W E B Griffin - Corp 05 - Line of Fire

by Line Of Fire(Lit)

  "He's all right?" she asked.

  "Yes, he's all right."

  "Daphne," Barbara said, "I wish I was pregnant."

  What the hell is the matter with you, Barbara? That's absolute idiocy! Jeanne thought. God, don't let me be pregnant!

  "It's not quite the same for you, Barbara," Daphne said.

  "I believe Joe's coming back," Barbara said. "Steve will, too."

  "You're in love with Joe," Daphne said.

  "You're not in love with Steve?"

  "How could I be in love with him? I hardly know him."

  How could I be in love with Johnny? I hardly know him, either.

  "You're upset," Barbara said. "Understandably."

  "Actually, I think I'm thinking pretty clearly," Daphne said.

  "What happened-and I was with him only that one night happened because he came to Wagga Wagga-"

  "Where?" Moore blurted and was immediately sorry.

  "My family has a station, Two Creeks Station, in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales," Daphne explained. "You'd call it a farm, or a ranch." He should not be hearing this, Joanne decided. This is between women, and none of his business.

  "Why don't you go get dressed?" Joanne snapped.

  "Hey, I'm trying to help," John replied. "And I do have to get the stuff for a code from her."

  "You know all about codes, too?"

  "I know what Pluto told me to get from her when she showed up," Moore said. "What about... Wagga Wagga'?" Daphne smiled.

  "Steve thought it was funny, too," she said. "I thought you knew all this, John?"

  "I wasn't here," Moore said. "I came after Koff- Steve and Lieutenant Howard jumped into Buka."

  "That's right, isn't it?" Daphne said. "I'd forgotten."

  "You don't have to talk to him about this," Joanne said.

  "It would be helpful if she would," Moore said coldly.

  "It's all right. If it will help Steve," Daphne said.

  "I'm not trying to pry," Moore said, looking at Joanne. "I just need words we can use for a code. Wagga Wagga sounds fine." He looked at Daphne. "Steve would remember that?"

  "Oh, I'm sure he would. He got lost twice trying to find it," Daphne said.

  "What was he doing there?"

  "After I learned that my husband was killed in North Africa," Daphne said, "there was a memorial service for him.

  When Steve heard, he wanted to do something for me. So he drove out. In that Studebaker, I think," she said, gesturing outside. "With a box of candy and flowers and a bottle of whiskey, he didn't know what was appropriate, so he brought one of each." Steve's a nice kid, John," Barbara said gently.

  Yes, a nice kid," Daphne said. "And I rode back from New South Wales to Victoria with him. He had to stop at Captain Pickering's place. What was it called?"

  "The Elms, in Dandenong," Barbara furnished.

  "And everybody was there, and they ran you and me off, and we eavesdropped-"

  "I was sent from the hospital to give them their shots," Barbara said, looking at Joanne.

  "I didn't even know Joe was in Australia until I walked in there. We had only the one night, too."

  "-and we heard what was going to happen to them the next day," Daphne went on, "and I decided-helped along by several gins-that the two loneliest people in the world were Yeoman Farnsworth and Sergeant Koffler, and... I'd always heard that all it takes is once; but even that didn't seem to matter."

  "Steve's in love with you," Barbara said.

  "You said it, Barbara," Daphne said. "Steve is a nice kid."

  So is John Moore a nice kid. You should have realized, Joanne Miller, that your maternal instincts and/or hormones were getting out of control. You should have reminded yourself that all he is is a nice kid.

  "He's more than a nice kid," Moore said. "He's one hell of a man. I don't think I like that `nice kid' crap."

  Go to hell, you bastard!

  "You're right," Barbara said. "I didn't mean that the way it sounded."

  "He's a kid," Daphne insisted. "Even if he were here, even if he wanted to marry me, even if I wanted to marry him, I couldn't. He's a minor, and your regulations don't permit your sergeants to marry; they have to be staff sergeants or above."

  "You're sure about that?" Barbara asked.

  "Yes," Daphne said.

  "They'd probably waive that, considering... the child," Moore said.

  "Australian law considers the child to be my husband's," Daphne said.

  "But he was in Africa," Barbara protested. "He couldn't possibly-"

  "I'm telling you what the law says," Daphne interrupted.

  "And you're determined to have it?" Joanne asked.

  God, I hate to talk about abortion with John sitting there with a shocked look on his face! But somebody, obviously, has to start thinking practically about this.

  "Oh, I thought about that," Daphne said. "How am I going to support the child?"

  "But it is getting a little late for an abortion, isn't it?" Barbara said.

  "Yes, it is," Daphne admitted.

  "What about your family?"

  "My family can count. They will want nothing to do with me or the baby when they find out. God, it was conceived the night of my husband's memorial service."

  "Your family doesn't know?" Joanne asked incredulously.

  "Don't worry about support," John Moore said. "That's not one of the problems. This can be worked out with The Corps,"

  "And if it can't?" Joanne snapped.

  "There's money available," he said.

  "Whose?" she demanded.

  "Mine, all right?" He actually believes that. More evidence that he's no less a child than the child who made this pathetic young woman pregnant.

  "In the end I decided that God had a hand in what's happening to me," Daphne said.

  "God?" Joanne asked. "What's God got to do with it?"

  "I thought that maybe I was being punished for being an adulteress... "

  "That's nonsense!" Barbara protested.

  "Or that God wanted Steve to leave something behind, a new life. Anyway, I'm going to have his baby. I'll work it out."

  "Not alone," Barbara said.

  "Right," Moore said. "And for one thing, you're not going back to Melbourne. You're going to stay here with us."

  "I've got to have a job," Daphne said.

  "I told you, you don't have to worry about money."

  Goddamn you." The one thing she doesn't need is false hope!

  "Can we get her a job here?" Barbara asked.

  "Yeah, sure," John Moore said. "Detachment 14 has authority to hire Australians. But that's not what I was talking about." He turned to Daphne.

  "I'm going to put my clothes on. Then we're going to have to take care of the Wagga Wagga business." Daphne nodded.

  "Won't that wait, for God's sake?" Joanne snapped.

  "I don't know what the hell is the matter with you," Moore responded furiously, "but everybody else around here is breaking their ass trying to get the boyfriends off Buka."

  "Is that what you're really doing, John?" Barbara asked very quietly.

  Moore didn't respond. He simply turned and went into his bedroom. As he left, Daphne's eyes followed him. God! That's admiration in those eyes of hers-awe! Joanne thought. As far as she's concerned Johnny Moore might as well be the Angel Gabriel, come to set all the evils of the world right.

  Barbara, meanwhile, with tears in her eyes, went to Daphne and put her arms around her.

  And Joanne pursued John Marston Moore.

  She found him naked, awkwardly trying to put his leg into his underpants.

  He modestly turned his back to her.

  "You sonofabitch!" she hissed. "You make me sick to my stomach."

  "Are you going to tell me why?" he asked over his shoulder.

  "You had absolutely no right to tell that poor girl you'd take care of her. That was incredibly cruel. She needs to hear the truth; she doesn't need you giving her false hope."

  "You're
talking about the money?"

  "Of course I'm talking about the money!"

  "I hadn't planned to tell you this..." Moore said. Instead of finishing that thought, he squatted, wincing, to pull his shorts up; and then he turned to face her, "... until our wedding night. But among all the worldly goods I'm going to endow you with is a lot of money. Pushing three million, to be specific." My God, he means it!

  "More than enough for you and me, and our kids, and Koffler's kid," Moore said. "OK?"

  "I never said I was going to marry you," Joanne said softly.

  "Well, what do you say?"

  "You may have to," she said. "I'm probably pregnant."

  "That would be nice," he said, and held his arms open for her.

  [Two]

  154' 30" EAST LONGITUDE

  8' 27" SOUTH LATITUDE

  THE SOLOMON SEA

  1229 HOURS 4 OCTOBER 1942

  When Sergeant George Hart, USMC, looked out of the port waist blister of the Royal Australian Navy Consolidated PBY-5 Catalina, he saw beneath him the expanse of blue ocean-absolutely nothing but blue ocean. He'd been riding in the Catalina for four hours; for the last twenty minutes it had been flying slow, wide circles...

  It just might happen that blue ocean was all he was going to see. He found it hard to believe that the pilot up front really had any precise idea where he was.

  There was no land in sight, and there hadn't been for a long time. He remembered from high school enough about the modern miracle of flight and airplanes to recall that there were such things as head winds and tail winds-and presumably side winds, too. These sped up or retarded an aircraft's passage over the Earth, and/or they pushed the aircraft away from the path the pilot wished to fly.

  It was possible, he recalled, to navigate by using the known location of radio stations. This pilot was obviously not doing that, because there were obviously no useful radio stations operating anywhere near here.

  What the pilot was doing was making a guess where he was by dead reckoning: He'd have worked that out by plotting how long he'd been flying at a particular compass heading at a particular speed.

  That would work only if there were no head winds, tail winds, or winds blowing the airplane to one side or another.

  How they expected to find a boat as small as a submarine this far from land was an operation he simply didn't understand.

  Curiosity finally overcame his reluctance to reveal his ignorance.

  A RAN sailor was standing beside him looking out the blister. "I don't see how you're going to find the submarine," George confessed to him with as much savoir faire as he could muster.

  "For the last hour," the sailor answered, "she's been surfacing every fifteen minutes, long enough to send a signal... They just hold the key down for ten or fifteen seconds. You saw that round thing on top?" He gestured toward the wing above.

  George nodded.

  "Radio direction finding antenna. Sparks just turns until the signal from the sub is strongest and gives the pilot the heading."

  "Yeah," George said. "That always works, huh?"

  The sailor pointed down at the sea. There was now a submarine just sitting there. It looked even smaller, even farther down, than he expected.

  The submarine was the HMAS Pelican. George knew deal about HMAS Pelican On his desk in Townsville, Commander Feldt had a book with photographs and descriptions every class of ship in the major navies of the world, as, descriptions of many individual ships, too.

  Since the Pelican was in the book, he looked it up; after all he was going riding -correction, diving- in it.

  It -correction, she- began life as HMS Snakefish in 1936, at the Cammell Laird Shipyard in Scotland. In 1939 she transferred to the Australian Navy and renamed Pelican.

  Does the Royal Navy treat the Royal Australian Navy the way the U.S. Navy treats The U.S. Marine Corps? George wondered. As a poor relation, only giving it equipment that's no good or worn out? Probably, he decided.

  According to Commander Feldt's book, HMAS Pelican had a speed on the surface of 13.5 knots and a submerged speed of 10. Elsewhere in the book George read that Japanese destroyers could make more than 30 knots. That meant that the Japanese would have a hell of an advantage if they spotted the Pelican wanted a fight. Particularly since destroyers had a bunch cannons, of all sizes, and depth charges. And the Pelican only a single four-inch cannon and a couple of machine guns.

  Of course the Pelican had torpedoes, but this did not give George much reassurance. He didn't think it would be very easy to hit a destroyer while it was twisting and turning at 30 knots and simultaneously shooting its cannons and throwing depth charges at you.

  The Catalina suddenly began to make a steep descent toward the surface of the ocean. George grabbed one of the aluminum fuselage members. A moment later he saw blood dripping down onto his utilities.

  The Catalina straightened out for a time, but then it made a really steep turn, after which it dropped its nose again.

  A moment later there was an enormous splash, and then another, and then another. They were on the surface of the ocean. He looked around for the Pelican but couldn't see it.

  The crew of the Catalina opened a hatch in the side of the fuselage and tossed out two packages. In a moment these began to inflate and assume the shape of rafts.

  Lieutenant McCoy, wearing utilities, scrambled through the hatch and into one of the boats. A moment later Chief Signalman Wallace, wearing his skirt and his Chief Petty Officer's cap and nothing else, dropped into the other. Then two of the other three Marine members of the replacement team, a staff sergeant named Kelly and a corporal named Godfrey, got in the rafts.

  That left Sergeants Doud and Hart in the Catalina. Because of their strong backs, they'd been chosen to transfer the equipment from the Catalina to the rafts.

  Before they took off, Hart told McCoy that he suspected this would be a bitch of a job. And McCoy told him he thought it would be worse than a bitch of a job. He was right. One of the radios almost went in the water. And when a swell suddenly raised one end of McCoy's raft, one of the tar-paper-wrapped weapons packages did go in.

  No problem, there was a spare.

  Finally everything was loaded onto the rafts, and Sergeants Doud and Hart half fell, half jumped into them.

  The Catalina's hatch closed and there was a cloud of black smoke as the pilot restarted his port engine. The plane swung away from them, gunned its engines, and started its takeoff.

  George felt a heavy sense that he was far removed from anything friendly. And he didn't get any relief from that when he finally spotted the submarine.

  The Pelican's crew are not waving a friendly hello, he realized after a moment, but gesturing angrily for us to get our asses in gear and paddle over.

  One of those thirty-knot Japanese destroyers with all those cannons and depth charges is charging this way.

  Why am I not afraid?

  Because this whole fucking thing is so unreal that I'm unable, to believe it. What the hell am I doing paddling a little rubber boat around in the middle of the Solomon Sea?

  The Pelican was a lot farther away than it seemed. By the time the raft bumped up against her hull, he was breathing so hard it hurt. And the saltwater stung like hell on the slash in his hand he'd got in the Catalina.

  The Pelican's crew threw lines down to them. These were fastened to the equipment they were taking aboard, and then the crew dragged that up to the submarine's deck. Finally, the raft paddlers crawled aboard-with considerable help from the crew.

  Just before passing through a hatch into the conning tower, George took one last look around him. He was surprised to see that one of the rafts was drifting away from the Pelican.

  Why're they loose? They were securely tied.

  But then he saw that the other raft was loose, too.

  And then there was a burst of machine-gun fire from above him.

  Jesus Christ! They're shooting holes in the rafts! What the hell for?

 
What are we going to use to get ashore?

  They're shooting holes in the rafts because they expect one of those thirty-knot Japanese destroyers, that's why they're shooting holes in them. It would take too much time to deflate them and bring them aboard.