You have no choice, he said to himself. You must believe that somewhere, someday, there is an answer. Dreamily his eyes stayed fixed to Nautaung’s mountain. And then suddenly he felt strangely peaceful as if the answer for now were in him and he was sure of it for the first time.
They landed at base after stopping at Ledo to refuel. The Colonel was sitting in his jeep waiting: “Con, this won’t be official but for the present consider yourself under the same conditions as you would under arrest to quarters.”
“Yes, Colonel,” he said expressionlessly, passively.
He climbed into the back of the jeep. He studied the Colonel’s driver for a moment. Ringa had been the Colonel’s driver the last time he had ridden in this jeep. For a second he wondered if the driver was more material like Ringa.
They drove past the main house and Base radio shack out a mile and pulled up to a small concrete cottage. It was of pink stucco and had a small well cared for garden and had been built originally as a home for the overseer of the tea plantation before the American government had leased the plantation.
The Colonel got out of the jeep. “Confine yourself here. It’s been cleaned up for you. We’ll call for you. It won’t be too long,” he said trying to reach Con with his eyes. But Con stared at the ground.
“Yes, sir,” Con said from a distance. He saluted not looking at the Colonel and then went into the cottage. There was a large nicely furnished livingroom; the furniture was of bamboo but well cushioned. There was a teak dining table highly polished, two bedrooms, bath, and kitchen. There was a fan revolving from the ceiling in the living room. He listened for the sound of the generator. He could not hear it and concluded that the base must now have a power plant of its own.
He wiggled his toes in his boots. He thought he would take a bath. Then he decided that he wouldn’t. That it would be bad to take a bath. That it would make him feel in someway as these men here felt. That he would lose something of what he had come here to defend. No. he would not take a bath.
He went into the kitchen. He found some scotch and glasses and poured a drink. From the liquor stock he deduced that this was the cottage where the Colonel entertained his VIP’s. He looked at the stock and considered making himself a martini. There were olives. I wonder, he said to himself, if the Colonel could prevent a ripe olive from falling off a tree. He ate an olive. He decided to stay with the scotch. He began to drink it straight sitting in a chair in the livingroom. He finished the drink and re-explored the house, examining everything, poking around like an old hound dog that had picked up the scent. He sat down with another drink.
There was a knock on the door. It opened. There was a General, the Colonel behind the General. It was General O’Hanlon. Con had met him several times in Washington and once in Ledo. Con stood up. They entered. Con studied the General for a moment trying to figure out if he had anything against him. He wasn’t sure. He hadn’t expected anything like this. The General was in Washington the last he had heard, in England a month before that. But the General got around a lot. He wasn’t a career General, Con knew. He was a self-made millionaire from New York. His exploits in World War I were legend.
“Well you really went and did it, Con boy,” the General said.
Con stared at him for a moment as a museum curator might stare at newly arrived set of bones, wondering of a place to fit them. He did not answer. He looked the General up and down. The General was very short, stocky. He was grey-eyed, grey-haired, heavily jowled, and had a ruddy bourbon-red skin. He had thick widely spread fingers and an unlit cigar in his mouth. Con thought he looked like an Irish hod-carrier. Maybe a race-track tout.
“You guys want a drink?” Con asked finally, almost sarcastically.
Colonel Pearson’s huge fists tightened, the veins in his neck swelled as Con’s insolent attitude penetrated. The Colonel stood a good foot and a half taller than the General.
“Thanks, Con,” the General said softly. “I’d like one. The Colonel would too.”
Con went out and poured for them. They were still standing when he came back in. Con left and went into the bedroom. He came back with one of the warrants and handed it to the General. The General was standing exactly where he had been when Con left the room. He hadn’t touched the drink.
“That’s my answer to anything you people have to say to me,” Con said. He went over and sat down. The General examined the document. The Colonel eyed it over the General’s shoulder. There was a silent, gripping, awkward tension. Only the click click of the spinning fan. It was hot in the late afternoon.
“I don’t read Chinese,” the General said softly.
“Those documents were ordered burned,” the Colonel said sharply.
“You go to hell, Pearson,” Con said meanly. “I’m not taking orders from anyone that’s a part of this. You included.”
The Colonel’s massive chest swelled. His skin reddened. The General raised his hand as if forbidding the Colonel to speak.
“Tell me exactly what happened. Exactly what this is all about, Con,” the General said softly, composed, in a mellow modulated voice. The General knew that his strength was in his voice; the contrast of his voice to his exterior personality. He put his unlit cigar back in his mouth.
Con began to give, cautiously at first. He narrated the events of the few preceding days in detail. He told the General as flatly, objectively as he could. He told him what Stilwell had said at Gwoliar about the activities of the renegade Chinese. When he was finished he was forward on the chair, his drink between his feet on the floor, a cigarette in his hand. The General was still standing. Con assumed the Colonel was still standing because the General stood. The Colonel always liked to sit down. Or sprawl down. I’ll bet he was a lazy son-of-a-bitch in the peace time army, Con said to himself.
The General was thoughtful for a long while after Con had finished. He chewed meditatively on the cigar, hands on hips, poised like an English bull-dog about to swipe at an annoying, buzzing fly.
“Do you have any conception of the far reaching complications of this situation?” the General asked finally. “Do you realize the drastic effect this might have on Chinese American relations? Thus on the war effort as a whole?”
Con half-laughed sarcastically. “Truthfully, General, I expected a different reaction from you. Anything but the same old patented bullshit.”
Now the General’s face reddened. The cigar in his mouth jerked once convulsively.
“Goddam it, Reynolds, you hold your tongue,” Colonel Pearson interceded caustically. “We’ve had about all we’re going to take from you.”
Con eyed the Colonel sneeringly. “I repeat: You go to hell, Pearson.”
The General grasped the Colonel’s arm momentarily as if to say, I’ll handle it.
“Young man,” the General said, “you’re going to have to make a personal apology to the Chinese government through their representative.”
“I refuse,” Con said stubbornly. “I’ll resign my commission this instant. I’ll go to trial. But I refuse to apologize.”
“Where are the documents?” the Colonel asked.
“Where you can’t get your hands on them,” Con said.
“Suppose we confiscate the documents?” the General asked.
“I’ve thought of that,” Con said. “I have four with me. You can have them. But I have four more. Spread out. In safe places.”
“Is it within your conception that you might not be able to grasp exactly how this would hurt the war effort?” the General asked still composed, his voice soft, almost caressing.
“I can see no reason whatsoever for supporting a man who takes American lives to enrich his personal treasury,” Con said. “I will never be able to conceive that. Or be a part of it. This bastard Kai-shek is no better than Hitler or Tojo. As long as you high and holy bigshots are supposedly cleaning out the lice in the world why don’t you clean them all out? And it seems to me the best place to start the extermination would be right at home.�
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“Can’t you understand that Chinese co-operation will save lives in the long run. American lives,” the General said.
“I don’t give a shit about the long run, General. Not if the long run is like that. The long, long run seems better. Anything seems better. I don’t give a shit what you say. You can’t deny what’s happened, has been happening, and will continue to happen if something isn’t done about it. And if your attitude is the attitude of the American Army the Army can go to hell. And if that’s America’s attitude America can go to hell.”
“He doesn’t mean that,” the Colonel said quickly. “I’m sure he doesn’t mean that, General. He’s been down there too long. He needs a rest. A good long holiday. I’m afraid we’ve asked a little too much of Con.”
“In the first place I feel fine,” Con said getting up from the chair, beginning to pace. “In the second place I belong with the Kachins. In the third place you’re asking too fucking much of me now. And I said ‘fucking’ because it’s a rotten sounding word. It’s fitting. You either send me back or I’m going to force this thing into the open,” Con hollered.
The General suddenly realized that somehow Con was maneuvering them into the defensive. They had handled him wrong, if it was possible to handle him at all. He reached up and whispered to the Colonel. The Colonel left. The General walked across the room chewing on the cigar. He stopped abruptly, wheeled around, his eyes fixed on Con.
“Do you realize I could have all I want of you just for your insubordination?” the General said.
“Do you realize what an ass you’d make of yourself publicly if it was found out why? You’re not going to bull me around. Your threats aren’t going to bother me because you and I both know who’s right. And people like you couldn’t stand to have the truth in the open. Try again?”
The General bounced out of the room towards the kitchen. Con heard the faucet turn on, the cabinet door open and shut, and then silence. The General was in the kitchen for over five minutes.
“Were you under specific orders to go into China?” he asked when he returned. “What were your orders exactly?”
“They never have been exact. Except for specific scouting missions like with Merrill’s. Or to blow a certain bridge. Or to take a prisoner or fix an agent. Like that. I was on my own the rest of the time.”
“Was it understood that you weren’t to go into China?” the General asked specifically.
“It was and it wasn’t. It might have been implied. But I’d never admit that.’ And Danny would back me.”
“Who’s Danny?” the General asked.
Con told him about Danny. The General was astounded. Outwardly he did not act astounded but he was thinking that the British had installed one of their top intelligence men right in the center of America’s foremost top secret organization; to keep a finger on its every movement. These documents, warrants as Con had called them, would be of great value to the British government, the General knew. For sometime the British had been critical of the U.S.’s attitude toward Kai-shek. These documents would bear them out internationally. England had long been collecting substantial material to be used in the form of diplomatic blackmail in whittling down Roosevelt’s policy of de-colonizing the Far East. Also the documents, if made public, would furnish marvelous propaganda not only for the Axis but for the Communists in China. Further it would bear out the Russian attitude on the corrupt state of the Kuomintang.
The General felt like whistling ‘Sweet Rosie O’Grady’ but he did not. He always whistled ‘Sweet Rosie O’Grady’ when he was really upset. “Does Danny know about this affair?”
Con discerned something off-key in the way the General had put the question. “He knows by now,” Con lied. “I sent him runners with two of the documents. For safe-keeping,” he lied again.
“That was tricky,” the General said sarcastically.
“I’ve been hanging around you fellows so long some of it was bound to wear off,” Con said.
The General was raging inside. Raging with Con’s insolence. Raging with the Colonel’s stupidity in bringing Danny to his high position in the organization. “So you think I’m pretty tricky myself?” he asked smoothly, almost pleasantly.
“I guess I shouldn’t have said that, General. I don’t know you that well.”
“But I could be tricky?”
“Why not?” Con grinned suddenly. “You’d have to know a few tricks to make a million bucks.”
It was the first time since their meeting that Con had not shown resentment or bitterness. The General smiled, quickly removing the cigar from his mouth. “Yes, I know a few tricks. Do you think you can get those warrants back from Danny?”
“Yes.”
“Will you?”
“No.”
“You don’t trust me?” the General asked.
“No,” Con said, smiling now.
“Why?”
“Why should I?” Con asked edgily, the smile evaporating like an eight ball in the corner pocket. “Why should I trust you when you persist in backing Kai-shek? To me that puts you on the same team. I won’t play. And you can’t make me play.”
“Suppose I told you that I don’t want them for the reason that you think. That I want those warrants only so the British won’t have them.”
“I wouldn’t believe you. Besides, the British haven’t got them. Danny’s keeping them for me.”
“Danny’s English, Con.”
“You don’t know Danny, General.”
“England will come first,” the General said assuredly.
“Look, General, if you think you can split Danny and me and chew up the remains you’re wasting your time,” Con said.
“I think we should get Danny here,” the General said.
“I guess we finally agree on something,” Con said.
The General walked over and picked his garrison hat up from the table. “You’d better calm down and do some solid thinking, young man. You’d better consider that in a total war there is no such thing as a personality. Men are expendable numbers. And you’d better consider that whether you like the Kai-shek government or not, they’re holding one million Japanese troops immobile. Troops that would otherwise be free to fight in the Pacific, Burma, even in Europe. You’re in hot water, young man. Much more than you realize,” he said, and chewing on the cigar, he set the garrison hat on his head jauntily and strode from the room.
Con watched him go. He half-laughed to himself: I suppose Kai-shek is no personality, he said to himself. I suppose he doesn’t know where these one million Japanese are getting their supplies. Jesus Christ, you’d think he’d feel a little foolish knowing that we were in a way supplying them ourselves. You’d really think that.
Con was tired, very tired. He got up slowly and walked into the bedroom. He lay down on the bed. It was hot. Sun lines streamed through the windows where the curtains parted. He began to sweat. His mind was dull, tired. A mosquito buzzed threateningly overhead. Landed. Bit. Con didn’t move. Out of the corner of his eye he watched it swell, fly heavily away. Soon he fell asleep.
CHAPTER XXXIX
The General and the Colonel drove back to the Colonel’s house. General O’Hanlon told the Colonel they would discuss it at dinner and went up to his room to take a bath. He hadn’t had a bath in two days. Having arrived in a humid India from a cold Europe only three days before he was uncomfortably aware of his need for a bath. In civilian life the General’s chief luxury was a steam bath followed by a long shower and the full treatment in a barber chair. He believed, sincerely, that a man following such a procedure twice weekly could exist on twentyeight hours a week less sleep without impairing his health or nervous system regardless of his age. To a man who thrived on the full life twentyeight hours a week was a fortune in time.
Now he luxuriated in the tub, the cigar still in his mouth. He soaped his white, thick, hairy legs examining the old slick-red shrapnel scars with his fingers with affection. He washed off the soap and got
out of the tub and dried. Wrapping a towel around his waist he put on his slippers and went into the bedroom and sat down on a wicker chair under the fan.
There was nothing that could be done with Con now, he knew. It was unfortunate that they had gone to his quarters in the first place. If he had known anything about the youngster’s nature he would have let him cool off for at least a day, then summoned him to his own ground in an office. Still, he thought, it wouldn’t have done much good. Besides, the Colonel whose authority Con had defied would have insisted on seeing Con at once and receiving some sort of explanation about the executions. The Colonel was being severely pressed by local headquarters and could not be blamed for that. Actually it wasn’t within the General’s jurisdiction, he felt, to penetrate within the boundaries of the Colonel’s command, though in taking over the conversation with Con he had done exactly that. But really only as a preventative measure, neither Con or the Colonel really being in a frame of mind to reason.
In the first place the question with the Colonel was not whether Con had done right or wrong but that he had defied authority. And the Colonel, for all his renegade qualities, was still a regular army officer. Con had disobeyed. Presently the Colonel saw no further. Presently he had no concern except for that basic principle of all soldiering.
On the other hand Con did not even consider this. Because principle had been affected, Con with his basically civilian and idealistic mind could not see authority as any excuse; to him the crime lay in the authority that had permitted it to happen in the first place.
Either the Colonel or Con was to be denied but the General had to admit that if Con were taken to court the advantage would be his. Not because Con was right but because Con was a civilian member of a civilian army that was basically suspicious of all regular personnel. And wars, the General knew, were not created by the military but by civilian forces eager to protect a nationalistic economy or for the future exploitation of the same.
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