W E B Griffin - Corp 07 - Behind the Lines

by Behind The Lines(Lit)

  If her parents heard her, that would be unfortunate. She was not going to lose the opportunity to sleep with her man when she had the chance, no matter what the circumstances. She didn't want to be here anyway; her father had shown up at her apartment in Manhattan early that morning and practically dragged both of them into his car to bring them here.

  She glanced idly out the window to see how dark it was, to make sure there was time to finish her toilette before they returned. Her father and Ken were perhaps five hundred yards from the house, walking through the stubble of a cornfield, obviously headed for home. She'd thought she'd have at least half an hour, that they wouldn't return until it was really getting dark.

  Oh, God, I hope Daddy didn't say anything to Ken that made him mad!

  "Damn!" she said, and increased the vigor of her toweling.

  She dressed as quickly as she could, in a brown tweed skirt and a light-green, high-collared sweater, slipped her bare feet into a pair of loafers, quickly applied lipstick, and went downstairs.

  She found them in the gunroom. Ken was peering down the barrels of a shotgun. Her father was scrubbing the action of the gun with a toothbrush.

  "Home are the hunters, home from the field," she said. "Much sooner than expected."

  "It didn't take long," Ernest Sage said, watching with what Ernie knew was discomfort as she went to Ken and kissed him.

  Ernest Sage was a slightly built, very intense man of forty-eight, who wore his full head of black hair slicked back with Vitahair. Vitahair was one of the 209 widely distributed products of American Personal Pharmaceuticals, of which he was Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer.

  "Tell me," Ernie said.

  "We were fifty yards into the first field. Two cocks jumped up. Before I could get my gun up, Ken got both of them."

  "He's a Marine, Daddy. What did you expect?"

  "He's a hell of a shot, honey," Ernest Sage said. "I'll tell you that."

  Ernest Sage did not rise to the top of APP solely because he was the largest individual stockholder in the corporation founded by his grandfather, Ezekiel Handley, M.D. He thought of himself as an ordinarily competent, decently educated individual, who had somehow acquired an ability to get people to do what he wanted them to do, and to like doing it. Or the reverse, to not do what he thought they should not do, and believe that not doing it was the logical and reasonable thing to do.

  He had often joked that there were only two people in the world he could not control, his wife and his only child. But even when he said that, he knew he had his wife pretty well under control.

  Ernie was the one who did what she wanted to do, and didn't do what she didn't want to do, completely oblivious to the desires and manipulative efforts of her father.

  Lieutenant Kenneth R. McCoy, USMCR, obviously confirmed that per-ception.

  Ernest Sage often privately thought that if he compiled a list of undesirable suitors for his daughter's affections, right at the top of that list would be a Ma-rine officer with an unpleasant family background-they didn't have a dime, was the way he thought of it-with only a high school education, whose only prospects were the near certainty of getting himself badly maimed in the war- or more likely killed.

  It deeply disturbed him, but didn't really surprise him, when Ernie told him that thirty minutes after she met Ken McCoy she knew she wanted to marry him.

  Adding to his difficulties was the fact that he not only admired McCoy but rather liked him. He could not even console himself with the thought that McCoy was after his and his daughter's money. Ernie would marry him at the drop of a hat, he knew, either with his permission or without it. McCoy refused to do that. He thought it would be unfair to leave her a widow, or obliged to spend the rest of her life caring for a cripple.

  Since Ernie almost always got what she wanted-because she was willing to pay whatever the price might be-one of the unpleasant possibilities that Ernest Sage was forced to live with was that she would get herself in the family way, either as a bargaining chip to bring McCoy to the altar, or-and with Ernie, this was entirely possible-simply because she wanted to bear his child.

  He had discussed this subject with Ernie, and she had pointed out that any illicit fruit of their union would not wind up on public assistance, the annual income from her trust funds being three or four times as much as she was paid by J. Walter Thompson, Advertisers.

  Since they were sleeping together-perhaps not here, tonight, because McCoy would object to that; but everywhere else, including a three-month pe-riod when they cohabited on a yacht at the San Diego Yacht Club while he was training for what had become the now famous Makin Island raid-the problem of her becoming impregnated was a real one.

  He had come to understand that the only reason she did not allow herself to become pregnant was that she was afraid of Ken, or else respected him too much to go against his wishes. And this of course meant that Ken McCoy was doing what he was unable to do as her father, guiding the course of her life.

  McCoy came into her life, perversely enough, through the young man Er-nest Sage and his wife had hoped for years would become, in due time, her husband. If one ignored his current role as a Marine fighter pilot, with odds against his passing through the war unscathed, or alive, this young man would have headed a list of desirable suitors. He came from a splendid family. His mother, who had been Ernie's mother's roommate and best friend at college, was the only daughter of Andrew Foster, of Foster Hotels International. His father-an old friend whom Ernest Sage could never completely forgive for arranging for the yacht in San Diego, knowing full well what Ernie wanted it for-was Fleming Pickering, now wearing a Marine general's uniform, but previously Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Pacific & Far East Shipping.

  Ken McCoy and Malcolm S. "Pick" Pickering met and became buddies at Officer Candidate School at the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia. On their graduation, Pick was sowing a few wild oats in a penthouse suite at the Foster Park Hotel on Central Park South-his one semi-disqualifying character-istic as the perfect suitor was his proclivity for wild-oats sowing.

  Though Ernie unfortunately regarded Pick as a troublemaking brother, she somewhat reluctantly, at her father's urging, went to the party after he told her she was duty-bound to congratulate Pick on his second lieutenant's bar, and to wish him well in pilot training. There she met Ken McCoy, sitting on a ledge, his feet dangling over Fifty-ninth Street.

  Fifteen minutes later, they left the penthouse in search of Chinese food in Chinatown.

  One of the first things Ernie told her father about McCoy was that he spoke Chinese like a Chinaman.

  "Well, they look pretty clean," McCoy said, handing Mr. Sage the shotgun barrels. "But what you really need is some Hoppe's Number Nine. I'll get some for you."

  "When he sold me that stuff, the man at Griffin & Howe said it was the best barrel cleaner available," Ernest Sage heard himself say.

  Why couldn't I have just said "Thank you" ? Am I looking for an excuse to fight with him?

  "The best barrel cleaner is mercury," McCoy said matter-of-factly. "Next is Hoppe's Number Nine."

  Mercury? What the hell is he talking about, mercury?

  "Mercury?"

  "You stop up one end of a barrel, fill the barrel with mercury, let it stay a couple of minutes, and then pour it out. Takes the barrel right down to the bare metal. I guess it dissolves the lead, and the primer residue, all the crap that fouls a barrel."

  Unfortunately, I suspect he knows what's he's talking about. I will not challenge him on that. There probably is some chemical reaction, vis-a-vis steel, copper, lead, and mercury.

  And then he heard himself say, "What you're saying is that the man at Griffin & Howe doesn't know what he's talking about?"

  "Not if he said that stuff is best, he doesn't."

  "Daddy," Ernie said. "Ken knows about guns. Why are you arguing with him?"

  "I wasn't arguing with Ken, honey. I was just making sure I understood
him correctly." He fixed a smile on his face. "The next step in the sacred traditions of hunting around here is the ingestion of a stiff belt. How does that sound, Ken?"

  "That sounds fine, Sir."

  Ernest Sage put the side-by-side Parker 12-bore together, and then put it in a cabinet beside perhaps twenty other long arms. He turned and smiled at his daughter.

  I've been around guns all my life, but your Ken knows about guns, right?

  "Into the library, honey? Or shall we go in the kitchen and watch your mother defeather the birds?"

  "The library," Ernie said. "Mother hates plucking and dressing birds; al-ways prays that you'll never get any pheasant."

  "I've never eaten a pheasant," Ken McCoy said.

  "Really?" Ernest Page said.

  They went into the two-story-high library. The front of what looked like a row of books opened, revealing a bar, complete to refrigerator.

  Sage took two glasses and started to put ice in them.

  "Yes, Daddy," Ernie said. "Thank you very much, I will have a drink. Whatever you're having."

  "Sorry, honey," her father said. "Excuse me. I'm not used to you being a full-grown woman."

  "Make her a weak one," McCoy said. "One strong drink and she starts dancing on tabletops."

  Sage turned in surprise, in time to see Ernie sticking her tongue out at McCoy.

  "Don't believe him, Daddy."

  He made the drinks and handed one to each of them.

  "What shall we drink to?" he asked. "The fallen pheasants?"

  "What about Pick?" McCoy replied. "I feel sorry for him."

  "Why do you feel sorry for him?" Sage asked.

  "He's going on display on the West Coast right about now."

  "I don't understand."

  "A War Bond Tour. All the aviation heroes from Guadalcanal. Modesty is not one of his strong points, but I suspect the War Bond Tour will cure him of that."

  "Pick is a hero?"

  "Certified. Got the DFC from the Secretary of the Navy himself last week."

  "I hadn't heard that."

  "For doing what he did with you?" Ernie asked. It was a challenge.

  "For being an ace. More than an ace. I think he has six kills. Maybe seven."

  "What did she mean, Ken, 'for doing what he did with you'? You saw Pick in the Pacific."

  "Yes, Sir. I saw him in the Pacific."

  "If he got a medal, why didn't you?" Ernie demanded.

  "Because I didn't do anything to deserve a medal."

  "Huh!" Ernie snorted.

  "What exactly is it that you do in the Marines, Ken?" Ernest Sage asked with a smile.

  He knew that McCoy worked for Fleming Pickering. He didn't know what Pickering did for the Marine Corps-Pickering had told him he was the general in charge of mess-kit repair-and he thought he probably was going to find out right now.

  "Well, right now, I've been trying to make sure that the Navy doesn't steal everybody who speaks an Oriental language from the Draft Board for the Navy; that The Corps gets at least a few of them. I've spent the last week at the Armed Forces Induction Center in New York."

  "I mean, ordinarily."

  "Whatever General Pickering tells me to do."

  "You're his assistant in charge of repairing mess kits, right?"

  "Yes, Sir. That's about it."

  "You're wasting your time, Daddy," Ernie said. "I live with him, and he won't tell me anything either."

  You had to say that, 'I live with him," didn't you ?

  Maintaining a smile with some difficulty, Sage said, "I don't mean to pry, Ken. Would asking you how long you're going to be around be prying?"

  "No, Sir. I'll be around a long time, I think. Four, five, maybe even six months."

  Well, I suppose, if you're young, and in uniform, five or six months is a "long time."

  "And then?"

  "They haven't told me."

  "And if they had, he wouldn't tell us," Ernie said, adding intensely, "I really hate this goddamn war!"

  "You are not too big to be told to watch your mouth, young lady."

  "What would you prefer, that I call it 'this noble enterprise to save the world for democracy'?"

  "That has a nice ring to it," McCoy said.

  "Oh, go to hell!" Ernie said.

  Ken McCoy did, in fact, know where he would be going in four to six months-he'd been told the week before; it was classified TOP SECRET. And he had been really impressed with what he would be doing, and with the long-range planning for the war the upper echelons of the military establishment were now carrying on.

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff intended to bomb the home islands of the Empire of Japan. Though the islands from which the planes would fly to attack Tokyo and other Japanese cities were now firmly in Japanese hands, the big brass was so sure that the war in the Pacific would see their capture that they had turned their attention to the details.

  One of the details was weather information. Without accurate weather pre-dictions-including something called "Winds Aloft," which McCoy had never heard of before last week-long-range bombing of Japan would not be possible.

  The ideal place to locate a weather-reporting station would be as close to Japan as possible. Since locating a weather station near Japan was out of the question, the next-best place-for reasons not explained to McCoy-was the Gobi Desert in Mongolia.

  Until he had time to think about it, he was genuinely surprised that United States military personnel were presently in the Gobi Desert, which was about as far behind the enemy lines as it was possible to get. Though there were a few soldiers and sailors, the majority of them were United States Marines who had been stationed in Peking and elected not to surrender to the Japanese when the war began. They had made for the Gobi Desert for reasons that were not en-tirely clear but that certainly included avoiding capture.

  They had taken with them a number of ex-China Marines, Yangtze River Patrol sailors, and members of the Army's 15th Infantry who had taken their retirement in China and considered themselves recalled from retirement. There were supposed to be sixty-seven of them.

  They had established radio contact through American forces in China, and were now in direct contact with Army and Navy radio stations in Hawaii, Aus-tralia, and the continental United States. They were ordered to maintain contact and to avoid capture, but not informed of the plans being made for them.

  Once they could be trained in a number of skills, including parachuting, it was planned that an initial reinforcement detachment would be sent to the Gobi Desert. In their number would be radio operators, meteorologists, cryptogra-phers, and other technicians.

  Their ability to collect, encrypt, and transmit weather data from the Gobi would be tested, as would the efficacy of predicting weather from the data fur-nished.

  Inasmuch as the personnel in the Gobi were predominantly Marines, and the Marines were part of the Navy, the Navy had been given overall command of the operation. The meteorologists, cryptographers, and communications personnel would be sailors. But the Secretary of the Navy, with the concur-rence of the President's Chief of Staff, had given the Marine Corps Office of Management Analysis responsibility for staging the operation.

  The Deputy Chief of Management Analysis had in turn named Major Ed-ward Banning as Officer in Charge, with Lieutenant Kenneth R. McCoy as his deputy. Nothing had been said to McCoy, but he knew that Banning held a MAGIC clearance, and thus could not be put in risk of capture, so Banning would not make the mission. He also felt quite sure that he himself would not become Officer in Charge by default; command of the mission would not be entrusted to a lowly lieutenant. Consequently, sometime between now and the time the mission left the United States, a field-grade officer would be assigned.

  But between now and then, he knew he would be in charge, turning to Banning only when he ran into a problem he could not handle himself. It would give him, as he had told Ernie and her father, four to six months in the States. And he was sure he could arrange his schedule t
o spend a good deal of time with her.

  Starting, he thought, almost immediately. He was about to go through the Marine Corps Parachutist's School at Lakehurst, New Jersey. While he was there, he could go into New York City every night and every weekend. But he would also have to periodically return to Lakehurst to check on the progress of the others learning how to parachute themselves and their equipment from air-planes.

  The thought of parachuting into Mongolia was a little unnerving, but he told himself it was probably a good deal safer than being a platoon leader on Guadalcanal. The real problem with the Mongolian Operation was that once he went in, it would be a long time before he could even think of getting out, perhaps not until the end of the war. But there was nothing he could do about that.