W E B Griffin - Corp 07 - Behind the Lines
Page 14
"I will, Sir, but I don't think it's necessary."
"And assure him that I have absolute faith that he's doing the same thing?"
"Yes, Sir."
"I don't suppose you'd be willing-or are free-to tell me the nature of your current mission to SWPOA?" (South West Pacific Ocean Area)
Pickering exhaled audibly.
On one hand, it's none of your business, CINCPAC or not. But on the other, you are CINCPAC.
"General MacArthur, for whatever reasons, has not chosen to receive the emissaries of Wild Bill Donovan...."
"General Donovan, of the Office of Strategic Services?"
"Yes, Sir. General Donovan and the President are old friends. He has complained to the President, and the President has sent me to extol the virtues of the OSS to General MacArthur."
"Do you think you'll succeed?"
"General MacArthur rarely changes his mind. He told me that he doesn't think the good the OSS can do for him is worth what the OSS will cost him."
"Have you ever wondered, Pickering, why the President, or General Mar-shall, doesn't simply order Douglas MacArthur to do what he's told to do vis--a-vis the OSS?" (General George Catlett Marshall was U.S. Army Chief of Staff.)
"I'd heard there was bad blood between Marshall and MacArthur."
"When MacArthur was Chief of Staff, he wrote an efficiency report on Marshall, who was then commanding the Infantry School at Fort Benning, stat-ing he was not qualified to command anything larger than a regiment."
"I hadn't heard that, Sir."
"There's bad blood between them, all right, but that's not the reason I'm talking about. Marshall put a knife in MacArthur's back after he left the Philip-pines. MacArthur left under the impression he was simply moving his flag and that the Philippines would remain under his command. But the minute he boarded that PT boat, the Army started dealing directly with General Skinny Wainwright, in effect taking him out from under MacArthur's command."
"I'd heard that story, Sir."
From El Supremo himself. By admitting that, am I violating his confi-dence ?
"There was a brigadier general on Mindanao, with 30,000 effectives. Fel-low named Sharp. They had food and rations, munitions, and they weren't in the pitiable state of the troops on Bataan. When Bataan fell, and then a month later, Corregidor, the Japanese forced Wainwright to order Sharp on Mindanao to surrender. Sharp obeyed Wainwright's order. MacArthur feels, with some justification, that if he had retained command of the Philippines, that wouldn't have happened. He told me it was his plan to use Sharp's people, and materiel, to continue the war, either conventionally or as guerrillas. If he had retained command of the Philippines, he feels, Sharp wouldn't have had to surrender until he at least got a guerrilla operation off the ground and running. And now they want to send somebody not under MacArthur's command in to start guer-rilla operations? You have your work cut out for you, Pickering, to talk Doug-las MacArthur into agreeing to that."
"What's the difference who would run it, so long as it's hurting the Japa-nese?"
CINCPAC looked at Pickering and smiled.
"Of all people, Pickering, I would have thought that you would be aware of the effect of the egos of very senior officers on warfare. And actually, it's a moot point. The surrenders have taken place. Whatever materiel could have been used by a guerrilla operation has either been destroyed or captured, and there's simply no way to get any into the Philippines."
"What did the Russian partisans do for supplies?" Pickering asked.
"Getting supplies across an enemy's lines is much easier than trying to ship them across deep water," Nimitz said.
"Luncheon, gentlemen," Denny called from the far end of the terrace, "is served."
[FOUR]
The Foster Lafayette Hotel
Washington, D.C.
0005 Hours 17 October 1942
Major Edward J. Banning, USMC, a tall, well-built thirty-six-year-old, fresh from a shower and wearing only a towel, sat on the bed and stared at the tele-phone. After a full thirty seconds, he reached for it.
He gave the operator a number in New York City from memory.
Maybe, he thought, as he counted the rings to six, torn between disappoint-ment and relief, she's not home. Away for the weekend or something. Or maybe she's got a heavy date. Why not?
A woman's voice came on the line, her "Hello?" expressing a mixture of annoyance and concern.
Oh, God, I woke her up.
"Carolyn?"
Why did I make that a question? God knows, I recognized her voice.
"Oh, my God! Ed!"
"Did I wake you?"
"Where are you?"
"Washington."
"Since when?"
"Since about nine o'clock."
"This morning?"
"Tonight."
"I will give you the benefit of the doubt, and believe this is the first chance you've had to call me."
"It really was," he said. "They just left."
"They being?"
"Two bare-breasted girls in grass skirts and a jazz quartet."
"In other words, you don't want to tell me."
"Colonel Rickabee, Captain Sessions, some other people."
I purposely did not tell her the others were Senator Fowler and the Admin-istrative Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy. Was that because of some noble concern with security, or because I am just too tired to get into an explanation?
"Where are you?"
"At the Foster Lafayette."
"Very nice!"
The Foster Lafayette was one of Washington's most prestigious-and inarguably one of its most expensive-hotels.
"You know why I'm here, Carolyn," he said.
Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, USMCR, was married to the only child of Andrew Foster, who owned the Foster Lafayette and forty-two other hotels. Foster had turned over to Pickering a Foster Lafayette suite for the dura-tion; and Pickering had left standing orders that the suite be used by the offi-cers on his staff when he wasn't actually using it himself.
"He's in the Pacific, isn't he?" Carolyn asked innocently. "Is anyone else there with you?"
"Christ, Carolyn, I don't think that's such a good idea," Banning said.
"If the bare-breasted girls in the grass skirts come back, tell them you've made other plans," she said, and hung up.
Banning stared for a moment at the dead phone in his hand, and then put it in its cradle.
"Jesus Christ!" he said, smiling.
The telephone rang.
He grabbed it.
"Major Banning."
"I forgot to tell you something," Carolyn said. "Welcome home. And I love you."
"You're something," he said, laughing.
"With just a little bit of luck, I can catch the one-oh-five milk train," she said, and hung up again.
He put the phone back in its cradle again, swung his feet up on the bed, and lowered his head onto the pillow.
He was almost instantly asleep.
[FIVE]
The Foster Lafayette Hotel
Washington, D.C.
0805 Hours 17 October 1942
When the telephone rang, Carolyn Spencer Howell, a tall, willowy thirty-two-year-old who wore her shoulder-length hair parted in the middle, woke imme-diately.
She glanced at the man in bed beside her with a sudden tenderness that made her want to cry, and then smiled, anticipating the look on his face when the telephone's ringing finally woke him up.
He slept on, oblivious to the sound.
Finally, she pushed him, at first gently and then quite hard. His only re-sponse was to grunt and roll over.
"I never really believed that cutting hair was what Delilah did to Sam-son," she said aloud. And then made a final attempt to wake him. She held his nostrils shut.
His response was to swat at whatever had landed on his face with his hand. The force of the swat was frightening.
"That was not a good idea," she said, then shrugged and reached for the telephon
e.
"Hello?"
She looked down at Ed's wristwatch on the bedside table. It was five min-utes past eight. She had been with him not quite four hours.
Should I be ashamed of myself for taking advantage of an exhausted man?
He didn't seem to mind.
But neither was there any of that postcoital cuddling, of fame and legend. He was sound asleep while I was still quivering.
"Who is this?" a somewhat impatient male voice demanded.
"Who are you?" Carolyn responded.
"My name is Rickabee. I was trying to reach Major Edward Banning."
"He's in the shower, Colonel Rickabee. May I take a message?"
"I'd hoped to see him. I'm downstairs."
"Why don't you give him five minutes and then come up?"
"Thank you," Rickabee said, and hung up.
She hung the telephone up, and then really tried to wake Ed. Tickling the inside of his feet-at some risk-finally worked. After thrashing his legs an-grily, he suddenly sat up, fully awake.
"What the hell are you doing?"
"Your Colonel Rickabee is on his way up," Carolyn said.
"Christ! You talked to him?"
"You wouldn't wake up," she said.
"I wonder what the hell he wants?" Banning asked rhetorically, and stepped out of bed. He headed directly for the bathroom.
Carolyn picked up the telephone.
"Room Service, please," she told the operator, and then ordered coffee and breakfast rolls for three.
Ed came out of the bedroom as she was fastening her brassiere.
"Jesus, you're beautiful," he said.
"I ordered coffee and rolls," she said. "Would you like me to take a walk around the block, or what?"
"No," he said. "Don't be silly. You stay."
"I'm not being silly. Is this going to be awkward for you?"
"Don't be silly," he repeated, making a joke of it. "I'm a Marine, aren't I?"
In other words, yes, it is going to be embarrassing for you. But you are either the consummate gentleman, or you love me too much-maybe both-to consciously hurt my feelings. Whichever, Thank You, My Darling!
Almost precisely five minutes later, the door chimes of Suite 802 sounded.
Banning, by then dressed in a khaki shirt and green woolen uniform trou-sers, opened it to a tall, slight, pale-skinned, unhealthy-looking man in an ill-fitting suit.
He was not what Carolyn expected.
Ed was closemouthed about what he did in The Marine Corps. Even though she told herself she understood the necessity for tight lips, this frus-trated Carolyn. But she knew that Ed was in "Intelligence," even if she didn't know precisely what that meant, and that his immediate superior was Colonel F. L. Rickabee, whom he had once described as "the best intelligence officer in the business."
She had expected someone looking like Clark Gable in a Marine uniform. Or maybe an American version of David Niven in a splendidly tailored suit. Not this bland, pale man in a suit that looked like a gift from the Salvation Army.
"Good morning, Sir," Banning said. "I was in the shower."
"So I understand," Rickabee said. He looked at Carolyn.
"Honey," Banning said. "This is my boss, Colonel Rickabee. Colonel, my... Mrs. Carolyn Howell."
"How do you do, Mrs. Howell?"
"How do you do?" Carolyn replied, offering her hand.
Rickabee's hand was as she thought it might be. Cold.
Carolyn Spencer Howell was, in the flesh, very much as Rickabee thought she would be. He knew a good deal about her. He was a good intelligence officer.
When Banning first became involved with her, Rickabee asked the FBI for a report on her. And the FBI's New York Field Office turned the investigation over to the Army's Counterintelligence Corps, a move that annoyed Rickabee, although he could not fault the thorough, professional job the CIC did on her:
Carolyn Spencer Howell came from a respected upper-middle-class fam-ily. Shortly after graduating cum laude from Sarah Lawrence (where she was apolitical), she married James Stevens Howell, an investment banker ten years her senior. Mr. Howell's interest in younger women apparently did not dimin-ish with marriage; and after nearly a decade of marriage, Mrs. Howell caught her husband in bed with a lady not far over the age of legal consent.
As a result of encouragement by his employers to be generous in the divorce settlement-philandering vice presidents do not do much for the image of investment banking-Mrs. Howell became a rather wealthy woman. She took employment in the New York Public Library, more for something to do than the need of income, and there she met Major Ed Banning, and took him into her bed.
So far as the CIC was able to determine, Banning was the only man to ever spend the night in Mrs. Howell's apartment. And Banning, meanwhile, was honest with her, telling her up front that there was a Mrs. Edward Banning, whom he had last seen standing on a quai in Shanghai, and whose present whereabouts were not known.
For Rickabee's purposes, Mrs. Howell was ideal for Banning. So long as he was, in his way, faithful to her, which seemed to be the case, he was unlikely to go off the deep end with a dangerous floozy, or even, conceivably, with an enemy agent. There was talk around, which Rickabee believed, that Ambassa-dor Kennedy's son, the second one, John, had been sent to the Pacific after becoming entirely too friendly with a redhead who had ties with the wrong governments.
"I'm really very sorry to intrude," Rickabee said, meaning it. "And I wouldn't have come if it wasn't necessary. But the thing is, Mrs. Howell, I need about thirty minutes of Ed's time now, and about that much time at half past ten."
"I was just telling Ed that I was going to take a walk around," Carolyn said. "Have a look at the White House, maybe."
"It's raining," Rickabee said. "Walking may not be such a good idea. But if you could read the newspaper over a cup of coffee in the lobby..."
"My pleasure," Carolyn said. She smiled and left.
Rickabee waited until the door closed after her.
"Haughton called," he said. "There's a special channel from Brisbane. He's going to bring it by the office."
Captain David Haughton, USN, was Administrative Assistant to Navy Secretary Frank Knox. A "special channel" was a message encrypted in a spe-cial code whose use was limited to the most senior members of the military and naval hierarchy-or more junior officers, for example Colonel Rickabee and Brigadier General Pickering, whose immediate superiors were at the top of the hierarchy. Since Pickering was in Brisbane, the special channel was almost certainly from him. The only other person authorized access to the special channel in Brisbane was General Douglas MacArthur, who was the Supreme Commander, South West Pacific Ocean Area. It was unlikely that MacArthur would be sending messages to a lowly Marine colonel.
"Yes, Sir."
"I thought you had better be there, in case something needs clarification."
"Yes, Sir."
"And it's possible that Haughton may want to talk about the Mongolian Operation. If that's the case, I thought it would be better if you were up to date on it, changes, et cetera, since you left."
"Yes, Sir."
"As soon as we're finished with Haughton, you're finished. Take the week I mentioned last night."
"Aye, aye, Sir."
"Do you think you could rustle up some coffee, Ed?"
The door chimes sounded.
Banning opened the door to admit the waiter with the coffee Carolyn had ordered from room service.
"Your wish, Sir," Banning said, chuckling, "is my command. I trust the Colonel will pardon the delay?"
[SIX]
Temporary Building T-2032
The Mall, Washington, D.C.
1045 Hours 17 October 1942
Captain David W. Haughton, USNA '22, a tall, slim, intelligent-looking Naval officer, had called for a Navy car to take him to The Mall, where a large collec-tion of "temporary" frame buildings built to house the swollen Washington bureaucracy during World War I were now occupied by the sw
ollen-and still swelling-bureaucracy considered necessary to wage World War II.
A 1941 Packard Clipper, painted Navy gray, with enlisted chauffeur, was immediately provided. This was not in deference to Captain Haughton's rank-it was said there were enough captains and admirals in Washington to fully man all the enlisted billets provided for on a battleship-but to the rank of his boss.