The Bridges at Toko-ri (7 page)

They were cavorting in this manner when the locked door opened and a Japanese man entered. He bowed low to both Nancy and Harry, smiled at the girls and started to undress. “Hey!” Harry cried. “We reserved this!” But the man understood little English and bowed to accept Harry’s greeting. When he was quite undressed he opened the door and admitted his wife and two teen-age daughters, who laid aside their kimonos. Soon the Japanese family stood naked by the pool and dipped their toes in. Harry, blushing madly, tried to protest again but the man said with painstaking care, “Number one! Good morning!” and each of his pretty daughters smiled and said musically, “Good morning, sir!”

“
Ohio gozaimasu
!” shouted the Brubaker girls, using a phrase they had acquired from their nurse. This pleased the Japanese family and everyone laughed gaily and then the man bowed again. Ceremoniously, father first, the family entered the pool.

By now Harry and Nancy were more or less numb with astonishment, but the pleasant warmth of the room, the quiet beauty of the surroundings and the charm of the Japanese family were too persuasive to resist. Harry, trying not to stare at the pretty girls, smiled at the Japanese man, who swam leisurely over, pointed to one of the Brubaker girls and asked, “Belong you?”

Harry nodded, whereupon the man called his own daughters who came over to be introduced. “Teiko, Takako,” the man said. They smiled and held out their hands and somehow the bitterness of the long night’s talking died away. The two families intermingled and the soft waters of the bath united them. In 1944 Harry had hated the Japanese and had fought valiantly against them, destroying their ships and bombing their troops, but the years had passed, the hatreds had dissolved and on this wintry morning he caught some sense in the twisted and conflicting things men are required to do.

Then he sort of cracked his neck, for he saw Nancy. His shy wife had paddled to the other side of the pool and was talking with the Japanese man. “We better hurry or we’ll miss breakfast,” Harry said, and for the rest of his stay they became like the spectators at the Cheyenne Frontier Days and they enjoyed themselves and never spoke of Korea.

Then shore leave ended in one of those improbable incidents which made everyone proud he served aboard a good ship like the
Savo
. Admiral Tarrant went aboard at noon and
toward four Beer Barrel
staggered up the gangplank with his two golf bags. Brubaker had obtained permission for Nancy to see his quarters but when she found how astonishingly small the room was and how her husband slept with his face jammed under two steam pipes she said she felt penned in and would rather stay on deck.

In the meantime hundreds of sailors and their Japanese girls had crowded into Yokosuka and in the lead were Mike Forney and Nestor Gamidge, accompanied by seven girls from the dance halls of Tokyo, Yokohama and Yokosuka. “I never knew there were so many girls,” Nestor said to one of the plane captains. “Best thing ever happened to Mike was losing Kimiko to that ape from the
Essex
.”

Mike agreed. When he had kissed his girls goodbye he swung onto the quay, elbows out, and pointed to the
Savo
: “Greatest flattop in the fleet.” Then he stopped dead for he saw that the
Essex
was alongside and there stood beautiful Kimiko, wearing the expensive plaid he had bought her. She was kissing her ape from the
Essex
and things went black. Clenching his fists, Mike lunged toward the lovers but little Nestor grabbed him.

Mike stopped, slapped himself on the head and muttered, “Sure, what’s one girl?” With grandiloquent charm he approached Kimiko, kissed her hand and said loudly, “The flower of Japan.” Then he grabbed the
Essex
man warmly and proclaimed, “The flower of the fleet. The best man won. Bless you, my children.”

Then everything fell apart.
For some loud mouth in the
Essex
yelled derisively, “And we could lick you bums in everything else, too.”

Mike whirled about, saw no one, then looked back at golden Kimiko and she was beautiful in that special way and she was his girl. Blood surged into his throat and he lunged at the
Essex
man standing with her and slugged him furiously, shouting, “You lousy ape!”

Six
Essex
men leaped to defend their shipmate and stumpy Nestor Gamidge rallied
Savo
men and soon M.P. whistles were screeching like sparrows in spring and there was a growing melee with men in blue dropping all over the place. Mike, seeing
himself
about to be deluged by
Essex
reinforcements, grabbed a chunk of wood and let the ape have it across the ear, laying him flat. At this Kimiko started to scream in Japanese and Mike grabbed her hat and tried to pull off the pretty plaid jacket, bellowing, “Go ahead and marry him. But not in my clothes.” Three
Essex
men, gallant to the end, knocked him silly.

The captain of the
Savo
witnessed this disgraceful riot and determined on the spot to get rid of Mike Forney, but Admiral Tarrant, surveying the brawl from
flag bridge
, thought, “I’d hate to see the day when men were afraid to mix it up for pretty girls.” He called for his glasses and studied Kimiko, who knelt over her
Essex
man and all the sailors aboard the
Savo
and the officers too were a little more proud of their ship.

THE SUN had to be well up or the photographs wouldn’t be any good, so it was nearly 0945 when Harry Brubaker’s jet catapulted violently across the prow of the
Savo
and far into the sky toward Korea. Ahead of him streaked a single Banshee with an extraordinary nose containing nine broad windows through which heavy cameras would record the bridges of Toko-ri.

While the
Savo
was in Yokosuka, other carriers were supposed to photograph the target but they had failed. When Cag bent his bullet head over their muddy films he growled, “What’s the matter?
They afraid to go down low?
Well show ’em how to take pictures,” and he assigned himself the dangerous mission, choosing Brubaker to fly protective cover.

Now, as the two Banshees streaked toward higher altitudes Brubaker concerned himself with trivial details: “Lay off those even altitudes.
Use 25,300.
Makes it just that much tougher for the anti-aircraft crews.
And remember that when Cag goes down for the pictures, keep 3,000 feet above him.”

Then, in the perpetually mysterious way, when he had climbed into the higher atmosphere, he experienced the singing beauty of a jet as it sped almost silently through the vast upper reaches of the world. Sea and sky fell away and he was aloft in the soaring realm.
of
the human spirit.

It was terrible ad supreme to be there, whistling into the morning brilliance, streaking ahead so fast that the overwhelming scream of his engines never quite caught up. In this moment of exhilaration he peered into the limitless reaches of the upper void and felt the surging sensation that overtakes every jet pilot: “I’m out front.” Through the silent beauty of this cold February morning he soared through the blue-black upper sky and thought, “I’m out front.”

Then, as his eyes swept the empty sky in casual patterns, he uttered a stunned cry, “My God! There it is!” But when he looked directly at what he had seen it vanished, so he returned to scanning and from the powerful corner of his eye he saw it again, tremendous and miraculously lovely, one of the supreme sights of creation: Fujiyama in morning sunlight towering above the islands of Japan. The cone was perfect, crowned in dazzling white, and the sides fell away like the soft ending of a sigh, and somewhere on the nether slope Nancy and the girls were waiting.

He now looked at the majestic volcano with his full eye, but again it was the omniscient corner which startled him, for it detected the mountains of Korea. Dead ahead they lay, bold and blunt and ugly. Tortured and convoluted, they twisted up at the two fleeting jets, the terrible mountains of Korea. They were the mountains of pain, the hills of death. They were the scars of the world’s violent birth, the aftermath of upheavals and multitudes of storms. There was no sense to them and they ran in crazy directions. Their crests formed no significant pattern, their valleys led nowhere, and running through them there were no discernible watersheds or spacious plains. Hidden among them, somewhere to the west, cowered the bridges of Toko-ri, gun-rimmed and waiting.

Brubaker knew the guns would be waiting, for as the Banshees crossed the coastline, a signal battery in Wonsan fired and he could follow the course of other gun bursts across Korea, for the communists announced impending danger exactly as the Cheyennes of Colorado had done two hundred years before.

Now the day’s hard work began. As soon as the Banshees came in range of communist guns, Cag began to descend in swift jinking dips and dives to confuse ground gunners, never staying on either course or altitude for longer than fifteen seconds. This threw a special responsibility on Brubaker who stayed aloft, weaving back and forth lest some stray MIG try to pounce upon the preoccupied photographic plane. So imperceptible was Cag’s silvery slim Banshee as it skimmed across the mountain tops that Brubaker was taxed to keep his eye on it.

At Yangdok a flurry of ground fire exploded at almost the right altitude to catch the photographic plane, so the jets increased speed to 560, jinking violently. Below them they spotted the ruins of a less important bridge, four spans rusting in the river. Farther on a communist working party strove to rebuild a major bridge, but this morning Cag ignored them, certain that later flights would halt the work. For now on the horizon rose the peaks that guarded Toko-ri.

Each was pock-marked with many circular red depressions in the snow. These were the gun emplacements and in swift estimate Brubaker decided there must be more than sixty. Lower were gaunt walled nests for the huge five-inch guns, a single shell from which could pulverize a plane before it fell to earth. And deep within the hills, hiding along the river, were the four bridges. On this first fleeting glance he noticed that the two historic bridges were on tall stone pillars and decidedly vulnerable, but that the two emergency alternates were extraordinarily low, scarcely clearing the water.

But most significant of all was one solemn fact: to get to the bridges you really did have to fly in one end of a valley, traverse it and fly out the other end. Brubaker swallowed and thought, “They got you lined up going and coming. And when you pull out for rendezvous you’re a dead duck.” Then he laughed to relieve his tension and whispered, “No wonder they saved this one till last.”

At that instant Cag started his bold run into the western entrance to the valley. Pushing his nose down into a 40
°
dive, he screamed along the shimmering river, held courageously to the hairline railroad tracks, and roared upon the bridges at 580 miles an hour. During each inch of this run more than two hundred communist guns fired at the streaking Banshee, but it howled straight on, its cameras grinding, making no concession to the fire. Cag had one mission only, to bring back photographs, and he ignored everything else. Five-inch guns, three-inchers, machine guns and even carbines blazed at his wailing jet, but at last he pulled away from the mortal pit and with a sickening upward twist sped off to the north.

For a moment Brubaker lost the sleek Banshee as it fled to the hills for rendezvous. In some anxiety he cast his eyes swiftly left and right and thus caught a fleeting glimpse of the plane in the corner of his eye. Quickly rotating his vision in that area he gradually pinpointed the photographic plane, twisting and turning toward the safer hills. He had the sensation of spying upon an animal retreating to some sheltered valley after a wounding fight.

“Drop down and look me over,” Cag called. “My tail section OK?”

Brubaker passed under the long-nosed jet and studied the fuselage minutely, for although both planes were doing more than 400 miles, in relation to each other they were nearly motionless. “Nothing visible,” he reported.

“Back we go,” Cag said.

The photographic jet heeled over in a tight turn, jinked to a lower altitude and went into a paralyzing dive. Out of the sun it streaked with blazing speed, but the communist gunners were waiting and in monomaniac fury they poured their fire upon the wraith-like Banshee as it screamed upon them. It seemed positively impossible that Cag could writhe his way through such fire but he bore on, clicking his shutters at the doomed bridges.

From aloft Brubaker followed this incredible mission and experienced a resolute desire to be there with his commander, but the instant this thought came to mind it was dispelled by the vision he had seen at Yokosuka: four bridges reaching out into space far above the heads of his wife and daughters, and he grew afraid; for he knew that tomorrow as the sun came up he would be pushing his own overloaded Banshee down, down upon the real bridges. It was then that the great fear came upon him, the one he would not be able to dispel.

Then he heard Cag cry, “Well, home we go.”

Ecstatically the two jets zoomed to 26,000. Far below them the savage, cheated mountains of Korea began to assume a beautiful countenance. Gone were the tortured profiles and the senseless confusion, for with the bridges of Toko-ri behind him, Brubaker saw Korea with a kindlier eye. To the north sprawling reservoirs glistened like great brooches, holding the hills together. To the south snow hung upon the ridge lines and made the valleys shimmering wonderlands of beauty, while beyond the upcoming range of mountains lay the vast blue sea, bearing somewhere upon its bosom the task force, that fair circle of home, with Beer Barrel waiting on the after deck.

Even Cag was impressed and called, “Real estate sure looks better on the way home.”

But when they reached home there was dismal news. “You heard the hot scoop?” Harry’s plane captain asked as soon as Brubaker was out of the cockpit.

“We ordered home?”

“Forney and Gamidge are being sent to the barge.”