After he worked the helicopter to a thousand feet, Second Lieutenant Telfair sat back and enjoyed his matchless view. He could see everything that was happening, and the burning of the stores and ammunition dumps at Hamhung especially intrigued him. He had heard about smoke rising six or eight thousand feet from an ammunition fire, and had not believed it, but now he saw it was true. There would be turbulence in that smoke, he thought, just like a thunderhead.
He looked at the map clipped to the board on his knee, and he saw how the roads were, and looked ahead and compared them with the map. The map was not exactly accurate, but it was easy to pick out the main road that ran down from the reservoir to the perimeter, because troops were still moving on it, and using the main road as a guide, he looked until he saw the secondary road. It wasn’t much of a road. You could see that from the air. He didn’t see anything on it, not anything at all, except a wisp of smoke at the crossroads. He got almost under this smoke, and then allowed the pinwheel to drop straight down several hundred feet.
When he was close to the road he saw that it could be a burned-out tank that smoked, and it was easy to see the bodies, about a dozen, he thought, lying around in the snow. But from the air, he couldn’t tell whose tank it was, or discern the nationality of the bodies. He was pretty sure the tank and the bodies had nothing to do with the company he was looking for. A dozen bodies didn’t make a company.
So Second Lieutenant Telfair caught himself some more altitude and headed up the road again, in the general direction of Koto-Ri. He soon saw he couldn’t go far, because a few miles ahead the clouds butted into the peaks. And as he approached this point he saw tiny red sparks flickering. He swiveled the helicopter, and allowed it to dip for a closer look, and he saw that the people who were shooting at him were mounted on horseback. “What kind of a war is this?” he asked himself aloud. “What kind of a war is this when cavalry can scare away a helicopter? By rights they shouldn’t have any cavalry, anyway.”
Now Second Lieutenant Telfair, unknown to anyone aboard the Leyte, and against orders, carried with him several hand grenades whenever he went on a mission with his pinwheel. He had never found a desirable target for what he thought of as his bombs, but this was it, if he was ever going to find it. He waggled the pinwheel wildly to distract the horsemen’s aim, and then went into what he considered a dive, meanwhile fighting to pry open, against the blast of wind, a section of his plexiglass cocoon.
When the opening was large enough, he pulled the pin of the grenade and dropped it towards earth, and banked the pinwheel to see what would happen. He saw that his bomb wasn’t going to kill anyone, because the horsemen were racing off. They were no longer shooting at anybody. They were just running. “I wonder whether this pinwheel scared those horses?” he said, disappointed. When he was flying he always talked aloud to himself like that. Sometimes this made him think he was crazy, and once he had told a Navy doctor about it, and the doctor had just laughed at him. “Doesn’t a pinwheel make a big racket?” the doctor had asked.
“Sure,” Lieutenant Telfair had said. “You can’t even hear yourself think.”
“Well, that’s why you talk aloud, so you can hear yourself think,” the doctor had said, and the doctor had laughed until he cried. This, Lieutenant Telfair did not understand, but he knew that he thought better, on a mission, when he talked to himself. “I guess I’d better go back,” he told himself.
So he stopped his pinwheel in midair, backed it around, and started towards the coast again, but he decided that on the way back he would take another, and closer, look at the burned-out tank, because nobody had bothered to shoot at him the first time. He swept along the road, low. He moved fast, too. His air speed was one hundred. A helicopter is deceptively clumsy, like a pelican. A helicopter is not really so slow. A helicopter flies faster than a duck, and enemy riflemen forget to lead them, for they are so fat and ungainly, and that is why so many second lieutenants like Slaton Telfair are still alive.
When he came in low over the tank he was pretty sure that it was a Chinese tank. It looked just like the turret of a T-34. “If that is a Chinese tank,” he said, “then there must be Americans around. Maybe all those dead are Americans. Maybe they fought the tank and they killed the tank and the tank killed them.”
He stopped the helicopter again, and allowed it to settle towards the ground, directly over the tank and the dead. He hovered twelve feet over the dead. The dead were Chinese, all of them. “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Lieutenant Telfair. “There ought to be Americans somewhere. Where are they?”
He began to look.
On the ground, Dog Company had seen the helicopter approach, of course, and they had screamed and yelled, and waved their arms. The helicopter had sailed over them, serenely, and on up the road towards their bivouac of the night, and the hill where they had seen the Mongol horsemen.
They cursed him. They cursed him, and the Air Force, and the Navy, and the high command. “Know what he’s doing?” said Petrucci. “He’s out looking for the Chinks. He doesn’t give a damn about us.”
“Why they don’t even know we’re here,” said Heinzerling.
“Know what would happen if that screwball pinwheel saw us?” said Heinzerling. “He’d call down fire on us, that’s what he’d do. He’d have the Mo laying sixteen inchers in our laps.”
“That’s all we need,” said Petrucci.
Far back the road they heard the rattle of rifles, and then an explosion that could have been a mortar, or a grenade. “Hope they got him,” said Heinzerling.
“They won’t,” said Petrucci. “Them pinwheel pilots are shot with luck. They live forever.”
Apparently Petrucci was right, for presently they heard the pinwheel again. They looked back and they saw it stop over the tank, and then it started moving again, down the road towards them.
Ekland knew he had to do something, and he had to do it fast. He had no flares, or even any tracer ammunition any longer, or anything at all to attract the attention of that pinwheel. The pinwheel might just happen to see them on the road, but this was unlikely, because of the overhang of the cliff, and the condition of the road, icy mud churned and filthy and frozen, exactly like their clothing. They were almost perfectly camouflaged. They might be seen in clean snow, and he looked off the road, and he saw clean snow. “Follow me!” Ekland yelled, and he ran out into the snow-covered flat, where his filthy parka would be marked against the clean white, and the others followed him, and they waved.
When the pinwheel was almost overhead it slowed down, and then stopped, and then began a weird revolving motion. It was as if the pinwheel said, “Who are you? Who are you down there? Friend or foe? Make some sign.”
“He wants us to make a sign,” said Ekland, and then he thought of what to do. “We make an SOS. We make an SOS in the snow.”
“With what?” asked Beany Smith.
“With ourselves,” said Ekland. He detailed them. “You, you, and you, you’re an S. You three, you’re the O. You three here, you’re the other S.”
Nine men lay down in the snow, as Ekland arranged them, and the pinwheel came down beside them, and a face in the pinwheel grinned, and a hand in the pinwheel jabbed down at the loaded basket litters.
They unloaded the supplies, and loaded Tinker into one of the basket litters, and they were about to lift Mackenzie when Mackenzie waved his hand and shook his head and said something, but they could not hear him, because of the noise of the pinwheel’s engine. Mackenzie pointed to his musette bag, and then he pointed to Ekland, and they all knew what the captain meant. And then Mackenzie touched the pocket of his parka, and Ekland leaned over him and took out the bottle of Scotch.