W E B Griffin - Corp 07 - Behind the Lines
Page 26
"You're wrong about me, Lieutenant," she said. "I married Steve be-cause I love him, not because I'm carrying his child."
"Believe it or not, Mrs. Koffler, I'd already figured that out."
She looked into his eyes again.
"You had, hadn't you?" she said, as if surprised.
He nodded.
"Now that we're all pals," George Hart said, "do you think you two could stop calling each other 'Mrs. Koffler' and 'Lieutenant McCoy'?"
McCoy looked at him.
"Mr. Hart," McCoy said, "second lieutenants should be seen and not heard. Isn't that so, Daphne?"
"I believe that's true, Ken," she replied.
T O P S E C R E T
SUPREME HEADQUARTERS SWPOA NAVY DEPT WASH DC
VIA SPECIAL CHANNEL
DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN
ORIGINAL TO BE DESTROYED AFTER ENCRYPTION AND TRANSMTTTAL
EYES ONLY-THE SECRETARY OF THE NAVY
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA
SATURDAY 14 NOVEMBER 1942
DEAR FRANK:
WORD JUST REACHED HERE THAT THE BATTLESHIPS WASHINGTON AND SOUTH DAKOTA HAVE SUNK THE JAPANESE BATTLESHIP KIHISHIMA, EVEN THOUGH THE SOUTH DAKOTA APPARENTLY WAS PRETTY BADLY HIT IN THE PROCESS. I'D LIKE TO THINK THAT ADMIRAL DAN CALLAHAN SOMEHOW KNOWS ABOUT THIS. I WAS PRETTY UPSET WHEN I HEARD HE WAS KILLED THE DAY BEFORE. REVENGE IS SWEET.
THE MORE I GET INTO THIS FERTIG IN THE PHILIPPINES BUSINESS-SPECIFICALLY, THE MORE I HAVE LEARNED FROM LT COL JACK NMI STECKER ABOUT THE EFFICACY OF A WELL-RUN GUERRILLA OPERATION-THE MORE I BECOME CONVINCED THAT IT'S WORTH A GOOD DEAL OF EFFORT AND EXPENSE.
WHERE IT STANDS RIGHT NOW IS THAT A YOUNG MARINE OFFICER, LIEUTENANT KENNETH MCCOY, WHOM THEY CALL "KILLER," BY THE WAY, JUST ARRIVED HERE. HE HAS ALREADY MADE THE MAKIN ISLAND MARINE RAIDER OPERATION, AND WENT ASHORE ON BUKA FROM ANOTHER SUBMARINE WHEN WE REPLACED THE MARINES THERE. HE IS AS EXPERT IN RUBBER BOAT OPERATIONS AS THEY COME, IN OTHER WORDS. HE SEES NO PROBLEM IN GETTING ASHORE FROM A SUBMARINE OFF MINDANAO.
HE AND STECKER HAVE COME UP WITH A LIST OF MATERIEL THEY FEEL SHOULD GO TO FERTIG, ESSENTIALLY, AND IN THIS ORDER, GOLD, RADIOS, MEDICINE, AND SMALL ARMS AND AMMUNITION. BECAUSE OF THE SMALL STATURE OF THE AVERAGE FILIPINO, BOTH FEEL THAT THE US CARBINE IS THE PROPER WEAPON. I HAVE THE RADIOS AND THE CARBINES AND AMMUNITION FOR THEM, AND HAVE BEEN PROMISED AN ARRAY OF MEDICINES WHENEVER I WANT THEM. I HAVE ALSO BEEN PROMISED A SUBMARINE, PROBABLY THE USS NARWHAL, WHICH IS A CARGO SUBMARINE. THE PROMISE CAME FROM CINCPAC HIMSELF, WHO SHARES MY BELIEF THAT ANY GUERRILLA OPERATION IN THE PHILIPPINES SHOULD BE SUPPORTED ON STRATEGIC, TACTICAL, AND MORAL GROUNDS.
I ONLY NEED TWO THINGS MORE: I NEED $250,000 IN GOLD. ACTUALLY, WHAT I NEED IS A CABLE TRANSFER OF THAT MUCH MONEY TO THE BANK OF AUSTRALIA, WHO WILL GIVE MB THE GOLD. THE SOONER THE BETTER.
THE SECOND THING I NEED IS FOR YOU TO GOOSE THE MARINE CORPS PERSONNEL PEOPLE. THEY STILL HAVEN'T TRANSFERRED LT COL STECKER TO ME. COLONEL RICKABEE REPORTS THAT HE'S BEEN GETTING A VERY COLD SHOULDER ABOUT THIS, ALTHOUGH NO EXPLANATION HAS BEEN GIVEN, AND YOUR NORMALLY INCREDIBLY ABLE CAPTAIN HAUGHTON HASN'T BEEN ABLE TO GET THEM OFF THEIR UPHOLSTERED CHAIRS, EITHER. I NEED STECKER FOR THIS. HE'S AN EXPERT IN GUERRILLA OPERATIONS, AND THIS IS CERTAINLY MORE IMPORTANT THAN WHAT THE CORPS WANTS HIM TO DO VIS-A-VIS SETTING UP PROPHYLACTIC FACILITIES AND AMATEUR THEATRICALS. MCCOY GOING ASHORE ALONE WOULD NOT BE NEARLY AS EFFECTIVE AS THE TWO OF THEM GOING TOGETHER.
I EARNESTLY SOLICIT YOUR IMMEDIATE ACTION IN THIS REGARD.
BEST REGARDS,
FLEMING PICKERING, BRIGADIER GENERAL, USMCR
T O P S E C R E T
Chapter Nine
[ONE]
Supreme Headquarters
South West Pacific Ocean Area
Brisbane, Australia
1715 Hours 16 November 1942
The two Army Military Policemen on duty at the entrance of General MacArthur's headquarters saluted crisply as Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, USMCR, strode briskly through the door.
Pickering returned their salute with a smile. He walked quickly to the Studebaker President with the letters usmc on each side of the hood and the Marine Corps insignia on its front doors, slid into the driver's seat, and started the engine.
Second Lieutenant George F. Hart, USMCR, the aiguillette of his aide-de-camp status flapping up and down as he ran, slowed as he passed through the door long enough to exchange salutes with the MPs and then broke into a trot to the car, as if afraid he would be left behind.
As soon as Hart was in the car, the Studebaker, with a chirp of its tires, backed out of the RESERVED FOR GENERAL OFFICERS parking space, stopped abruptly, and then, with another squeal of tires, drove away.
The two MPs exchanged glances and small smiles. With the exception of the Marine general, every other general and admiral at Supreme Headquarters, Southwest Pacific Ocean Area, had an enlisted driver for his official vehicle. The driver would jump out of the car when he spotted his general or admiral, open the rear door, stand at attention until the general or admiral had climbed in, close the door, and then, after making sure the aide-de-camp was in the backseat, get behind the wheel and chauffeur his august passenger in the ritual dignity to which he was entitled by virtue of his rank.
Not so General Pickering. Not only did he normally drive himself, but more often than not he wasn't accompanied by his aide-de-camp.
There was more. It was reliably rumored that General Douglas MacArthur called General Pickering by his Christian name. Every other officer was ad-dressed by his rank, except for a very few whom El Supremo honored by ad-dressing them by their last names.
This, and a number of other personal idiosyncrasies-General Pickering did not live, for example, in the quarters provided for the very senior officers, but in a rambling frame house he rented near the racetrack-had not, most of the enlisted men knew, endeared General Pickering to his peers, the other gen-eral and flag officers of Supreme Headquarters, SWPOA.
It was therefore perhaps natural for the enlisted men, and many of the jun-ior officers, to look fondly upon General Pickering. Anybody who had most of the big brass pissed off at him couldn't be all bad.
"Goddamn the way these people think," General Pickering said, as he wheeled, entirely too fast, around a corner and headed toward the Closed For The Duration racetrack.
George Hart did not reply. He wasn't sure if he was being spoken to, or whether General Pickering was thinking aloud. But a smile flickered across his lips.
There was a silence of perhaps thirty seconds.
"Fertig was a light colonel when Bataan fell," Pickering said. "Not a goddamned captain."
Lieutenant Hart now deduced that whatever had put General Pickering in his current very pissed-off frame of mind concerned Wendell Fertig. Again, he elected not to reply.
Pickering glanced over at Hart. "That sonofabitch must have known that, George," he said reasonably, "and he should have told me."
"That sonofabitch," Lieutenant Hart correctly suspected, was Brigadier General Charles Willoughby, USA, MacArthur's G-2 (General Staff Officer, Intelligence).
"Yes, Sir," Hart said. "How did you find out?"
"I ran into Phil DePress," Pickering said. "He told me."
Lieutenant Colonel Philip J. "Phil" DePress, who still wore the lapel insignia of the proud, now-vanquished 26th Cavalry-it had been forced to eat its horses before the Philippines fell-had somehow escaped and was now one of MacArthur's staff officers.
Hart met DePress in Washington, three months before, shortly after he went to work for General Pickering. Private George F. Hart, formerly Detec-tive Hart of the St. Louis, Missouri, Police Department, had been recruited from the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, to serve ostensibly as an orderly, but in fact as a bodyguard, to General Pickering, then recuperating from wounds and malaria in the Army's Walter Reed Hospital in Washing-ton.
Colonel DePress, who had been sent to Washington as an officer courier from MacArthur's SWPOA headquarters, showed
up in Pickering's hospital room bearing a personal letter from MacArthur congratulating Pickering on his promotion to brigadier general.
At the time, Hart was having more than a little trouble adjusting to the sudden changes in his life. One day he was just one more boot in a basic train-ing platoon. Then he was summoned, late at night, to the Bachelor Officers' Quarters, where a cold-eyed Marine first lieutenant (whom Hart correctly sus-pected was younger than he was) asked him rapid-fire, but pertinent, questions about his law-enforcement background. Apparently satisfied with his answers and with Hart personally, he offered him an assignment as bodyguard to a Gen-eral Pickering, adding that General Pickering didn't want a bodyguard.
Two days later, he was in Washington, still wearing his boot's shaven-head haircut, promoted sergeant, and living not in the Marine barracks, but in General Pickering's apartment in the Foster Lafayette Hotel, whose windows looked out across Pennsylvania Avenue onto the White House.
Information was thrown rapidly at him. For instance, he learned that Gen-eral Pickering was a reservist who had earned the nation's second-highest award for gallantry, the Distinguished Service Cross, as a teenaged enlisted man in France in the First World War, and that, in civilian life, he had been Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of the Pacific & Far East Shipping Corporation.
Hart had also learned that Pickering was not in the ordinary chain of com-mand in the Marine Corps. He reported directly to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. And on a mission to the Pacific for Secretary Knox (not further de-scribed to Hart then), he had been on Guadalcanal, where he contracted ma-laria. Later, aboard a destroyer taking him from the island, he was wounded when the warship was strafed by a Japanese bomber. After her captain was killed, he earned the Silver Star for assuming command of the vessel, despite his wounds.
Hart had heard, of course, of the Marine Raider attack on Makin Island (in which President Roosevelt's son participated); and after what he knew about General Pickering, he was not really surprised to find out that the cold-eyed lieutenant who had "interviewed" him at Parris Island had made the raid. Nor even to find out that the lieutenant-who was in fact three years younger than he was (he was twenty-five)-was the near-legendary "Killer" McCoy.
At the time he met Colonel DePress, Hart was devoutly following the ad-vice of his father-Police Captain Karl J. Hart-that when you're involved in something you don't really understand, keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut. Thus, when Colonel DePress came into General Pickering's hospi-tal room, he thought like a cop, and not like a Marine Corps boot promoted far beyond his capabilities to sergeant. And as a cop, trained to read people, he recognized that DePress and Pickering were kindred souls, and that they them-selves were both aware of their kinship.
When he came to Australia with General Pickering, he was not surprised that Colonel DePress became one of the very small group of people uncon-nected with General Pickering's mission who were welcome at Water Lily Cottage.
Not much surprised George F. Hart anymore. Not even when he found him-self in a rubber boat with Killer McCoy, paddling ashore onto the Japanese-held island of Buka, nor the gold bars on his collar when the other boots in his platoon at Parris Island were still hoping to make PFC.
He was well aware that his promotion had to do with facilitating General Pickering's mission, and not with his being some kind of super Marine. He was beginning to understand his role as a Marine: In addition to the bodyguard role, it was to make himself as useful as he could to General Pickering. And he liked this role. He had some time ago realized that Pickering was special, and work-ing for him a privilege.
More than that: General Pickering was the only man in his life he admired as much as his father... perhaps more than his father, as disloyal as this might sound.
Pickering drove the Studebaker President past the boarded-up racetrack, turned right, and two blocks beyond turned off the street onto the clamshell-paved driveway of Water Lily Cottage.
A Chevrolet pickup truck with Royal Australian Navy markings was among the vehicles pulled nose-in against the porch of Water Lily Cottage. It belonged to Lieutenant Commander Eric A. Feldt, RAN.
Pickering had stopped the Studebaker, pulled on the parking brake, and was halfway up the steps of Water Lily Cottage before Lieutenant Hart could open his door.
When Pickering walked into the room, Feldt and Hon were comfortably sprawled on the rattan furniture with which the cottage was furnished. Hon started to get to his feet, but Pickering waved him back.
"I knew you wouldn't mind if we started without you, Pickering, old sod," Feldt said, raising a glass dark with whiskey. "Particularly since I am the bearer of bad tidings."
"No sub?" Pickering asked, walking to a table holding a dozen or more bottles of liquor.
"Three weeks is the best I could do," Feldt said, "even begging on my knees. Sorry."
"Well, thanks for trying," Pickering said.- "It was a long shot anyway."
He picked up a bottle of Famous Grouse scotch whiskey and poured an inch and a half into a glass. Then he turned to Hart.
"You want one of these, George?" he asked.
"No, thank you, Sir. I've got the duty tonight."
"That may be a blessing in disguise," Pickering said thoughtfully, obvi-ously referring to the unavailability of an Australian submarine. "Nimitz may be able to loan us the Narwhal."
"The what?"
"The Navy has two transport submarines. Underwater freighters, so to speak. One of them is the Narwhal; I don't know what they call the other one. If we can have it, we could take Fertig a lot more than we could carry on a regular sub."
"You think he'll be willing?" Feldt asked.
"We'll soon find out," Pickering said. "Pluto, send Nimitz a Special Channel Personal, saying we need the Narwhal, and where should we plan on rendezvousing with her?" He paused and added, thinking aloud, "Which means we'll probably have to fly them to Espiritu Santo; it would take too much time to bring the Narwhal here; which in turn means I'm going to have to fight the Army Air Corps for several tons of space on their transports."
Feldt nodded.
"Yes, Sir," Major Hon said. "Would you like to see the message before it goes out?"
"I have a profound faith in your spelling, Pluto," Pickering said, smiling, "but you better send an information copy to Haughton. I'm sure there are thirty admirals on CINCPAC's staff, with twice as many good reasons why CINC-PAC should not let us have the Narwhal. I may have to go to Frank Knox about this, and Haughton should have forewarning."
"Yes, Sir," Pluto said. "Haughton but not Rickabee?"
"Ask Haughton to advise Rickabee," Pickering said, and then asked, "Where are they?"
Major Hon pointed to the rear of the cottage.
Pickering took a healthy swallow of the whiskey, then set the glass down beside a row of empty glasses. He then immediately picked it and the empties up with the fingers of one hand. With the other, he grabbed the bottle of Fa-mous Grouse by the neck.
He walked out of the living room and down the corridor to a closed door, and knocked on it with the whiskey bottle.
"Open up!" he ordered.
The door was opened by Staff Sergeant Steve Koffler.
"It's the cocktail hour," Pickering said. "Didn't anyone notice?"
He handed the Famous Grouse to Koffler, and walked to a table in the middle of the room and set the glasses on it. Lieutenant Colonel Jack (NMI) Stecker and First Lieutenant Kenneth R. McCoy were sitting at the table, their uniforms protected by flower-patterned aprons, obviously borrowed from the kitchen. The table held three small rifles, technically U.S. Carbines, Caliber.30, Ml, broken down. Pickering saw their trigger group assemblies were also in pieces.
"When you can part with that adorable apron, Jack," Pickering said, "stick these in your pocket."
He tossed a small cellophane-covered package onto the table. It contained two silver eagles, the insignia of a colonel.
"That's a little premature, is
n't it?" Lieutenant Colonel Stecker asked, a little uncomfortably.
"The Secretary of the Navy told me, I told General MacArthur; and to-morrow morning at oh eight forty-five, with suitable ceremony, El Supremo will pin those on you."
Stecker shook his head.
"That really wasn't necessary," Stecker said.
"There will be a photographer," Pickering went on. "Elly will soon have a picture of her husband the Colonel, with El Supremo beaming at him, with which to dazzle her neighbors."
Elly was Mrs. Jack (NMI) Stecker.
"I suppose," Colonel Stecker said, reaching for the bottle of whiskey, "that it would be bad manners if I were to say I wish to hell the General had minded his own business?"