Counterattack

by W. E. B Griffin

  A middle-aged woman opened the door.

  “Hello,” Mrs. Hortense Cavendish said with a smile. “May I help you?”

  “I’m Ensign Cotter, to see Captain Pickering. I’m from the hospital.”

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “I’m a nurse,” Barbara said.

  “I think he was expecting a doctor,” Mrs. Cavendish said. “But please come in, I’ll tell him you’re here.”

  She left Barbara waiting in the foyer and disappeared down a corridor. A moment later a man appeared and walked up to her. He was in his shirtsleeves and wearing suspenders. And his collar was open and his tie pulled down. He held a drink in his hand.

  Barbara was prepared to despise him as a palace-guard brass hat with an exaggerated opinion of his own importance—and with what Dr. Whaley had so cleverly described as “an overdeveloped sense of medical self-protection.”

  “Hello,” Pickering said. “I’m Fleming Pickering. I was rather expecting Commander Whaley, but you’re much prettier.”

  “Sir, I’m Ensign Cotter.”

  “I’m very pleased to meet you,” he said. “We saw the ambulance. What’s that all about? Is the Navy again suffering from crossed signals?”

  “Sir, I’m here to administer certain injections,” Barbara said. “There is a chance of a reaction to them. The ambulance is a precaution.”

  “Well, the first stickee seems to be doing fine,” Pickering said. “We’re hoping that your intended target will show up momentarily. I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait until he does.”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re here to immunize Corporal Koffler,” Pickering said. “At the moment, we don’t know where he is. You’ll have to wait until he shows up. If that’s going to pose a problem for you at the hospital, I’ll call and explain the situation. This is rather important.”

  “I was under the impression the immunizations were intended for you, Captain.”

  “Oh, no,” Pickering said, and smiled. “I suspected crossed signals. Shall I call the hospital and straighten things out?”

  “If I’m going to have to stay, I’d better call, Sir,” Barbara said.

  “The phone’s right over there,” Pickering said, pointing to a narrow table against the foyer wall. “If you run into any trouble, let me know. Sometimes the Regular Navy is a bit dense between the ears.”

  She looked at him in shock.

  “Between us amateurs, of course,” Pickering smiled. “I presume you’re a fellow amateur?”

  “I’m a reservist, Sir, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I was sure of it,” Pickering said. “When you’re through on the phone, please come in the sitting room.” He pointed to it.

  “Yes, Sir,” Barbara said.

  “Oh, Barbara,” Dr. Whaley said when she called him at his quarters. “I hope you’re calling because you’re lost.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You found The Elms without any trouble?”

  “Yes, Sir. I’m here now. I’ve just met Captain Pickering.”

  “How did that go?”

  “It’s not what you thought, Doctor.”

  “I already found that out. The men to be immunized, the Marine officer who was here at the hospital, and the one you’re there to see, are about to go on some hush-hush mission behind the lines. High-level stuff. And I learned five minutes after you left that Pickering is not what I led you to believe he was.”

  “He’s really nice,” Barbara said.

  “He’s also General MacArthur’s personal pal,” Dr. Whaley said. “And Frank Knox’s personal representative over here. Not the sort of man to jab with a dull needle.”

  “No, Sir,” Barbara chuckled. “The other man to be immunized isn’t here yet. Captain Pickering said I’ll have to stay here until he shows up. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “You stay as long as you’re needed,” Dr. Whaley said, “and be as charming as possible, knowing that you have our Naval careers in your hands.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “You better send the ambulance back, Barbara. When you’re finished, I’ll send a staff car for you.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Barbara hung up, walked out of The Elms, sent the ambulance back to the hospital, and then reentered the house.

  “Everything go all right?” Captain Pickering asked her when she reached the room he’d directed her to. “Come in.”

  “Everything’s fine, Sir,” Barbara said.

  “Gentlemen, this is Ensign Cotter,” Pickering said. “Ensign Cotter, this is Major Ed Banning, Lieutenant Vince Donnelly, and Lieutenant Joe Howard.”

  Lieutenant Joe Howard, who had been mixing a drink at the bar, turned, looked at Barbara, dropped the glass, and said, “Oh, my God!”

  “Joe!” Barbara wailed.

  “Why do I suspect that these two splendid young junior officers have met?” Banning asked dryly.

  “Lieutenant Howard,” Captain Pickering said, “Ensign Cotter was just telling me that sometimes these shots have adverse effects. Why don’t you take her someplace where she can examine you?”

  He hardly had time to congratulate himself on having produced—snatching it from out of the blue—a Solomon-like solution to the problem of how to handle two young lovers who were embarrassed to manifest a display of affection before senior officers. For, unfortunately, his brilliance was wasted; Ensign Cotter, forgetting that she was an officer and a gentlewoman, ran to Howard and threw herself in his arms, and cried, “Oh, my darling!”

  After a moment, Captain Pickering spoke again.

  “Joe, why don’t you take your girl and show her the grounds?”

  Howard, not trusting his voice, nodded his thanks and, with his arms around Barbara, led her out of the sitting room and started down the corridor.

  All of a sudden, she stopped, spun out of his arms, and faced him.

  “You’re on this mission, aren’t you?” she challenged.

  He nodded.

  “Oh, my God!”

  “It’ll be all right,” he said.

  “They don’t send people on missions like that unless they volunteer,” she said, adding angrily, “You volunteered, didn’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “Goddamn you!”

  He didn’t reply.

  “Why? Can you tell me why?”

  “It’s important,” he said.

  “When do you go?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” she wailed. He nodded.

  “What are we going to do now?” she asked.

  He shrugged helplessly.

  “We could go to my room,” Joe blurted.

  She met his eyes.

  “They’d know,” she said.

  “Do you care?” he asked.

  She reached out and touched his face and shook her head.

  He took her hand from his face and held it as he led her the rest of the way down the stairs and then up the broad staircase to his room.

  XIII

  (One)

  The Elms

  Dandenong, Victoria, Australia

  2105 Hours 6 June 1942

  As Corporal Stephen M. Koffler and Petty Officer Daphne Farnsworth approached Melbourne, they came up to a road sign indicating a turnoff to Dandenong. It occurred to Corporal Koffler then that he’d better check in before he took Petty Officer Farnsworth home.

  “Would you mind sitting in the car for a minute while I tell Mrs. Cavendish I’m back?” Steve asked as he made the turn. “Maybe there’s a message for me, or something.”

  “Of course not.”

  He drove down the long line of ancient elms that lined the driveway. When they reached the house, there were two cars parked in front of it. One was a drop-head Jaguar coupe and the other a Morris with Royal Australian Navy plates. After a moment, to her surprise, Daphne recognized it as Lieutenant Donnelly’s car.

  She wondered what he was doing out here, and then she wondered what he was g
oing to think when he saw her with Corporal Steve Koffler of the United States Marines; she was supposed to be still at home, grief-stricken.

  “Oh, shit!” Steve Koffler said, when he saw the cars.

  When Major Edward J. Banning, USMC, noticed the glow of the headlights flash across the front of The Elms, he rose to his feet and went to one of the French windows in the library. As he pushed the curtain aside, the Studebaker pulled up beside the Jaguar and the Morris.

  It has to be Corporal Steven Koffler, goddamn the horny little A WOL sonofabitch!

  I am not going to eat his ass out. It is not in keeping with the principles of good leadership to eat the ass out of an enlisted man just before you ask him to parachute onto an enemy-held island. If he doesn’t kill himself in the jump, there is a very good chance he will be killed by the Japanese, probably in some very imaginative way.

  If I were a corporal, and they left me all alone with the keys to a car, would I take the car and go out and try to get laid? Never having been a corporal, I can’t really say. But probably.

  Banning couldn’t help recalling Kenneth R. “Killer” McCoy, late Corporal, 4th Marines, Shanghai.

  If I had set up the Killer in a house like this in China, and told him he would be left alone for a week or ten days minimum, he would have had a nonstop poker game going here in the library, a craps table operating in the foyer, half a dozen ladies of the evening plying their trade upstairs; and he’d be using the Studebaker to ferry customers back and forth to town.

  It was not the first time Banning had thought of Corporal Killer McCoy during the past twenty-four hours. He started remembering McCoy just after he and Captain Pickering arrived at The Elms; they were informed then by Mrs. Cavendish that Corporal Koffler had taken the Studebaker at five the previous afternoon, and that he hadn’t been seen since. And no, she had no idea where he might have gone. That sounded like something McCoy would have done.

  Which did not mean that Corporals McCoy and Koffler were not stamped out of the same mold—far from it. Banning would have been nervous about sending Killer McCoy to jump on Buka, but he wouldn’t have had this sick feeling in his stomach. Killer was probably capable of carrying off something like this with a good chance of coming through it alive. Banning did not think that would be the case with Joe Howard and Steve Koffler. The words had come into his mind a half-dozen times: I am about to send two of my men to their deaths.

  It was not a pleasant feeling, and his rationalizations, although inarguably true, sounded hollow and irrelevant: I am asking him to risk, and perhaps even give, his life so that other men may live. And: He’s a volunteer, nobody pushed him into this at the point of a bayonet. And even: He’s a Marine, and Marines do what they are ordered to do.

  There was really no point whatever in wishing that the Killer was here. For one thing, Killer was no longer a corporal. He was now an officer and a gentleman and would soon find himself ordering some enlisted Marine to do something that would probably get him killed.

  And there was no other enlisted man in Special Detachment 14 who could be sent. No one else, not even the Commanding Officer, knew how to jump out of an airplane without getting killed. And that, as applied to Joe Howard, violated a principle of leadership that Banning devoutly believed, that an officer should not order—or ask—someone to do something he would not do himself.

  “I think that’s him,” Banning said, turning from the window to Captain Pickering and Lieutenant Donnelly. He kept his voice as close to a conversational tone as he could muster as he continued, “Maybe I’d better go find Howard and his nurse.” They had not been seen, which surprised no one, since they had left the sitting room.

  “I’ll get him, Major,” Lieutenant Donnelly said.

  “Good evening, Sir,” Corporal Koffler said, coming into the library. Nervously, he looked at Pickering and Banning in turn, and said, “Sir,” to each of them.

  “Welcome home,” Banning said.

  “Sir, I didn’t expect to see you.”

  “Well, you’re here. Have you been drinking?”

  “No, Sir.”

  Lieutenant Donnelly came into the room.

  “They’ll be here in a minute,” he said.

  “You know Captain Pickering,” Banning said to Koffler, “and I understand you’ve met Lieutenant Donnelly.”

  “No, Sir. I talked to him a couple of times on the phone.”

  “How are you, Corporal?” Donnelly said.

  “How do you do, Sir?”

  Banning saw in Donnelly’s eyes that he had expected Corporal Koffler to be somewhat older. Say, old enough to vote.

  “Something pretty important has come up,” Banning said.

  “Yes, Sir?”

  “There’s several ifs,” Banning continued. “Let me ask a couple of questions. First, would it be possible to drop one of the Hallicrafters sets by parachute? Or would it get smashed up?”

  “I thought about that, Sir.”

  “You did?” Banning replied, surprised.

  The door opened again, and Ensign Barbara Cotter and Lieutenant Joe Howard came into the room.

  Barbara Cotter averted her eyes and looked embarrassed, confirming Fleming Pickering’s early judgment of her as a nice girl. Then he had a thought that made him feel like a dirty old man: Christ, I could use a little sex myself.

  “How goes it, Steve?” Joe Howard asked. “We were getting a little worried about you.”

  “Hello, Sir.”

  “The lady is Ensign Cotter, Koffler,” Banning said. “Lieutenant Howard’s fiancée.”

  “Hello,” Barbara said.

  “Ma’am,” Koffler replied uneasily.

  “Should I be in here?” Barbara asked.

  “You don’t look like a Japanese spy to me,” Pickering said. “And it seems to me you have an interest in what’s going on.”

  “Sir…” Banning started to protest. Ensign Barbara Cotter, whatever her relationship with Joe Howard, had no “need to know.”

  “Ensign Cotter is a Naval officer,” Pickering said formally, “who is well aware of the need to keep her mouth shut about this operation.”

  Banning had called Pickering as soon as he arrived at the airport in Melbourne. He thought he should know that USMC Special Detachment 14 was about to drop two of its men behind Japanese lines. Pickering had been more than idly interested. In fact, he promptly announced that if he “wouldn’t be in the way,” he would pick Banning up and drive him out to The Elms while the operation was being set up. Banning had wondered then if Pickering was in fact going to get in the way, and now it looked as if he was.

  For a moment, Banning looked as if he was on the edge of protesting further, but then reminded himself that Special Detachment 14 wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for Pickering.

  “Yes, Sir,” Banning said finally.

  “Corporal Koffler was telling us how he would drop one of the Hallicrafters by parachute,” Pickering said. “Go on, please, Koffler.”

  “You’d need a parachute,” Koffler said. “I mean,” he went on quickly, having detected the inanity of his own words, “I mean, I think you’d have to modify a regular C-3 ’chute. All the cargo ’chutes I’ve ever seen would be too big.”

  “I don’t understand,” Fleming Pickering confessed.

  “Sir, the whole set, when you get it out of the crates,” Steve Koffler explained, “doesn’t weigh more than maybe a hundred and fifty pounds. Cargo ’chutes, the ones I’ve seen, are designed to drop a lot more weight—”

  “The question is moot,” Lieutenant Donnelly said. “There are no cargo ’chutes available. Period. You’re talking about modifying a standard Switlick C-3 ’chute, Corporal?” Steve nodded. “How?” Donnelly pursued.

  “Do you think I might be able to get you the parachute, parachutes, you need, Banning?” Pickering asked.

  “Sir,” Donnelly replied for Banning, “I don’t think there’s a cargo parachute in Australia.”

  “OK,” Pickering
said. “You were saying, Corporal Koffler?”

  “Sir, I think you could make up some special rigging to replace the harness. Make straps to go around the mattresses.”

  “Mattress?” Banning asked.

  “Mattresses,” Steve said. “What I would do is make one package of the antenna and the generator. I think you could just roll them up in a mattress and strap it tight. And then add sandbags, or something, so that it weighed about a hundred seventy-five pounds. Where do you want to drop the radio, Sir?”

  “Why sandbags? Why a hundred seventy-five pounds?”

  “That’s the best weight for a standard ’chute. Any more and you hit too hard. Any lighter and it floats forever. You couldn’t count on hitting the drop zone,” Koffler said, explaining what he evidently thought should be self-evident to someone who was not too bright.

  He obviously knows what he’s talking about. Why does that surprise me?

  “And then do the same thing with the transceiver itself,” Koffler went on. “Wrap it in mattresses, and then weight it up to a hundred seventy-five pounds. It would probably make sense to wrap some radio tubes—I mean spare tubes—in cotton or something, and put them with the transceiver. They’re pretty fragile.”

  “I have some parachute riggers, Corporal,” Lieutenant Donnelly said. “Civilian women. They have some heavy sewing machines. Could you show them, do you think, how to make such a replacement for the harness?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Koffler said. “I think so.”

  He looked uncomfortable.

  “Speaking of civilian women, Sir, I’ve got a lady outside in the car. Could I take a minute to talk to her? I was about to take her home.”

  “Sure,” Banning said. “Go ahead.”

  When he was gone, Fleming Pickering said, “Well, what do you think, Ed?”

  “I don’t know what to think, Sir. He doesn’t seem to think there will be much of a problem. More important, he seems to know what he’s talking about.”