Read Online The Book of Honor by Ted Gup - Free Book Online

matter was “politically inadvisable,” the State Department dropped the request for compensation.
    As for those who resisted the Communists and whom Mackiernan had aided, they fared no better. In February 1951 the guerrilla leader Wussman Bator and one hundred of his followers were arrested in China. Another five thousand “bandits” had been killed, wounded, or captured, according to Beijing. The Chinese government publicly charged that Mackiernan had been “an American imperialist agent,” a spy, who had orchestrated the resistance against the Communists. The State Department dismissed the allegation as “the usual tripe.”
    A year to the day after Mackiernan was murdered, Wussman was executed, according to the Chinese, in front of ten thousand cheering citizens. Beijing boasted that when its troops searched Mackiernan’s house, they found an entire arsenal—153 charges of high explosives, radio equipment, and 1,835 rounds of ammunition. According to testimony during the public trial of Wussman, Mackiernan had set up a kind of “Revolutionary Committee” with Wussman. Its purpose was to recruit battalions of Kazakhs who would lead a campaign of harassment against the Communists.
    Mackiernan’s first wife, Darrell, meanwhile was occupied trying to ensure the financial well-being of her daughter, Gail. She persuaded a U.S. senator from Maine, Margaret Chase Smith, to introduce a bill into Congress that would provide $15,000 “as a gratuity to compensate . . . Gail Mackiernan for the loss of her father.” The measure failed to win passage. Instead, the government awarded a portion of Mackiernan’s death benefits—$47.15 per month—to Darrell and her daughter.
    Mackiernan’s body was never returned to the States. The exact location of his grave, somewhere near Shigarhung Lung along the Tibetan border, has long since been lost. Over the course of succeeding decades the few at the Central Intelligence Agency who knew Mackiernan or of his CIA employment either passed away or retired. His name, his mission, and his ordeal were, in time, utterly forgotten, erased as thoroughly as if he had never existed.
    He was destined to be the CIA’s first nameless star. But there was something Douglas Mackiernan had feared even more than death—imprisonment at the hands of the Chinese Communists. That fate was reserved for another covert operative not long after him.

CHAPTER 2
    A Pin for St. Jude
    IN A MODEST working-class neighborhood of Yonkers, New York, Bill McInenly dutifully retrieved from the basement a mahogany box containing what little was left from his Uncle Hughie’s life. He placed the small treasure chest squarely on the dining room table and reverently lifted back the lid. Inside, neatly arrayed in a wooden drawer resting on slats, were all the objects Ruth Redmond could salvage of her son’s life. A medal from the Boy Scouts. Honors for winning the broad jump and high jump at Roosevelt High. A silver cigarette lighter with the initials “HR” for “Hugh Redmond.” He so loved his smokes.
    Here was his weathered Selective Service card. It showed he did not wait for the outbreak of war to be summoned to service, but enlisted on July 1, 1941. He had blue eyes, it said, blond hair, and a fair complexion. He stood but five feet four inches and weighed 155 pounds. Actually his eyes were a pale and gentle blue, his hair thick and wavy, his complexion white as flour. And there was nothing diminutive about him. His frame was broad and taut.
    Beside the Selective Service card was a small box holding a collection of military patches, among them the Screaming Eagle from the 101st Airborne. There were also a lieutenant’s bars and a sharpshooter’s medal.
    From the contents of the box it might appear Redmond was among the lucky ones. On June 6, 1944—D-Day—he landed near the Douve River in Normandy. Of the twenty