He’s spent a lot of time traveling with the Old Man, and a lot of that in airliners or the Room Service, but he had paid no more attention to the way those airplanes had worked than he had to what made the wheels go around on a locomotive.
That was now all changed. A Marine brigadier general, a pilot, who had been in the trenches in France as an enlisted man with Corporal Fleming Pickering, USMC, had saved his old buddy’s son from a Marine Corps career as a club officer by arranging to have him sent to flight school.
As the passengers were escorted from the terminal at LaGuardia Field to board Flagship Dallas, Second Lieutenant Malcolm Pickering, USMCR, stepped out of the line and took a good close look upward at the engine mounted on the wing, then studied the wing itself. For the first time he noticed that the front of the wing was made out of rubber (and he wondered what that was for), and that the thin back part of the wing was movable, and that on the back part of the part that moved there was another part that moved. And that there were little lengths of what looked like clothesline attached to the wing.
A stewardess finally went to him, took his arm, and loaded him aboard, eyeing him suspiciously.
He did not have his usual scotch and soda when they were airborne. The stewardess seemed relieved. He sat in his single aisle seat and watched the movable parts of the wing move, and tried to reason what function they performed.
They flew above the clouds. His previous reaction to a cloud cover, viewed from above, had been “How pretty! It looks like cotton wool.”
He now wondered for the first time how the pilot knew when it was time to fly back down through the cloud cover; how he knew, specifically, when Atlanta was going to be down there, since obviously he couldn’t see it.
Before today, before he was en route to Florida to learn how to fly airplanes himself, he would have superficially reasoned that pilots flew airplanes the way masters of ships navigated across the seas. They used a compass to give them the direction, and clocks (chronometers) to let them know how long they had been moving. If they knew how fast they were going, how much time they were taking, and in what direction, they could compute where they were.
Now he saw the differences, and they were enormous and baffling. The most significant of these was that a ship moved only across the surface of the water, whereas an airplane moved up and down in the air as well as horizontally. And if things were going well, a ship moved at about fifteen miles an hour; but an airplane—the airplane he was now on—moved something like twelve times that fast. And if it was lost, an airplane could not simply stop where it was, drop its anchor, sound its foghorn, and wait for the fog to clear.
When the Flagship Dallas touched down at Atlanta, Pick Pickering waited until all the other passengers had made their way down the steeply slanting cabin floor and debarked, and then he went forward to the cockpit.
The door was open, and the pilot and copilot were still in their seats, filling out forms before a baffling array of instruments and controls—what looked like ten times as many instruments and controls as there were on the Room Service.
“Excuse me,” Pickering said, and the pilot turned around, a look of mild annoyance on his face. The annoyance vanished when he saw that Pickering was in uniform.
“What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”
“You can tell me how you knew Atlanta was going to be down here when you started down through the clouds.”
The pilot chuckled and looked at his watch. The watch caught Pickering’s attention. It was stainless steel and had all sorts of dials and buttons.
A pilot’s watch! Pickering thought.
“We just took a chance,” the pilot said. “We knew it had to be down here somewhere.”
“So could a mountain have been,” Pickering replied.
The pilot saw that he was serious.
“We fly a radio beam,” he said, pointing to one of the dials on the control panel. “There’s a radio transmitter on the field. The needle on the dial points to it. When you pass it, the needle points in the other direction, and you know you’ve gone too far.”
“Fascinating!” Pickering said. “And the altimeter tells you when you’re getting close to the ground, right?”
The pilot suppressed a smile.
“Right,” he said. “What the altimeter actually does is tell you how far you are above sea level. We have charts—maps—that give the altitude above sea level of the airports.”
“Uh-huh,” Pickering grunted his comprehension.
“There is a small problem,” the pilot said. “The altimeter tells you how high you were seven seconds ago. Seven seconds is sometimes a long time when you’re letting down.”
“Uh-huh,” Pickering grunted again.
“Let me ask you a question,” the pilot said. “This isn’t just idle curiosity on your part, is it.”
“I’m on my way to Pensacola,” Pickering said. “To become a Marine aviator.”
“Are you really?” the pilot said. “Watch out for Pensacola, Lieutenant. Dangerous place.”
“Why do you say that?”
“They call it the mother-in-law of Naval aviation,” the pilot said. “Blink your eyes, and you’ll find yourself standing before an altar with some Southern belle on your arm.”
“You sound as if you speak from experience,” Pickering said.
“I do,” the pilot said. “I went to Pensacola in thirty-five, a happy bachelor. I left with wings of gold and a mother-in-law.”
“I suppose I sound pretty stupid,” Pickering said.
“Not at all,” the pilot said. “You seem to have already learned the most important lesson.”
“Excuse me?”
“If you don’t know something, don’t be embarrassed to ask questions.”
He smiled at Pickering and offered his hand.
“Happy landings, Lieutenant,” he said. “And give my regards to the bar in the San Carlos hotel.”
Pickering walked down the cabin aisle and got off the plane. The stewardess was standing on the tarmac, again looking at him with concern and suspicion in her eyes.
“I noticed that the Jensen Dynamometer was leaking oil,” Pickering said, very seriously, to explain his visit to the cockpit. “I thought the pilot should know before he took off again.”
He saw in her eyes that she believed him. With a little bit of luck, he thought, she would ask the pilot about the Jensen Dynamometer, and the pilot would conclude his stewardess had a screw loose.
The airlines limousine, a Checker cab that had been cut in half and extended nine feet, was loaded and about to drive away without him when he got to the terminal.
Thirty minutes later, it deposited him before the Foster Peachtree Hotel in downtown Atlanta. It was one of the smaller Foster hotels, an eight-story brick building shaped like an “E” lying on its side. The Old Man had bought it from the original owners when Pickering was in prep school, retired the general manager, built a new kitchen, installed a new air-conditioning system, and replaced the carpets and mattresses. Aside from that, he’d left it virtually untouched.
“People don’t like change, Pick,” the Old Man had explained to him seven or eight months ago, when they had been here on one of the Old Man’s unannounced visits. “The trick to get repeat customers is to make them think, subconsciously, of the inn as another home. You start throwing things they’re used to away, they start feeling like intruders.”
A very large, elderly black man, in the starched white jacket of Peachtree bellmen, recognized him as he got out of the Checker limousine.
“Well, nice to see you again, Mr. Pickering,” he said. “We been expecting you. You just go on inside, I’ll take care of your bags.”
The Old Man is right, Pickering thought as he walked up to a door being opened by another white-jacketed black man, if we dressed the bellmen in red uniforms with brass buttons, people would wonder what else was changed in the hotel, and start looking for things to complain about.
The resident ma
nager spotted him as he walked down the aisle of shops toward the lobby, and moved to greet him. He was a plump, middle-aged man, who wore what hair he had left parted in the middle and slicked down against his scalp. Pickering knew him. L. Edward Locke had been resident manager of the Foster Biscayne in Miami when Pick had worked a spring vacation waiting tables around the pool during the day and tending bar in the golf course clubhouse at night.
“Hello, Mr. Pickering,” Locke said. “It’s good to see you.”
“When did I become ‘Mr. Pickering’?” Pick said, as he shook his hand.
“Maybe when you became a Marine?” Locke said, smiling.
“I’d rather, in deference to my exalted status as a Marine officer, prefer that you stop calling me ‘Hey, you!’” Pick said. “But aside from that, ‘Pick’ will do fine.”
“You look like you were born in that uniform,” Locke said. “Very spiffy.”
“It’s supposed to attract females like moths to a flame,” Pick said. “I haven’t been an officer long enough to find out for sure.”
“I don’t think you’ll have any worries about that at all,” the resident manager said. “Would you like a drink? Either here”—he gestured toward the bar off the lobby—“or in your room? I’ve put you in the Jefferson Davis Suite.” And then Locke misinterpreted the look in Pickering’s eyes. “Which we cannot fill, anyway.”
“I wasn’t planning to stay,” Pick said. “Unless my car hasn’t shown up?”
“Came in two days ago,” Locke said. “I had it taken to the Cadillac dealer. They serviced it and did whatever they thought it needed.”
“Thank you,” Pick said. “Then all I’ll need is that drink and a road map.”
They started toward the bar, but Pickering stopped when he glanced casually into a jewelry store. There was a display of watches laid out on velvet. One of them, in gleaming gold, band and all, had just about as many fascinating buttons and dials and sweeping bands as had the watch on the wrist of the Eastern Airlines pilot.
“Just a second,” Pick said. “I have just decided that I am such a nice fellow that I am going to buy myself a present.”
The price of the watch was staggering, nearly four hundred dollars. But that judgment, he decided, was a reflection of the way he had come by money—earning it himself or doing, by and large, without—until his twenty-first birthday. On his majority, he had come into the first part of the Malcolm Pickering Trust (there would be more when he turned twenty-five, and the balance when he turned thirty) established by Captain Richard Pickering, founder of Pacific & Far East Shipping, Inc., for his only grandson.
The first monthly check from the Crocker National Bank had been for four times as much money as he was getting as a supernumerary assistant manager of the Andrew Foster Hotel. He could afford the watch.
“I’ll take it,” he said. “If you’ll take a check.”
“I’ll vouch for the check,” Locke said quickly, as a cloud of doubt appeared on the face of the jewelry store clerk.
“That’s a fascinating watch,” Locke said, as Pick strapped it on his wrist. “What are all the dials for?”
“I haven’t the foggiest idea,” Pick said. “But the Eastern Airlines pilot had one like it. It is apparently what the well-dressed airplane pilot wears.”
Locke chuckled, and then led Pickering into the lobby bar. They took stools and ordered scotch.
“I really can’t offer you the hospitality of the inn for the night, Pick?”
“I want to get down there and look around,” Pick said. “What we Marine officers call ‘reconnoitering the area.’”
“Not even an early supper?”
“Ah understand,” Pick said, in a thick, mock Southern accent, “that this inn serves South’ren fried chicken that would please Miss Scarlett O’Hara herself.”
“That we do,” Locke said. “Done to a turn by a native. Of Budapest, Hungary.”
Pickering chuckled. He looked over his shoulder and nodded at a table in the corner of the bar.
“You serve food here?”
“Done,” Locke said. He reached over the bar and picked up a telephone.
“Helen,” he said. “Edward Locke. Would you have the garage bring Mr. Pickering’s car around to the front? And then ask my secretary to bring the manila envelope with ‘Mr. Pickering’ on it to the bar? And give me the kitchen.”
The manila envelope was delivered first. It contained a marked road map of the route from Atlanta to Pensacola, Florida. It had been prepared with care; there were three sections of road outlined in red, to identify them as speed traps.
“There’s a rumor that at least some of the speed traps are passing servicemen through, as their contribution to the war effort,” Locke said. “But I wouldn’t bank on that. And on the subject of speed traps, they want cash. You all right for cash?”
“Fine, thank you,” Pickering said. “What about a place to stay once I get there?”
“All taken care of,” Locke said. “An inn called the San Carlos Hotel. Your grandfather tried to buy it a couple of years ago, but it’s a family business and they wouldn’t sell. They’re friends of mine. They’ll take good care of you.”
“Just say I’m a friend of yours?”
“I already called them,” Locke said. “They expect you.”
“You’re very obliging,” Pick said. “Thank you.”
“Good poolside waiters are hard to find,” Locke said, smiling.
IV
(One)
Temporary Building T-2032
The Mall
Washington, D.C.
1230 Hours, 6 January 1942
There was a sign reading ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE on the door to the stairway of the two-floor frame building.
Second Lieutenant Kenneth J. McCoy pushed it open and stepped through it. Inside, there was a wall of pierced-steel netting, with a door of the same material set into it. On the far side of the wall, a Marine sergeant sat at a desk, in his khaki shirt. His blouse hung from a hanger hooked into the pierced-steel-netting wall.
The sergeant stood up and pushed a clipboard through a narrow opening in the netting. When he stood up, McCoy saw the sergeant was armed with a Colt Model 1911A1 .45 ACP pistol, worn in a leather holster hanging from a web belt. Hanging beside his blouse was a Winchester Model 1897 12-gauge trench gun.
“They’ve been looking for you, Lieutenant,” the sergeant said.
McCoy wrote his name on the form on the clipboard and pushed it back through the opening in the pierced-metal wall.
“Who ‘they’?” he asked, smiling.
“The colonel, Captain Sessions,” the sergeant said.
“I was on leave,” McCoy said, “but I made the mistake of letting them know where they could find me.”
The sergeant chuckled and then pressed a hidden button. There was the buzzing of a solenoid. When he heard it, McCoy pushed the door in the metal wall open.
“They said it was important,” McCoy said. “Since I am the only second lieutenant around here, what that means is that they need someone to inventory the paper towels and typewriter ribbons.”
The sergeant smiled. “Good luck,” he said.
McCoy went up the wooden stairs two at a time. Beyond a door at the top of the stairs was another pierced-steel wall. There was another desk behind it, but there was no one at the desk, so McCoy took a key from his pocket and put it to a lock in the door.
He pushed the door open and was having trouble getting his key out of the lock when a tall thin officer saw him. The officer was bent over a desk deeply absorbed with something or other. He was in his shirtsleeves (with the silver leaves of a lieutenant colonel pinned to his collar points), and he was wearing glasses. Even in uniform, and with a snub-nosed .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special revolver in a shoulder holster, Lieutenant Colonel F. L. Rickabee, USMC, did not look much like a professional warrior.
He looked up at McCoy with an expression of patient exasperation.
“The way it works, McCoy,” Lieutenant Colonel Rickabee said, as if explaining it to a child, “is that if you’re unavoidably detained, you call up and tell somebody. I presume you were unavoidably detained?”
“Sir,” McCoy said, “my orders were to report no later than oh-eight-hundred tomorrow morning.”
Rickabee looked at Second Lieutenant McCoy for a moment. “Goddamn it,” he said. “You’re right.”
“The sergeant said you were looking for me, sir,” McCoy said.
“Uh-huh,” Colonel Rickabee said. “I hope you haven’t had lunch.”
“No, sir,” McCoy said.
“Good,” Rickabee said. “The chancre mechanics flip their lids if you’ve been eating.”
“I had breakfast,” McCoy said.
“Don’t tell them,” Rickabee said.
“I had a physical when I came back, sir,” McCoy said. “That was just a week ago.”
“You’re about to have another,” Rickabee said.
He bent over the desk again, shuffled the papers he had been looking at into a neat stack, and then put them into a manila envelope stamped with large red letters SECRET. He put the envelope into a file cabinet, then locked the cabinet with a heavy padlock.
“Wait here a moment, McCoy,” Lieutenant Colonel Rickabee said. “I’ll fetch Captain Sessions.”
He went down the corridor and into an office. A moment later, Captain Sessions, USMC, appeared. He was a tall, well-set-up young officer, whose black hair was cut in a crew cut. His brimmed officer’s cap was perched on the back of his head, and he was slipping his arms into his blouse and overcoat. He had obviously removed the blouse and overcoat together.
“Hey, Killer,” he said, smiling, revealing a healthy set of white teeth. “How was the leave?”
“As long as it lasted, it was fine, thanks,” McCoy replied. Captain Sessions was about the only man in the Corps who could call McCoy “Killer” without offending him. Anyone else who did it seldom did it twice. It triggered in McCoy’s eyes a coldness that kept it from happening again.
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