The Corps V - Line of Fire

by W. E. B Griffin

  Brigadier General Fleming W. Pickering, USMCR, Headquarters, USMC, will proceed by military and/or civilian rail, road, sea and air transportation (Priority AAAAA-1) to such points as he deems necessary in carrying out the mission assigned to him by the undersigned.

  United States Armed Forces commands are directed to provide him with such support as he may request. General Pickering is to be considered the personal representative of the undersigned.

  General Pickering has unrestricted TOP SECRET security clearance. Any questions regarding his mission will be directed to the undersigned.

  W. D. Leahy, Admiral,

  USN Chief of Staff to the President

  "Turn it over, General," Rickabee said. Pickering did so.

  TOP SECRET

  OFFICE OF THE CHIEF OF STAFF TO THE PRESIDENT

  Washington, D.C. 24 September 1942

  1st Endorsement

  1. The following personnel of my personal staff are engaged in carrying out the mission assigned to the undersigned by the Chief of Staff to The President.

  Dillon, Major Homer J USMCR 17724

  McCoy, 1st Lt Kenneth R USMCR 489657

  Moore, 2nd It John M USMCR 20043

  Hart, Sgt George F USMCR 2307887

  2. All provisions regarding travel priorities, logistical support and access to classified materiel specified in the basic order apply to the personnel listed hereon.

  3. Any questions regarding the listed personnel or their mission will be referred to the undersigned.

  Fleming Pickering

  Brigadier General, USMCR

  TOP SECRET

  "Very impressive, Rickabee," Pickering said. "You think this will do it, so far as getting them on airplanes, et cetera?"

  Rickabee handed Pickering a typewritten copy of the endorsement and a fountain pen.

  "When you sign that endorsement, General," Rickabee said, we'll photograph it, reduce it, and heat-seal the whole thing in plastic, like an ID card. With that White House stationery, it should be a very impressive document. In any event, it's my best shot at getting done what has to be done without people all over Washington asking questions." Pickering signed it and handed it back.

  "Thank you," Pickering said. "Considering your overall objections to the whole idea, I'm grateful to you."

  "General, your deputy felt obliged to make you aware of his best judgment," Rickabee said. "This Marine hopes you get away with it."

  Chapter Thirteen

  [One]

  SUPREME HEADQUARTERS

  SOUTH WEST PACIFIC OCEAN AREA

  (FORMERLY, COMMERCE HOTEL)

  BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA

  27 SEPTEMBER 1942

  Five people in Australia were cleared for classified TOP SECRET-MAGIC: the code name assigned to what was then regarded as the most important secret of the war. Navy cryptographers at Pearl Harbor had broken some-but not all-of the codes used by the Imperial General Staff to communicate with the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy.

  In theory, of those at SWPOA, only General Douglas MacArthur and his intelligence officer, Brigadier General Charles A. Willoughby, were authorized access to MAGIC messages.

  Neither General MacArthur nor General Willoughby, however, had the cryptographic training or the time to decode such messages. Consequently, two others at SWPOA administered the MAGIC program. After Navy cryptographers at Pearl Harbor had decoded and analyzed an intercepted Japanese message, both the message and its analysis were encrypted using an American code (which was restricted to MAGIC) and transmitted to SWPOA. There the analysis and message were decoded and placed before General MacArthur and General Willoughby.

  The people who did this were First Lieutenant Hon Song Do, Signal Corps, U.S. Army Reserve, and Mrs. Ellen Feller, a civilian employee of the Navy Department who was accorded the assimilated rank of a lieutenant commander. In addition, Major Edward F. Banning, USMC, Commanding Officer of USMC Special Detachment 14, was cleared for access to MAGIC. Banning knew enough about cryptography to operate the cryptographic machine.

  "Pluto" Hon, as he was known, was a very smart young man. He held a Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT and he was a trained cryptographer. That is to say, he was familiar with the esoteric theories of that craft and not just a man who knew how to work the code machine. That wasn't all that made Lieutenant Hon impressive: Hon, whose ancestry was Korean, read and spoke Japanese fluently, and understood Japanese culture better than practically anyone else you were likely to find in the United States Armed Forces. And he was as good an analyst and cryptographer as anyone you were likely to meet at Pearl Harbor. Indeed, he'd been stationed there before being sent to General MacArthur's headquarters.

  Another of the best-kept secrets of Supreme Headquarters, SWPOA, was that Hon was a regular at General and Mrs. MacArthur's after-dinner bridge parties. Most often Hon and General MacArthur were partners. The General liked to win.

  Of the three people who administered the MAGIC program at SWPOA-Banning, Feller, and Hon-Major Banning was senior. He was of course senior in grade to Lieutenant Hon.

  And as a serving officer of equivalent grade, he was senior to Mrs. Feller. All the same, Major Banning was very much aware that the one person of the three who really knew what he was doing was Lieutenant Hon. In other words-and the irony wasn't lost on Banning-the one real expert was the lowest ranking member according to military hierarchy.

  This rarely posed problems for him or for Lieutenant Hon.

  Or rather, this rarely posed problems between them. The problems were caused by the third member of the team, Mrs. Ellen Feller.

  Mrs. Feller rather liked her role as a senior civilian.

  Mrs. Feller came to Australia over a long and convoluted route. Her husband was the Reverend Glen T. Feller, of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Before the war Reverend Feller had brought Jesus to the heathen of China and Japan. As a result of this experience, Mrs. Feller spoke Japanese and Chinese-though not nearly as well as she believed she did.

  When the Reverend Feller decided to pass the war years bringing the word of Jesus to Native American Heathen in the American Southwest, Mrs. Feller (who didn't like her husband very much) sought and found employment as an Oriental Languages Translator in the Navy Department in Washington.

  When Fleming Pickering was commissioned into the Navy as a captain, he needed a secretary with the necessary clearances, and Mrs. Feller proved acceptable to him. Later, shortly after the fall of Corregidor, Pickering came to Australia. Once there, he realized that Lieutenant Pluto Hon, as brilliant and competent as he was, couldn't handle the tremendous work load on his own. As a result, he dispatched an URGENT radio to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox requesting immediate reinforcement. Secretary Knox dispatched Pickering's former secretary.

  It didn't take Major Ed Banning and Lieutenant Pluto Hon long to learn to detest Mrs. Feller, though of course each man kept his opinion private. The lady was a three-star bitch... no, a four-star bitch. Of that neither had any doubt.

  In fact, she was worse than that; she was dangerous-and they had little doubt of that either.

  For one thing, as far as Lieutenant Hon was concerned virtually all of Mrs. Feller's analyses of MAGIC intercepts failed to catch the point of the Japanese originals. Hon credited this failure to her remarkably shallow knowledge of Japanese culture and modes of thought. Though she was shallow, that didn't mean she wasn't clever. She was as aware as Hon was that her work was weak. So she simply used his, much of the time. Often, when his own analyses disagreed in one way or another with the ones from Pearl Harbor, she "appropriated" Hon's and passed them off as her own. Thus, the analyses Mrs. Feller brought to the attention of Generals MacArthur and Willoughby were frequently not hers but his. Indeed, she had a General Willoughby convinced that she was not only a very attractive lady, indeed, but a brilliant one.

  It didn't take Major Banning long to pick up on Mrs. Feller's dishonesty; his contempt for the lady had its source there. But his contempt went furthe
r than that. When Captain Fleming Pickering was in Australia, he showed an outrageous disdain for the proper security of classified documents. He left them lying all over the houses he rented.

  In consequence, Banning arranged for agents of the Army's Counterintelligence Corps to sweep Captain Pickering's quarters whenever he left them. Since he didn't trust Mrs. Feller on general principles, he kept the sweep in operation after Captain Pickering's departure.

  At the end of his stay in Brisbane, Pickering rented a house near the racetrack called Water Lily Cottage. After Pickering left Australia, Mrs. Feller and Sergeant John Marston Moore occupied the cottage.

  Sergeant Moore, also the son of missionaries, had been sent to Special Detachment 14 as a Japanese linguist. Because of Moore's profound understanding of Japanese language and culture, Hon attempted to enlist Moore in the MAGIC analysis process without letting him know about MAGIC itself. The attempt encouraged by Pickering, energetically opposed by Banning-was a failure... at least if anybody hoped to keep Moore from learning about MAGIC. It took him about two days to figure out that the documents he was analyzing had to have come from intercepted and decoded Japanese messages.

  Pickering's solution to that was to add Moore to the MAGIC listen his own highly questionable authority. Pickering's decision caused Banning not a few problems, especially after Pickering left Australia. For instance, because the First Sergeant and Company Commander of the Headquarters Company could not be told that Moore was analyzing intercepted Japanese messages for the Supreme Commander, these men often decided that Sergeant Moore's contribution to the war effort should be as Charge of Quarters or Sergeant of the Guard. To spare Moore from these tasks, and to get him as far as possible out-of-sight-out-of-mind, Banning moved Moore into Water Lily Cottage.

  It took the thorough agents of the CIC only a few days to learn that Mrs. Feller was taking Sergeant Moore into her bed.

  Indeed, the agents were aware that she had taught him sexual acts that were specifically proscribed by military regulation.

  When CIC informed Banning of this illicit relationship, he did nothing to end it. For one thing, it didn't surprise him. For another, maybe getting a little would improve the bitch's personality. For another, calling her attention to it would make it obvious to her that she was under CIC surveillance. For another-and this was the deciding factor:

  Mrs. Feller arrived in Australia on the same day Captain Pickering left for Guadalcanal. According to CIC, on that day Mrs. Feller went straight from the airport into Captain Pickering's bed. After learning this, Banning realized that his hands were tied where Mrs. Ellen Feller was concerned. He could complain to only one person about her, and that person was Fleming Pickering, and that was a hornet's nest he decided not to disturb. He told this to no one, not even Pluto.

  It didn't take Mrs. Feller long to prove that she was not only very skilled in protecting her ass, but dangerously ruthless in doing so.

  Shortly after the Guadalcanal invasion, the First Marine Division G-2 and most of the Japanese-language interpreters of the division were killed in action. The Marine Corps liaison officer at SWPOA received orders to go to Guadalcanal as the G-2's replacement. Because he was a Japanese linguist, similar orders went to Sergeant John Marston Moore. No one in Headquarters, USMC, knew that he was privy to MAGIC and should be kept far away from any place where there was the slightest risk of his falling into enemy hands.

  Mrs. Feller, meanwhile, saw in his sudden transfer the chance to end a potentially sticky situation. As nice a boy as he was, John was only a sergeant; and senior civilian employees with the assimilated rank of lieutenant commander should really not be cavorting in bed with common enlisted men. She was only too aware that eventually someone would find out.

  Knowing full well that Moore should not be sent anywhere near Guadalcanal, Mrs. Ellen Feller not only kept her mouth shut about his MAGIC access, but ordered Moore to say nothing about it either. By the time Pluto Hon and Banning (who was in Townsville with Commander Feldt) learned what was going on, Moore was on a plane for Guadalcanal. And by the time Moore could be ordered off Guadalcanal, he'd been seriously wounded.

  That was bad enough. But in Banning's view, this very bad situation just missed becoming a disaster. If Moore had been captured, MAGIC would have been compromised and shut down.

  When it was over, Banning fully expected to be relieved or even court-martialed. He was the senior officer of the Office of Management Analysis in Australia, and the responsibility for the failure was clearly his. But Colonel Rickabee had apparently determined that since Moore's transfer was a fluke and that MAGIC was not compromised, he would leave things the way they were.

  After the Moore fiasco, Pluto Hon and Ed Banning devised a system for dealing with Mrs. Feller: Her responsibility would now include only the delivery of MAGIC to MacArthur and Willoughby. She would no longer work the decoding machine or produce analyses of MAGIC intercepts. That suited her fine. The cryptographic facilities, known as the dungeon, were in the basement of the Commerce Hotel. She didn't like it down there, anyway. And she could still present Hon's analyses as her own and thus bask in General Willoughby's appreciation of her genius.

  If anything came up that Banning or Hon thought should be delivered to MacArthur personally, they did so. Usually Pluto would slip whatever it was to MacArthur before or after a bridge game.

  The message from KCY to HWS came in like any other: HWS, KCY. HWS, KCY.

  SB CODE.

  SWPOA Radio, this is CINCPAC Radio. Standby to copy an encoded message.

  The high-speed operator, an Army staff sergeant, reached for his telegraph key and tapped out KCY, HWS, GA.

  CINCPAC Radio, this is SWPOA Radio, go ahead.

  He then turned from the radio equipment on the table before him to a fairly large, black device equipped with a typewriter keyboard and put his fingers on the keys.

  As the message came in, in five-character blocks, he typed it out. The five-character blocks made no sense at all; and the next stage in the process was equally odd; for his typing did not form letters on a sheet of paper. Rather it made perforations, like Braille, on a narrow strip of paper. This fed out of the side of the machine into an olive drab wastebasket.

  Finally the message was finished.

  The SWPOA operator turned back to his key and tapped out: KCY, HWS, UR 09 x 27 x 34 AK.

  CINCPAC Radio, SWPOA Radio acknowledges -receipt of your message number 34 of 27 September.

  Pearl Harbor immediately replied: HWS, KCY, SB CODE.

  Pearl Harbor had another coded message to transmit.

  The operator tapped: KCY, HWS, HI CINCPAC, SWPOA, hold one moment, please.

  "Charley," the high-speed operator called to another highspeed operator, "can you take KCY Code on Six?"

  The other operator checked his equipment, called out, "Got it," and tapped out, KCY, HWS, GA on his key, and then turned to the tape device by his side.

  The staff sergeant who had taken Message 09 x 27 x 34 left his chair, retrieved the perforated tape from the wastebasket, walked across the room to another machine, turned it on, and fed the tape into a slot in the side of the device.

  This device was something like a Teletype machine. It had a roll of paper feeding onto a platen, and the keys (but not the keyboard) of a typewriter. After a moment, with a clatter, the decoded message began to appear on the paper.

  FROM CINCPAC RADIO PEARL HARBOR

  TO SWPOA RADIO BRISBANE

  27SEP42 NUMBER 34

  TOP-SECRET PKFDD DSDTS HSJS POWST MNCOI SCHRE

  "Shit!" the staff sergeant said softly, and then reached up and pushed the BREAK key. The machine stopped clattering. He pushed the EJECT TAPE button, and the strip of perforated paper began to back out of the device.

  He walked to the desk of the officer on duty.

  "Sir, I've got a MAGIC," he said.

  The officer, a Signal Corps captain, nodded and looked around the room.

  "I don't know where
the hell Swift is," he thought aloud.

  "Can you run it down?"

  "Yes, Sir," the staff sergeant said. Actually he was glad that PFC Swift, the messenger, was fucking off someplace. It gave him an excuse to get out of the radio room for a few minutes, if only down to the dungeon.

  He walked to the steel door of the radio room, took from a peg a.45 in a leather holster on a web belt, strapped it on, and then left.

  The radio room was on the roof of what had been the Commerce Hotel. It was necessary to walk down a flight of stairs to reach the elevators. When an elevator came, he rode it to the basement. After that, he went down a long, brick-walled corridor until he reached another steel door. This one was guarded by two soldiers armed with.45 pistols and submachine guns.