Captain Saikaku disagreed with Major Ieyasu, and did so with less tact than Ieyasu expected. Neither Saikaku’s disagreement, nor his lack of tact, surprised Lieutenant Colonel Tange.
“It is the policy of the Emperor,” Saikaku pontificated, “that we enlist the support of the people here by incorporating them into the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Hanging forty-odd innocent Filipinos is not the way to do that.”
“Nineteen of His Majesty’s soldiers have been murdered, including a senior officer who was a dear friend,” Ieyasu snapped. “That cannot go unpunished. Moreover, the attack itself challenges our authority here, and that cannot be tolerated.”
“If we had the people who did this, I would put the rope around their necks myself. I would do so in the square here, with the people watching. But we don’t have the people who did this—”
“We know who they are,” Ieyasu interrupted. “This so-called ‘U.S. Forces in the Philippines.’ ”
“No, Sir, we don’t know that,” Saikaku responded. “That is one possibility.”
“And the others?”
“Simple bandits. Mindanao has a long history of banditry.”
“We found U.S. Army cartridge cases all over the site, for U.S. Army rifles and submachine guns.”
“Which proves nothing. Before we liberated these islands, bandits—many of them members of the Moro tribe—frequently attacked U.S. and Filipino Army units, robbed them, and made off with their weapons. What I am saying is that the execution of forty-odd Filipinos on the questionable premise that they aided U.S. Forces in the Philippines would both unnecessarily antagonize the Filipino population and would lend credence to the idea that U.S. Forces in the Philippines is in fact a military force which threatens us. We don’t want that to happen.”
“What makes you so sure U.S. Forces in the Philippines is not ‘a military force which threatens us’?” Ieyasu demanded.
“Well, for one thing,” Saikaku said, “we have been reading all their communications traffic with the Americans in Australia. They keep asking for supplies, including such basic items as radios and radio codes; and Australia keeps replying that their requests are being considered.”
“I personally found that interesting, Major Ieyasu,” Colonel Tange said. “If this man Fertig—and especially if he were actually a general officer—was sent here, or was left behind when the Americans surrendered, it would seem logical that he would have been provided with both good radios and a cryptographic system.”
“Exactly,” Captain Saikaku said.
“Perhaps, Captain Saikaku,” Major Ieyasu said sarcastically, “you would be good enough to tell us how you would recommend the Colonel deal with this matter?”
“I am sure the Colonel has already decided how to do that,” Saikaku said smoothly.
“Let’s hear what you have to say, Saikaku,” Colonel Tange said.
“Sir, I would arrest all the able-bodied males within a five-mile area of the robbery site—”
“Robbery and murder site,” Major Ieyasu interrupted.
“—robbery and murder site,” Saikaku went on. “And subject them to intensive interrogation. A thorough and skillful interrogation, by which I mean there would be no evident marks on their bodies on their release.”
“On their release? In other words, before we arrest them, you don’t think a ‘thorough and skillful interrogation’ will come up with anything?”
“I doubt that it will, Major Ieyasu,” Saikaku replied. “But I think we have to try. We may find some information, perhaps nothing useful now, but useful to us later. Then we release the prisoners. By arresting them, and then releasing them without serious physical harm, we will accomplish several things. First, we will establish our authority by the very act of arresting them. Second, they will learn—and may be counted on to pass on—just how uncomfortable a Kempeitai thorough and professional interrogation can be. And finally, by releasing them, we will prove that while we are firm, we are just.”
“Very interesting,” Colonel Tange said. “I wish to consider that at my leisure.”
Everyone in the room understood that Colonel Tange’s decision would look very much like what Captain Saikaku had suggested—either because that was what he had already come up with on his own, or because Saikaku’s ideas seemed to be the best offered. But to make that announcement now would cause Major Ieyasu to lose face.
“You said Lieutenant Hideyori is outside, Captain Saikaku?” Colonel Tange went on. “Has he something to report?”
“No, Sir. I spoke with him at length before I came here. Should the Colonel desire, I am prepared to give a brief report on his failure. I ordered him to be here in case the Colonel, or Major Ieyasu, would like to talk with him personally.”
“Let’s have the brief report,” Tange ordered.
“There have been fewer and fewer communications between Fertig and Australia. I alluded to this before. He asks for supplies; they reply that his request is being considered, and give him a time for his next transmission. The time between such contacts seems to be growing longer.
“This, however, makes Lieutenant Hideyori’s efforts to locate the transmitter much more difficult, as Fertig seems to be moving his transmitter after every exchange with Australia. He moves the transmitter within an area thirty miles wide east to west and seventy miles north to south, and always where there are few roads.”
“In other words, he’s no closer to finding the transmitter than ever?” Colonel Tange asked.
“I regret that seems to be the case,” Saikaku replied. “Shall I send for him, Colonel?”
“In your judgment, is he doing everything he should be doing?”
“Yes, Sir. He is.”
“Then there’s really no point in wasting my time talking to him, is there?”
“I would not think so, Sir.”
“Thank you, gentlemen, that will be all,” Colonel Tange said. “Major Ieyasu, would you please stay behind?”
[TWO]
Rocky Fields Farm
Bernardsville, New Jersey
1615 Hours 25 October 1942
Miss Ernestine Sage stepped out of her bathroom stark naked, in the process of toweling her hair, having decided it made sense to bathe now, while her father and Ken McCoy were trying to fit in an hour or so of hunting before supper, rather than before she went to bed.
As soon as dinner was over, she intended to announce that she was tired, they all had a busy day tomorrow, and why didn’t everybody go to bed?
Thirty minutes after that, she planned to sneak as quietly as possible down the corridor past her parents’ bedroom and into the guest bedroom. Ken would not expect her to do that, and it would be a pleasant, if discomfiting, surprise for him. And she had no intention of going back to her bedroom, no matter what his protests.
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 perception.
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 Marine 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 period 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 Ernest 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 semidisqualifying characteristic as the perfect suitor was his proclivity for wild-oats sowing.
Though Ernie unfortunately regarded Pick as a trouble-making 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 batrels. “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, f suspect he knows what’s he’s talking about. I will not challenge him on that. There probably is some chemical reaction, vis-à-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; always 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.
Behind the Lines Page 19