges.

"--documented violations of Article 81...conspiracy. Article 92...failure to obey lawful orders...Article 94...mutiny and sedition...Article 107...making false statements...Article 108...loss, damage and wrongful disposition of military property...and Article 118...murder, by unlawful orders--" Collins put the list down, glared across the table at Craft. "It is a disgrace that I've got to do this...a disgrace to that uniform and to your oath of office."

Craft wilted under the Army chief's stern gaze. "We were just following orders, sir. Orders from SCAP."

Collins acknowledged that. "I know, son. That's what makes this such a disgrace. It doesn't stop here." He carefully folded the papers and put them back in his satchel. "And it's worse when we're in the midst of a shooting war. Hell, we may have World War III right in our laps any minute now. What you've done, son--" but Collins couldn't bring himself to finish the sentence. "There was some kind of 'seismic disturbance' inside China this afternoon. Could be an earthquake. Could be an atom bomb. For all of our sakes, you'd better hope it's an act of God."

Craft was lost in thought, his handcuffed hands steepled together on top of the table. LaSalle? He got through? It has to be him--

"General...if that 'disturbance' was an atom bomb, I think I know who flew the plane."

Collins was already rising, washing his hands of the whole dirty business. "Not now, son. Save it for the hearing tomorrow. You'll have plenty to answer for at the court-martial. I've got a war to run." He left, and the MP's motioned Craft to get up too. He was escorted to a crude stockade of timber and plywood and wire mesh in the back of the hangar and placed in a cell, the only prisoner of the Atsugi Air Base Correctional Facility.

Major Lloyd Gilruth glared at Craft through the bars and wire of the cell. "It was Clayton LaSalle, wasn't it, General. He's the man who flew into China."

Craft had long despised the little worm from 10th MPs. He glared back. "I don't know who it was, Major. But whoever it was, he's a damn hero. When this is all over, it'll be his name on the statues, not yours. Somebody had to have the guts to do what was right in this bloody mess of a police action."

Gilruth shrugged. "Doesn't matter, now. It'll all come out in the trial. Personally, sir, I hope they string your worthless body up from the highest tree limb in Japan. As an example of the worst kind of treason. But that'll be up to the Judge Advocate, I guess." He spun on his heels and left.

Craft sat down on the metal cot and studied his surroundings. Yeah, pal, the Judge Advocate and the Red Chinese.

2-1-51, Thursday

Aboard the Bataan, over the Central Pacific

6:50 p.m.

"Court, I've never mentioned to you a little something called Gallant Flag, have I?"

Brigadier General Courtney Whitney watched Douglas MacArthur pace the full length of the aisle of the C-54 transport plane, turn about and come back. Whitney was moon-faced, pudgy-cheeks and rheumy eyes. He was chief of SCAP's Government Section and a true MacArthur sycophant in the eyes of much of the Dai Ichi. He had the impression MacArthur wasn't only talking to him, but to a larger, unseen audience.

"No, sir, I don't believe you've ever discussed that with me, sir."

MacArthur continued pacing, hands folded behind his back. He stopped once or twice, peering out the windows. The Bataan was in level flight, two hundred and fifty miles an hour, at twenty-thousand feet over the Central Pacific. Lightning flickered from cloud to cloud. Storms were gathering. MacArthur's mood reflected the weather.

"Two months ago, one of General Wright's staff aides, a General Paul Craft, came to me with a plan. A good plan. Bold, decisive...the kind of plan that wins wars. A plan, that if done right would have broken the back of the enemy and changed the balance of power here in the Far East, maybe the world, forever." MacArthur chewed on the end of his corncob pipe. His deputy chief of staff, Colonel Charles Kades and his personal secretary, Colonel Laurence Bunker sat with Whitney, spellbound, as the Old Man addressed History itself.

"Like Inchon, sir?" Whitney thought.

MacArthur smiled gravely. "Very much. It was called Gallant Flag. This plan would have destroyed the enemy's ability to wage war in Korea. It would have prevented the very thing that has happened, with the Chinese able to send hundreds of thousands of troops across the Yalu, completely unopposed. It would have eliminated any protected sanctuary in Manchuria." His fists clenched around the pipe. "It would have given us victory, men. Victory. There's no substitute for victory...I've said it before. War's very purpose is victory."

"General, this operation must have been classified above my level," said Kades. "Never heard of it."

MacArthur nodded. He paced to the end of the aisle and turned about again, then held on to the backs of the seats. The Bataan was too small a theater for the man.

"You're right, Charles. Gallant Flag was closely held. Myself, a few others, General Craft. Most Top Secret. We made it Purple. It was a magnificent plan, fellows. Using the weapon we never dared think about. The atom bomb. We could have brought this war to a close six weeks ago, just as I promised. Had the boys home by Christmas."

Whitney had the impression MacArthur's monologue was as much for the history books as it was for them. "Atom bombs, sir? Doesn't that require the President's approval?"

MacArthur glowered. "I report to the United Nations. Even Bradley and the Joint Chiefs told me to 'feel unhampered tactically in planning operations.' And that was last September. Of course, I approved the operation. I've got an obligation, Court...every commander does. An obligation to win the wars I'm given, with the least loss of life. As quickly and surely as I can. Paul Craft did the legwork. Now--" he shook his head, looked at the worn carpet lining the aisle. "--the operation has failed. Our last best hope."

Whitney didn't understand. "I've heard rumors, sir--"

MacArthur held up his hand. Enough. "We had bombs designated. From the States. A plan was worked out...bringing them in quietly was critical...the Communists are everywhere. Spies infest our government--" his lips quivered--"even our military. So we took another route."

"Outside normal channels, General?" asked Kades, not believing what he was hearing. "I saw nothing from SAC indicating they were doing this."

"It wasn't Strategic Air Command," MacArthur told him. "Gallant Flag was executed under my authority as Supreme Commander, Allied Powers. And it worked--the bombs were brought in, unnoticed. Complete secrecy. But we were betrayed. Collaborators, spies, I don't know--somehow Washington found out."

"General, was this plan known to the Joint Chiefs?" Kades was increasingly uneasy at what SCAP was telling him.

MacArthur ignored him. "I wasn't privy to all the details. Craft did that. Now, Communist sympathizers have insinuated themselves into the picture. Craft was arrested yesterday...I saw the report. Confronted by the Chief of Staff himself." MacArthur's face was hurt; he shook his head sadly. "General Collins didn't even inform me he would be coming to Tokyo."

"And now the President summons you to a meeting in Hawaii," said Whitney. "It doesn't make any sense...how can we fight a war with one hand tied behind us?"

"They don't understand," MacArthur agreed, waving his hands at unseen enemies, the unenlightened rabble out there. "They don't want to understand...war isn't for the timid. War can't be contained, put in a drawer and locked away. That's what Truman wants to do with Korea. And the Chiefs--" he made a pitiful face, just shrugged, sat down sideways in the seat and glared at his own baleful reflection in the window. Strong winds buffeted the plane and Bataan vibrated in the gusts.

MacArthur watched the clouds flash with lightning. All about him, the structure of deceit and betrayal that was Operation Gallant Flag was collapsing. Paul Craft arrested. Clayton LaSalle lost somewhere over China. Albert Ranier arrested. Tetsuko in the custody of the Japanese government. Good men, all of them.

Worse, the real military purpose of the plan, to interdict Red Chinese support for their armies in North Korea, was never achieved. All the planes had been lost. The Chinese offensive continued south of the Han River, pushing the UN forces south, ever south, although Ridgeway seemed to have stabilized the lines lately. Perhaps, the great mass of the enemy could yet be turned...but at what cost?

MacArthur was depressed, under assault by detractors and enemies on all sides. "All of my enemies," he had once told Whitney, "are timid fools who don't understand the Oriental mind as I do. They don't realize that the battle with Communism is joined now...here...in this place."

"They don't see things like you do, General," Whitney had replied. "They don't have the vision."

"No, they don't." Whitney was always right, always able to put his finger on the essence of the problem. MacArthur liked to grab his aide by the shoulder, and shake him affectionately, as he would a pet. Whitney had a wonderfully loopy grin when he did that.

"Truman," he went on, "wants to get rid of me. I'm a threat to him politically. You know why, Court?"

"You see the enemy for what he is, sir."

"I tell the truth. The truth makes him uncomfortable. Truman and his lackeys want to sweep Korea under the rug. They want to ignore the Communists, just like they're doing back in the States. Joe McCarthy is right, by God. Washington's just crawling with Reds and sympathizers. Court, I'm so glad I've been away and haven't had to see all that. It's pathetic. But history will prove I'm right."

Whitney loved to hear the Old Man speak. A MacArthur talk was a rolling barrage of oratorical flourishes and punches, reverberating across the halls of time. Here, truly, was one of the greatest men of history.

"If we lose Korea," MacArthur intoned, warming to his subject, slashing the air with the stem of his pipe, "like we lost China, through bungling and lack of resolve, there's no telling where it will all end. Our whole position in the Far East is threatened. My God, we just fought the Japanese to prevent them from dominating Asia. Have we learned nothing?"

By now, SCAP was up and about the aisles of the plane, no longer confined even to the passenger spaces, but carrying his argument forward into the cockpit, haranguing Lieutenant Colonel Story and the flight crew. He paced and stewed, argued with himself, tried out different turns of phrase, chewed on rhetoric, jabbed at opponents with his pipe, only occasionally taking a glance out the window at the fierce storm blowing outside. Just like the weather, MacArthur's mood was dark and thunderous. To Courtney Whitney, for President Truman to try and bring down MacArthur was like doing battle with Nature itself, dabbling with powers beyond comprehension. He worshipped the General; they all did.

Finally, MacArthur sat down, spent, and puffed on his pipe, making a few notes on a pad of paper. To himself, he muttered, "We've got to see what we can do for Paul Craft. I won't let the Army make him a scapegoat." Then he looked up, almost as if he were talking with the Deity himself.

"I will apologize for nothing. If I have sinned, I did so to save my country and all it stands for."

2-1-51, Thursday

The Forbidden City, Peking

8:30 p.m.

For Lyle Kitchens, the Great Hall of the Ten Harmonies could have been a child's feverish fantasy come true. In a columned space easily the size of an American football field, he counted scores of dragons, gryphons, fanciful beasts, golden lion's heads and bronze elephants lining the marble expanse of the hall. Tapestries and velvety brocade were draped over ornate banisters around the perimeter of the Hall. Fretworks of silver, pearl, ivory and gold lined pediments around the ceiling, itself a vast blue and white mosaic portrait of concentric rings, denominating the stars of the cosmos, with the Middle Kingdom depicted as a lush garden in the very center.

Standing next to Jiang Chen Li, Kitchens muttered, "This place is fit for a king."

Jiang smirked. "Or an emperor, my friend. The Ming emperors received tribute from the provinces here."

Kitchens had been standing at attention for what seemed like hours. The cotton tunic and trousers of a People's Liberation Army battalion commander itched his skin mightily. He wanted to scratch in the worst way but it was impossible without disrupting the formation. He gritted his teeth and tried to think of home.

"So when do the festivities begin?"

Jiang was the picture of formality and gravity. "As soon as the Incomparable Educator of the Masses has arrived."

"I hope it's soon."

They were inside the Forbidden City, in a Peking still jittery from the atom bomb blast that had gone off twenty miles southeast of the city. Kitchens was wide-eyed at the splendor of the place, a cloistered 250-acre complex of palaces, temples and ceremonial halls, built in the 15th century by the Ming emperor Yung-lo. A flowery inscription in red lacquered script encircled the platform before which the men stood.

"What does that say?" Kitchens whispered.

Jiang was becoming annoyed. "It reads 'he stands in the center of the earth and stabilizes the people within the four seas.' "

"Chairman Mao?"

"No, the Son of Heaven...Yung-lo. Now, keep quiet, Major. Important people have arrived."

The Hall of the Ten Harmonies was a vast, gilded hall of swooping tile roof and heavy cedar columns, strung with beads of lights like a massive Christmas ornament in the center of a cobblestoned courtyard, now overgrown with weeds and grass, but majestic beyond measure to Kitchens' eyes. They entered the hall in strict military formation, marching up a ramp carved with writhing bas-relief dragons, each head snarling north, toward ancient enemies from the Mongolian steppe.

For the next two hours, they waited in parade-ground formation, Lyle Kitchens decked out in a borrowed uniform of a PLA battalion commander, while Mao and his staff flew back from the emergency command past in Sinkiang province.

The gathering was to be an awards function, a small gathering of Party elite and PLA leadership cadres, in the ornate assembly room of the Hall of Ten Harmonies. Shortly after 8:00 o'clock, the Chairman of the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China strolled in, his entourage likewise clad in drab cotton tunics, baggy trousers, and simple felt caps. Mao's cap had a single red star.

Kitchens watched the Chairman out of the corner of his eyes. He had seen only pictures of the Red Chinese revolutionary before, that and grainy black and white newsreel footage. In person, Mao was short, tending to pudgy, waxen-faced, with a wreath of dark hair hanging off the back of his head like a furry halo. As he walked into the hall, a moving bubble of space was cleared in all directions. No question, the dictator radiated an indefinable aura about him, a presence of power and authority secure in its position. A faint smile crossed surprisingly feminine lips.

The purpose of the small ceremony was to recognize the valor and bravery of all who had defended the People's Republic from the 'capitalist enemy and their running-dog lackeys.' Lyle Kitchens didn't know about that. Just wearing the uniform of the enemy made him distinctly uneasy but Jiang and the others had insisted. He was in no position to argue.

Truth be known, Lyle Kitchens wasn't sure exactly what his status was. Probably something between a hero and a traitor, half capitalist running-dog, half revolutionary idol. A real half-breed, he told himself. Unloved on either side of the Iron Curtain.

Jiang was there, dressed in his field army mustard yellow, along with Lieutenant Wu Hu-ban, the MiG pilot who's courageous ramming of Bouncin' Betty had forced the American bomber away from the heart of Peking.

Mao and the Minister of Defense Lin Piao proceeded slowly down the front line of the assemblage, pinning emblems and medals on proud chests. Cameras whirred and clicked from the background.

"The People's Order of Merit," whispered Jiang, to Kitchens' unvoiced question.

At last, the Chairman came to Kitchens himself. Mao held out his hand, and the silver medal was placed in his palm. He apprised Kitchens carefully, squinting up at the American major, hesitating with the medal poised. Kitchens' heart skipped a few beats. Should I even be here?

"Even though China and America are at war," Mao finally said, "the Chinese people do not regard Americans as enemies, merely as wayward neighbors." He grasped the medal and pinned it on Kitchens' chest. Then he smiled, crooked and stained teeth and all. "This is surely the first time a capitalist dog has been awarded a medal for heroic service to the Revolution. But your efforts must be recognized. The Chinese People...and this great city--are grateful to you."

When the ceremony was over, Kitchens and Jiang were marched out of the Hall and escorted to a waiting convoy of sedans. Every vehicle wheezed black smoke in the cold winter wind whipping across the vast courtyard. Jiang had told him they were to be driven back to the An Shan air base. A plane was waiting for Kitchens. Waiting, he was told, to fly the Army investigator westward, to New Delhi, India, where he would be released to the custody of the Indian authorities.

"We have no relations with America," Jiang explained. "That, I'm afraid, will take a very long time."

On the ride back to An Shan, they passed through many darkened neighborhoods and small villages. The city was blacked out as a precaution, expecting more air raids at any moment. Overhead, through the soot and ash of countless cooking fires, he heard the thunder of Chinese MiGs, patrolling the black skies over the capital.

Kitchens told Jiang, "I've got to ditch this uniform, pal. Before I land in India. If I show up like this, the Army will mark me for a traitor and collaborator for sure."

Jiang was quiet, pensive, thoughtful. He promised to help Kitchens find some different clothing at the base. "Perhaps, you would like an Indian raj, Major?"

They discussed their odd relationship.

"Technically," Kitchens was saying, "we're enemies at war."

"That is so," Jiang admitted. "The animosity between China and America will go on. Despite what happens in Korea. At least, a greater conflict has been averted."

"Yeah, for the moment."

"The world remains a dangerous place."

They were quiet for awhile, letting the nighttime sights sink in. Peking was still a city at war, still cleaning up from years of Japanese occupation. Rubble and ash, Kitchens thought to himself. That's what I'll remember of this place. Nothing but rubble and ash.

"Jiang, I can't tell the truth when I get back to the States. If I ever get back. The Army will debrief me for months, probably. I'll never be able to tell them what happened after you sprang me from that brig on Mishida. Who would believe it? I don't believe it myself."

An enigmatic smile on Jiang's face. Something the Chinese did well. "A distant shadow, in our mythology, perhaps. It is sad that your name will be forgotten. It has to be that way. What you did won't be forgotten. There is a word in my language. Pung-yo...it means friend, by most translations. But it really means more. It means a kind of brother in spirit, someone who lives in the eyes of others, by his great deeds."

"Great deeds, my ass. I was scared out of my wits."

Jiang acknowledged that. "It was Sun Tzu who said, 'He is the greatest warrior of all who wins the battle without firing a shot.' You will be remembered, comrade Major, as perhaps the greatest warrior of the age."

"Yeah, well, I don't know about that, pal. I'm treading a damn fine line here, between being a wartime collaborator with an enemy power and an agent of the U.S. government, cooperating on an investigation. I did have approval to make contact, to cooperate in a limited sort of way. Trouble was, nobody ever told me what that really meant. Did I cooperate? Or did I collaborate? My superiors may not understand the distinction. Hell, I'm not sure I do myself." Kitchens scratched incessantly at the itching cotton tunic. "What's the difference between cooperation and collaboration?"

"A question for the philosophers, perhaps?"

"For sure, no one will ever admit or believe the truth of what really did happen. Me...Lyle Kitchens, the old Philly stud himself, flying in the backseat of a MiG jet as it rams an American B-29 carrying an atomic bomb across China. Whew--! That's gonna be a tough one to sell back home."

"You could stay in India, comrade. I'm told the Indian women are particularly skilled at making a man contented with his lot."

Kitchens snorted. "I got a wife. And a little girl, waiting for her Daddy. No, what happened has to remain a secret forever. My career and my life would be ruined by the Army if it got out. I'd be court-martialed as a traitor. I may still be. In my country today, people see Communists everywhere. I'd probably be shot."

"It's the same in China," Jiang admitted. "Enemies of the Revolution are discovered everyday. They're executed, by the thousands, every week. It's a kind of madness."

At the An Shan airbase, the convoy pulled out onto the ramp. An unmarked DC-3 was bathed in light, its props already turning, trailing smoke into the wind. Kitchens ducked into a shed nearby, exchanging his PLA uniform for plain civilian clothes, and a black Homburg that didn't really fit. At the foot of the stair ladder, he shook hands with Jiang, a long, fervent grasp.

Both men knew they would never see each other again. Both knew that when the plane took off, they would return to being adversaries once again. But they also knew now that they were adversaries with a difference. For each would know that once, in a dim and unrecounted past, they had passed beyond enmity and become partners for awhile, partners in a desperate race to keep the world from spiraling even deeper into the madness than it already had.

The DC-3 lumbered growling and smoking out to the end of the darkened runway. The engines revved and the aircraft took off and lifted away and was gone, banking south for India.

Inside, Lyle Kitchens looked out across the north China plain, and a hazy reddish-purple sunset, a ribbon of light still hugging the bleak bowl of desert to the west. The sky was black and thick, but not with fog or clouds, he soon realized. A fine particulate rain pelted the window, suspended in the last rays of western light like a gauzy curtain. Kitchens swallowed hard, his throat dry. He realized what he was seeing.

In the last twelve hours, thousands of tons of soil had been lifted into the atmosphere by the atomic blast south of Peking. High level winds had smeared the particle haze into many layers, now refracting the dying sunlight like a circus funhouse mirror.

Eerie, beautiful, lethal, all at the same time. A lingering effect of the airburst of an 80-kiloton atom bomb over the rice paddies of Hubei. The dead and dying would never be fully counted.

Lyle Kitchens stared in silent wonder, both at the riotous prism of color suspended in the sky and at the very thin line between enmity and partnership, between cooperation and collaboration.

The very thin line between a friend and an enemy.
CHAPTER 34

Friday, February 2, 1951

Hickam Field, Honolulu

8:10 a.m.

General George Marshall squinted up into the morning sun as the C-54 circled the field for the third time, like a hawk seeking prey. The Bataan eased onto its final approach, waggled a bit in the tricky crosswinds and settled toward the runway, kissing the tarmac with a small puff of smoke. The Air Transport Service transport roared toward the row of hangars and chopped its engines. Stairs were rolled up to the side door and General of the Army Douglas MacArthur emerged, clad in rumpled khakis and oily service cap, corncob pipe in the corner of his mouth.

Marshall smiled in spite of himself. The Great One is looking for President Truman. He's going to be disappointed with a mere Secretary of Defense.

Warily, MacArthur descended the stairs, scouting in every direction for cameras, press reporters, smelling a trap. At the bottom, he found Marshall.

The officers saluted, then shook hands. MacArthur grasped Marshall's elbow with faux warmth, holding it just long enough for the cameras to get their angles.

"Welcome to Hawaii," Marshall said. "The President asked me to come in his place."

MacArthur was plainly disappointed, though he continued to smile for the newshounds. Through gritted teeth: "I didn't hear anything about you coming, George. The President ordered me to this meeting. I assumed he would have the courtesy of showing up himself."

Marshall had already pulled out another Distinguished Service Medal for SCAP's chest. "The Russians, you know, General. Germany and NATO and all that. He's got a lot on his mind."

"Indeed. Asia and the Far East are usually at the bottom of the stack. I'm used to that."

"Stick your chest out, Douglas," he ordered, making a show of placing the medal above a line of service ribbons. Candy keeps the children quiet, he thought to himself. Cameras clicked and flashbulbs popped. MacArthur beamed and mugged for the press.

A line of Air Force sedans had pulled up alongside the Bataan. Marshall was anxious to get this distasteful business over with. "Come on, General. We've got a lot to talk about."

The convoy of staff cars headed for the brick and tan Base Operations building at the end of the hangars. White awnings shaded the windows from intermittent sun. Overhead, heavy morning clouds scudded low across Honolulu and Pearl Harbor. The generals said nothing as the cars approached the building.

The small conference room was bare, save for a coffee-stained but polished mahogany table, a tea and coffee cart and an official portrait of Harry Truman overlooking both of them. How appropriate, Marshall imagined. He fiddled with a pencil and pad and didn't waste any words. Only the SecDef and the Supreme Commander, Allied Powers were present.

"Douglas, I've got a statement from the President," Marshall said. "It's for the press. The President intends to release it tomorrow. Before we talk, I want to read it to you verbatim."

MacArthur regarded the SecDef coolly. "I trust the President sees the wisdom of my recommendations about the war."

Marshall ignored him, and read. "'General Douglas MacArthur has faithfully and brilliantly served his country for nearly fifty years, in three major wars. His command has been a beacon to all who love freedom and liberty. It is with the greatest regret that I reluctantly accept the general's request to relinquish his command and to come home at last to the land he loves.'" He didn't look up, but continued staring down at the paper.

MacArthur cleared his throat. "What is this, George? You know perfectly well that I haven't tendered my resignation. I haven't relinquished anything. Is this some kind of joke?"

At last, Marshall looked up, meeting MacArthur eye to eye. "It's no joke, Douglas. The President asked me to deliver this."

"It's a request for my resignation."

"It's an ultimatum. The President is very serious on this matter. Resign now from the Army. Come home to a hero's welcome with full honors and benefits. Or you will face arrest, imprisonment and probable court-martial."

"Arrest?" MacArthur half rose out of his chair. He jabbed the air with the stem of his pipe. "Court-martial—on what grounds? This is some kind of—"

"No...it is not." Marshall's eyes narrowed. MacArthur sat down abruptly. "Douglas, these charges are very serious. Don't make me spell this out. We both know what's going on. You've violated your oath of office, approved clandestine operations involving atomic bombs. You've violated the President's prohibition on making announcements without clearing them with the Pentagon or the White House." Marshall picked up the page, waved it in the air. "The whole damn page is full of insubordinations. Just listen for once, will you? You think this is easy for me, for any of us?"

MacArthur paled. He was appalled and just for a single moment, speechless. Marshall got up and began pacing the room, one by one detailing each count of insubordination. The Supreme Commander's face darkened with every word.

When Marshall was done, MacArthur recovered his bearing quickly enough. His head was shaking from side to side, slowly at first like a metronome, then more quickly.

"All of this is the gravest form of character assassination. These are fabrications from my enemies....that's all they are. You know that. Lies and half-truths, innuendo, slander and hate." His voice deepened, rolling thunder with each phrase. "What the President is doing...what the Chiefs are doing...is unconscionable. They're all playing politics with the lives of American boys in Korea. Unconscionable. I'm trying to do my duty and win the war, but my hands are tied."

"Your first duty, General, as a soldier, is to obey orders. That's what this is all about."

"No," MacArthur was no longer interested in listening. "No...my first duty, my allegiance is to the United Nations now. Not just the United States."

Marshall shook his head sadly, sat down heavily. "How can you, Douglas, you of all people, have such a divided sense of loyalty. The UN is an artifact. It's a committee of old men. You and I are soldiers. And this—" he tapped the papers he had just set on the table "—this is dereliction of duty. You know it and I know it. Appealing to the UN, over the President's head for Christ's sake, is just waffling and handwaving. The President and the Chiefs saw right through it a long time ago."

"It's about Gallant Flag, isn't it?" MacArthur said. "Clandestine operations...that hurts, George. That hurts me a great deal. Especially coming from you. The very purpose of war is victory. How can we deliberately hold back our forces and let the Red Chinese and the Russians dictate the course of this war? That is truly unconscionable. Every day's delay...every day's dickering and indecision--costs lives. I can save more lives by taking this war to the enemy's sanctuary than Harry Truman will ever save by hiding Korea in some desk drawer and calling it a damned 'police action.'"

"That's not what this is about and you know it. Gallant Flag is a slap in the face. General, ask yourself what you would do. If a commander went outside the chain of command, and on his own initiative, undertook to widen a campaign, threatening a unit's position and overall strategy, without getting approval from his superior officer, he'd be shot and he should be. You can't pretend Gallant Flag is anything other than insubordination. Maybe even treason."

"Treason?" MacArthur quaked with indignation. Tears formed in the corner of his eyes. "No one has ever accused a MacArthur of disloyalty, let alone treason. The very word is—" he shook his head. "I never approved of this so-called clandestine operation. I have cooperated fully with the investigators. And I trust that the guilty will be punished to the fullest extent of the laws of the United States."

But Marshall would have none of this. "There's ample evidence—specifics from wiretaps and surveillance—that you not only knew all the details from the beginning, but that you made major decisions regarding the operation, approved every step and actively attempted to hide the mission from the Joint Chiefs and the normal command authority. It's no good lying to me, General. I know the truth. You and your staff have conspired to steal and divert government property in the form of Mark VI atom bombs and supporting materials, and to undertake military operations on your own authority, outside the scope of your orders, without approval from Washington."

Marshall leveled a stern gaze at the Supreme Commander. "Douglas, every one of these accusations is a serious charge. Every one of them could send a man to prison. Taken together, they speak of a willful disregard for the chain of command and a serious dereliction of duty to support the stated policies and laws of the United States. A pattern of arrogant, self-serving, flagrant refusal to follow orders is one of the most serious charges that can be leveled at any American soldier. Such conduct is dangerous, not only to the country but to your fellow soldiers. It speaks of a callous ignorance of their needs and welfare. General, you claim to be trying to win this war and save lives. But the truth is, through your actions, you could have and still may plunge this nation into the most catastrophic war the world has ever seen. I pray to God that doesn't happen. If it does, much of the blame and history's opprobrium will fall on your shoulders."

MacArthur could only seethe with anger as the SecDef went on.

"I ask again the question of the moment: will you accept the President's terms?"

For a long moment, Douglas MacArthur quivered and shook with barely controlled fury. At length, he stood up abruptly, grabbed his cap and left the room. Outside, Colonel Kades and Colonel Bunker stood by, rising quickly as SCAP emerged from the conference room. One look at their commander's face told them all they needed to know. The two O-6's fell in behind SCAP and marched out of the building in the shadow of their superior officer.

Two parallel lines of armed Military Police had taken up positions around the convoy of vehicles. MacArthur briefly paused in the gusty sunshine outside, watching flags and pennants snap at the foot of the steps, wondering if the MP's would try to arrest him. What orders did they have?

Let them arrest me, he decided, and headed for the lead car. Bunker and Kades hustled to keep up.

A flustered Lieutenant scrambled to open the rear door of the Ford and MacArthur climbed in.

To Kades: "You drive, Charles. Back to the Bataan. We're getting out of here right now."

Kades took the driver's position and started up the car. Surrounded by MPs, the car eased out of line and sped off toward the parked aircraft. No one followed. No one did anything.

Aboard his own C-54, MacArthur ducked into the cockpit, where the Bataan's pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Tony Story, was poring over a lapful of checklists and maintenance orders.

"Colonel--" MacArthur intoned.

Startled, Story dropped his paperwork. "General—sir, I wasn't expecting—"

"Get the Bataan buttoned up for takeoff. I want to leave Hickam and be airborne as soon as possible."

Story started to ask a question but SCAP's face quashed any delays. "Yes, sir, right away, sir. I'll need clearance, sir...and the weather reports."

MacArthur was grave, already thinking ahead. "Get your weather reports. I'm giving you clearance."

Story blinked. "Yes, sir...right away, sir—"

Hurriedly complying with SCAP's order, the Bataan was fully fueled and made ready in twenty minutes. Her four 1300-horsepower Pratt and Whitney radials coughed and belched to life and moments later, as mechanics and ground crewmen scattered, she started rolling along the ramp and down the taxiway, heading for the very end of Runway 18 Left.

Colonel Charles Kades looked out the portside window as he buckled himself in. "Looks like we've got company, General."

MacArthur took a peek. Rolling behind the Bataan as she lumbered toward the runway was a convoy of jeeps and deuce-and-a-half trucks, filled with MPs and infantrymen, keeping pace with the aircraft.

As Bataan turned onto the runway and Colonel Story began her pre-takeoff

checks, a detail of jeeps surged across the grassy sward between runways and took up positions on 18 Left, attempting to block the C-54 from beginning its takeoff roll.

The co-pilot unbuckled his seat straps and poked his head back into the passenger compartment. "General, sir, Lieutenant Colonel Story requests instructions. Those jeeps have blocked us from using this runway."

MacArthur had anticipated the whole scenario. "Tell Tony to find another runway immediately. Roll over the grass if he has to. And don't wait for clearance. The tower will never give us clearance."

The co-pilot frowned dubiously. "Yes, sir—I'll tell him—."

Moments later, her engines groaning with power, the Bataan pulled off 18 Left and bounced her way across a grassy strip to another inactive runway, marked 13. Red flags and orange pylons marked off a construction zone. Runway 13 had been under repairs for months, and was flagged inactive DO NOT USE on all aeronautical charts.

Tony Story gritted his teeth as the C-54 bounced and rocked over potholes and tar patches. "We can't use this runway, Al. It's under repair."

"I know, I know. And our friends just don't want us to go." Behind them, a detail from the convoy had already cut over from 18 Left and was bounding over the grass after them.

"Tell the general there's no way we—" Story stopped when MacArthur's head appeared right behind him.

"Tony, I don't care what you have to do—get Bataan into the air."

"Sir, look at the signs...look at the pylons. This runway's under repair—"

"I'm aware of that, son. Just fly us out of here. There's a war on and we've got to back to it."

Story sucked in his breath. He glanced over at his co-pilot Al Street and shook his head. Outside both cockpit windows, both of them saw jeeps and trucks pulling up alongside the aircraft, soldiers dismounting, MPs running toward the plane. Two jeeps with quad-50s were already skidding onto the runway a hundred yards ahead of them, turning to train their weapons back toward Bataan.

But it was too late.

Story shoved the four throttles forward and Bataan was rolling. They cleared the jeeps with several dozen feet to spare as their drivers hurriedly put the vehicles into reverse. Four thousand feet down Runway 13, bouncing and careening over bumps and holes, the C-54 lifted off, narrowly missing another inbound C-54 on final to 18 Left. Story banked Bataan hard right, then gunned her engines and clawed for lift as he banked back to the left and swung her around into a strong headwind. He trimmed her for climb and put them on a southwesterly heading away from Hickam, out over the sun-dappled Pacific. Behind them, the rocky snout of Diamond Head disappeared from view into the clouds.

Miles behind them, General George Marshall stood up in the front seat of the jeep and watched MacArthur's plane fade from view. He shook his head, knowing now he would have to report failure of the mission back to the President. George Marshall did not like to fail. He shuddered at the thought of what lay ahead, and the difficulty the President would have in removing such a 'force of nature' from office.

Aboard the Bataan herself, Douglas MacArthur watched silently as bright morning sunlight played across the wavetops of the central Pacific. He was pensive, angry, thoughtful.

He knew deep in his heart that he was right. Now was the time to confront Communism on the battlefield. Why couldn't they all see that? It was too bad if Truman and the politicians in Washington and the Joint Chiefs didn't have the stomach for the fight.

Five years ago, he mused to himself, we had the greatest army in the world. Today, we can't beat back a ragtag bunch of Asian peasants.

MacArthur knew that he had the stomach and the will and the nerve to carry the fight right into the very heartland of Communism itself, if necessary.

History will see that I am right.

Americans would never stand for a long cold war against this type of enemy. They wanted victory now, overwhelming victory, unconditional surrender.

It's the only way of war we know.

Meanwhile, Truman and the politicians could dither and dally. MacArthur pulled out a ruled writing pad and a pen from an overhead compartment and began making notes, notes for a speech to be delivered to the press when he returned to Atsugi airfield in Tokyo. A demand for unconditional surrender by the Communists, for starters. They would have to see their position was hopeless. Already, Ridgeway had blunted their most recent advances south of the Han. They were steadily being annihilated on the battlefield.

The Supreme Commander told himself, as he wrote longhand on the pad with the sun-dappled Pacific sliding into night below the Bataan, that he would never give in to that cheap tradesman Harry Truman. He would ignore this infantile ultimatum offered by Marshall and take his case directly to the United Nations. Instinctively, he felt himself now acting on a broader worldwide stage, with worldwide responsibilities only dimly seen by Harry Truman and his sycophants.

With that imperious thought in mind, Douglas MacArthur started writing more resolutely, the words rolling like fine wine from the tip of his pen, his lips tightly clenched around his corncob pipe.

We shall see how History treats this whole affair.
EPILOGUE

Major Lyle Kitchens

Left the Army in 1954. Joined the FBI and began working in 1955 as a counterintelligence agent, out of the Washington Field Office. Testified as to Communist

penetration in the Army and the Defense Department during hearings conducted by Senator Joe McCarthy in 1955. Active in several spy cases from 1956 to 1976. Retired from the Bureau in 1977. Died in 1982.

General Paul Craft

Tried on charges of treason, conspiracy, insubordination and dereliction of duty. Court-martialed in 1951 and sentenced to 30 years in military prison at Fort Leavenworth. Released in 1981. Retired to Florida, where he was employed as a desk clerk at a beachside motel in Ormond Beach. Killed in a robbery attempt in 1984.

Masuhiro Tetsuko

Tried by the Japanese government for conspiracy and treason. Convicted, sentenced to death. Executed November 1, 1952.

Dr. Albert Ranier

Tried by the U.S. government in 1951 for conspiracy, treason, espionage and other charges. Convicted, sentenced to 25 years in federal prison, Joliet, Illinois. Released for health reasons in 1970. Died of a stroke in a Texas motel, January, 1971.

Fyodor Trofimenko

Promoted to general in the NKVD in 1951, assigned as first deputy commander, Second Chief Directorate at Moscow Center. On duty during major spy scandal involving NATO penetration of VV-S (Soviet Air Force) air base and theft of operational and mission plans for atomic strike against western Europe. Arrested and charged with treason and anti-Soviet behaviors. Executed on Stalin's orders, January 1953.

Jiang Chen Li

Promoted to Brigade Commander, 40th Field Army of the Peoples Liberation Army. Saw action in Korea during Spring Offensive, 1951 (Fourth Offensive). Was a stand-by delegate for Red China during armistice talks at Panmumjom, Fall 1952/ spring 1953. Promoted to Division Commander in 1955, then retired from the PLA in 1957. Appointed local Party leader in small city near Shanghai in 1958. Promoted regional Party district secretary from 1959-1966. Ousted by Red Guards and sent to re-education labor camp in Szechwan province 1967-1975. Rehabilitated after death of Mao Tse-tung in 1976, appointed instructor on military history at PLA Academy for Military Science.

The War in Korea

In early February, 1951, the United Nations condemned Red China as an aggressor, for entering the war.

February 11: CPV forces begin offensive north of Hoengsong.

February 14: CPV forces stopped at Chipyong-ni by UN forces.

February 18: U.S. Army Operation "Killer" commences.

March 1: UN forces reach the 38th Parallel.

March 18: UN forces re-take Seoul.

General Douglas MacArthur

General MacArthur continued to issue proclamations demanding surrender by the Red Chinese and NKPA forces. Day-to-day tactical decisions were left to General Matthew Ridgeway, commanding general of the Eighth Army. After continuing to issue demands of the Chinese and North Koreans in early April, General MacArthur was relieved of command of Far Eastern Forces and recalled to the United States. He left Tokyo for good on April 11, 1951. He arrived in the United States to a tumultuous welcome, culminating in a ticker-tape parade through New York City and an address to the U. S. Congress.
"Old soldiers never die...they just fade away—"

General of the Army Douglas MacArthur
About the Author

Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses...just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He's been happily married for over 20 years. He's also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.

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