Behind the Lines

by W. E. B Griffin

  The flight from Pearl Harbor in the huge, four-engined flying boat was long and rough. A Medical Corps lieutenant commander got airsick thirty minutes out of Pearl, threw up what looked like the remnants of an entire Hawaiian luau and two quarts of beer all over himself and the deck, and then spent the rest of the flight either moaning, dry-heaving, or rubbing his vomit-soaked uniform in McCoy’s face as he made his way—every fifteen minutes—to the head.

  Before McCoy boarded the Coronado at Pearl Harbor, he had run into a zealous Navy lieutenant who wouldn’t let him get on the airplane—AAAAA priority or not—until his shot record was up to date. McCoy’s shot record recorded that he had been injected with every inoculation against every disease known to the Navy Medical Corps. The record itself, however, was in Washington. Ed Sessions had suggested that since he was going to be around for a while, it would make sense to have the contents of the shot record incorporated into all his official records.

  Sessions hadn’t gotten it back to him when the hurry-up call from General Pickering to go to Brisbane came in.

  The idiot at Pearl actually wanted to give him the entire series of inoculations again. But a medical lieutenant commander at the hospital was more reasonable. He gave McCoy “credit” for all the shots given Marines in the States, but insisted that McCoy take the series prescribed for people headed for the Pacific and/or South West Pacific Ocean Areas—despite McCoy’s protestations that he had been in Australia only the month before, and had had the shots then.

  So he suffered from the side effects of half a dozen inoculations—including a left buttock that felt as if it had been bitten by a poisonous snake. He couldn’t sit on his sore left buttock without pain, and there was no way, on the pipe-and-cloth seats of the Coronado, to avoid sitting on it.

  Before the Coronado took off from Pearl Harbor, there was a long flight on an Army Air Corps B-17 Flying Fortress from San Francisco. He spent that flight making himself as comfortable as possible on a pile of mail sacks.

  McCoy climbed out of the whaleboat and then, carrying his bag, made his way up the stone steps cut into the wharf.

  Second Lieutenant Hart saluted First Lieutenant McCoy.

  There was nothing wrong with the salute. It was crisp and accompanied by a smile.

  “Give me your bag, Mr. McCoy,” Hart said. “You must be a little weary.”

  McCoy returned Hart’s salute and handed over his bag. Hart picked it up effortlessly—the sonofabitch really has a build—and then gestured down the wharf. McCoy looked and saw General Pickering’s Studebaker staff car.

  “You’re cleared through the arrival processing, Mr. McCoy,” Hart said. “The General arranged it.”

  “Thank you,” McCoy said, and started walking toward the Studebaker.

  There’s nothing really wrong with Hart. He didn’t ask for that gold bar; and for that matter, I’m the guy who recruited him for General Pickering from Parris Island.

  And, oh, shit, I know for a fact he’s not a candy-ass. When I told him I was going to leave him alone overnight on the beach at Buka, all he said was “OK.” That took balls.

  What’s wrong around here, McCoy, is you. You’ve got a bad case of candy-ass yourself. “It isn’t fair that I’m back here.”

  “I don’t think the discipline of the entire Marine Corps would collapse if you called me ‘Ken,’ George.”

  “That would presume I have forgiven you for leaving me on that beach all by my lonesome, Mr. McCoy. I’m not quite at that point yet.”

  “Well, in that case, go fuck yourself, Mr. Hart.”

  “Hey, before I forget it: When you see Koffler, and he thanks you for his wedding present, just say ‘You’re welcome.’ ”

  “You bought him a wedding present, and said it was from me?”

  “Two sets of pajamas, from the Officers’ Sale Store.”

  “How much?”

  “Now that you mention it, four-fifty each, plus two bits to have the fly sewn shut on the bride’s. Nine and a quarter.”

  McCoy stopped, took out his wallet, and handed Hart a ten-dollar bill.

  “Thanks, George,” he said, and then thought aloud: “How did you know you’d get your money back?”

  “You ever hear what they say about bad pennies, they keep turning up?”

  In other words, you didn’t. You’re really a nice guy, Hart.

  “How’s the General?” McCoy asked.

  “Ask him yourself,” Hart said, and effortlessly waved McCoy’s bag toward the Studebaker.

  Brigadier General Fleming W. Pickering was in the process of stepping out of the front passenger seat.

  “Jesus Christ,” McCoy muttered. “It’s five o’clock in the morning. What’s he doing up at this hour?”

  “I think he wants to talk to you before you get out to Water Lily,” Hart said. “As a matter of fact, I know he does. He told me.”

  “I’d welcome you to Australia, Ken,” General Pickering said as McCoy came near. “But I’m afraid you’d throw something at me. Sorry about this; it was necessary.”

  McCoy saluted crisply.

  “Good morning, Sir.”

  “How was the flight?”

  “I’ve had better, Sir,” McCoy said.

  “You all right? You’re walking funny.”

  “I had a shot where I sit, Sir. It’s a little sore. I’ll be all right.”

  “Get in the back, Ken,” Pickering said. “I want to talk to you before we get to the cottage.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir.”

  “George, take twenty minutes or so to drive us home.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir.”

  “I didn’t think. Ken, are you hungry?”

  “I’m all right, Sir.”

  “Somehow, I suspect that’s not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

  “I’m all right, Sir. I can wait until we get to the cottage.”

  “If you’re sure,” Pickering said doubtfully. “I’d really like to get this out of the way.”

  “I’m all right, Sir,” McCoy repeated.

  “OK, then get in.”

  A general officer, McCoy thought, is holding the door for me.

  There were two reminders that Pickering was a general officer—first when Hart removed the covers from the red-starred general officer’s plates on the car, and again when they passed the guard at the gate to the Navy base. He started saluting the car long before they reached the guard shack.

  Pickering returned the guard’s salute casually, then extended a cigar case to McCoy. McCoy took one.

  “Thank you, Sir.”

  “Cuban,” Pickering said. “The Pacific Commerce called here. Unfortunately for her master, I remembered he was a cigar smoker. I pulled rank on him and relieved him of his stock. So he smokes his thumb on the long voyage to San Francisco, and you and I and El Supremo have something to smoke.”

  Typical General Pickering, McCoy thought. If he got cigars from one of his ships, it was because he asked for them politely, not demanded them, and the captain gave him all he had, not so much because Pickering owns Pacific & Far East Shipping, but because the captain, like everybody else I’ve ever known who works for him, would give him the shirt off his back.

  “Two questions, Ken,” Pickering said. “How would you feel about going back to the Philippines? I mean by rubber boat off a submarine?”

  “I’m a Marine, Sir. I go where I’m ordered.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “Every time I start feeling sorry for myself, Sir, I remind myself I’m not on Guadalcanal, living in the mud, with people trying to kill me.”

  “Are you feeling sorry for yourself right now?”

  “I thought I was going to have four or five months in the States.”

  “With Ernie, you mean,” Pickering said. It was not a question. “How is she?”

  “Just fine, Sir.”

  She was fine when she put me on the plane, but when Ed Sessions showed up at her apartment with my
plane tickets, she lost it. I’d never seen her cry before.

  Pickering grunted.

  “You coming back must have been tough on her. But she’s a tough little lady.”

  You didn’t see her cry.

  “Yes, Sir. She is. I have a package for you—it’s in my bag—from Mr. Sage. I was going to send it with an officer courier, but then ...”

  “How do you get along with him?”

  “If I were him, I don’t think I’d like me, either. Ernie deserves better than this, than me.”

  “Better than this, maybe. But if I had a daughter, I wouldn’t be laying barbed wire to keep you away from her.”

  McCoy chuckled. “Thank you, Sir.”

  “Second question: How do you get along with Colonel Jack Stecker?”

  What kind of a question is that? How do I get along with him? He’s a light colonel and I’m a first lieutenant. He’ll tell me what to do, and I will do it.

  “Colonel Stecker is a fine Marine, Sir.”

  “And he was a fine buck sergeant in the First World War. My question was, ‘How do you get along with him?’ ”

  “I say ‘Aye, aye, Sir’ to him a lot.”

  “Am I hearing, ‘He’s a fine Marine, but I don’t like him’?”

  “No, Sir,” McCoy replied quickly and sincerely.

  “Does the name Fertig mean anything to you?”

  “He didn’t surrender in the Philippines?” McCoy asked.

  “Right.”

  “I picked up on a little about him in Washington,” McCoy said.

  “Right. He’s a reserve Army officer, a captain ...”

  The way I heard it, he’s a light bird, McCoy thought, but said nothing.

  “... who has a radio, an obsolete code machine, and says he is establishing a guerrilla force. He’s got some people with him, including some Marines. El Supremo is a little embarrassed about him—after he announced there was absolutely no possibility of guerrilla activity in the Philippines, this fellow Fertig shows up—but Nimitz, and more important, Leahy and Frank Knox think he may have potential.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “What I want to do is send you and Jack Stecker into the Philippines—specifically, onto Mindanao. You’ll take Fertig some supplies, a radio, some codes, medicine, small arms, et cetera.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir.”

  “But your primary mission will be to evaluate him, the people around him, and his, their, potential. Between you and Stecker, I think you have the experience and the knowledge to come up with some valid answers.”

  The last poop I had was that Eighth and Eye was giving Colonel Rickabee a bad time about transferring Stecker to Management Analysis. Did they finally get off their fat asses?

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “I’m going to have Stecker transferred ...”

  What’s he doing, reading my mind?

  “... to us. I asked for him some time ago, got no response, and finally had enough of the feet-dragging at Eighth and Eye, and went right to Frank Knox.”

  Well, that ought to get them off their fat asses. But they’ll have their knives out for you, and Stecker, and anybody connected with either one of you.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Unfortunately, until he is transferred to us—he’s here in Australia to set up for the First Marine Division’s refitting and rehabilitation when they’re relieved from Guadalcanal— I can’t involve him officially. As far as that goes, I haven’t even asked him if he’d be willing to go. But I’ve been pumping his brain and his experience, and Feldt is trying to get an Aussie submarine to take you and the supplies. If that falls through, I think I can get one from the Navy, from Nimitz. When you speak with Stecker, stay off the subject of him going with you.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir.”

  “How soon do you think you could be ready to go?”

  “Did you say, Sir, that Colonel Stecker’s arranged for the supplies you want me to take in?”

  “They’re available on twenty-four hours’ notice.”

  I don’t want to go to the goddamned Philippines. What I want to do is go home, and put my arms around Ernie, and tell her I’m back and I’m going to be there awhile.

  “Then, if we have an Aussie submarine, we can go in twenty-four hours, Sir,” McCoy said, and then raised his voice. “Hey, George, you want to go for another rubber-boat ride?”

  “No, Sir. Thank you very much just the same, Sir.”

  “George can’t go,” Pickering said. “For reasons I can’t tell you.”

  Which means that Hart now has one of these MAGIC clearances I’m not supposed to know about. Just got it. He couldn’t have gone along on the Buka Operation if he had had a MAGIC clearance. Banning wouldn’t have gone with me to the Gobi Desert, and Hart can’t go with me to the Philippines. People with MAGIC clearances are not expendable. Stecker and I don’t have them, so we’re expendable.

  How about giving me a MAGIC clearance, General, so I can’t do crap like this? And while you’re at it, how about throwing in one for Colonel Stecker?

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “It won’t be in twenty-four hours, obviously,” Pickering said. “But don’t sign any long-term leases, Ken.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir.”

  “Take us home, George,” General Pickering ordered. “We’re done.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir.”

  “You sure you don’t want to change your mind, George?”

  McCoy asked. “Maybe this time you won’t fall out of the boat.”

  “Once is enough, thank you just the same, for that sort of thing,” Hart said.

  “Ken, I said George can’t go,” Pickering said.

  “I’m just pulling his chain, Sir.”

  [THREE]

  Water Lily Cottage

  Brisbane, Australia

  0605 Hours 14 November 1942

  Two U.S. Army jeeps, a jeep with USMC markings, and a 1938 Jaguar Drop Head Coupe were parked in front of the cottage when Hart pulled the Studebaker up in front of the wide porch that circled the rambling frame building. Without thinking consciously about it, McCoy identified the vehicles and concluded that just about everybody who lived in Water Lily Cottage was “home.”

  The Jaguar was the General’s personal vehicle, made available to him by its owner, an Australian executive of Pacific & Far East Shipping Corporation. “One of the world’s great automobiles,” Pickering often declared, “presuming you can get the sonofabitch to start, and if you don’t mind a leaking roof.”

  The Marine Corps jeep was probably Colonel Stecker’s. The U.S. Army jeeps, which carried the bumper markings of the SWPOA motor pool, were assigned for the use of the “Dungeon Dwellers”: The Dungeon—more formally known as the SWPOA Cryptographic Room—was so called because it was located in the subbasement of the Supreme Headquarters SWPOA Building, behind a creaking steel door, and with walls that oozed condensation.

  Within the Cryptographic Room (which was actually a suite) there was another room behind another heavy, always locked steel door. It was a cryptographic section guarding one of the most closely held—and vitally important—secrets of the war, which went by the code name MAGIC.

  Navy cryptographers at the Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii, Navy Base had broken many—by no means all—of the Japanese Imperial General Staff and Imperial Navy codes. Not only was the very fact that the codes had been broken classified TOP SECRET, but access to intercepted and decrypted messages was limited to a very few people, personally approved by the Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief, Admiral William Leahy, or by the President himself. The Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and the Supreme Commander, South West Pacific Ocean Area, General Douglas MacArthur, were on the list. So were Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, USMCR, and Colonel F. L. Rickabee, of the Office of Management Analysis.

  McCoy was assigned to the Office of Management Analysis after he was commissioned, and in the course of events learned more than he had any right to know about
MAGIC. He did not consciously seek this knowledge, but it was not difficult for him to pick up a fact here and a fact there—it would have been difficult, or impossible, for him not to—and assemble a rather clear picture of MAGIC, and of how USMC Special Detachment 16 (the official unit description for Management Analysis personnel stationed in Australia) were involved with it.

  It was clear to McCoy that Major Hon Song Do, Signal Corps, USA, on. “Temporary Duty” with Detachment 16, and Second Lieutenant John Marston Moore, USMCR, were far more than a pair of cryptographic officers assigned to handle routine classified material for SWPOA.

  Hon, a Korean-American from Hawaii, was not only absolutely fluent in Japanese, but held a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Moore was born in Japan to missionary parents, studied at the University of Tokyo, and was equally fluent in Japanese.

  At least once a day, sometimes more often, one or the other of them had a private session with General Douglas MacArthur, and sometimes his Intelligence Officer, Brigadier General Charles Willoughby. They went to these meetings—without leaving the SWPOA Headquarters Building—with a briefcase chained to their wrists, and carrying .45 pistols under their uniform tunics.

  Hence, carrying something really secret. What sort of secrets? Secrets that could not be shared with the other general officers at SWPOA; secrets that had to be handled with even greater care than other TOP SECRET material coming into SWPOA; under a classification, MAGIC, that no one was even supposed to talk about.

  Hon was a mathematician. Mathematicians broke codes. Hon and Moore were Japanese linguists. By definition, Japanese linguists dealt with the translation of Japanese.

  In other words, McCoy correctly concluded, Hon and Moore were reading, translating, interpreting, some kind of highly classified Japanese material. Why highly classified? There would be no strict security involved if all they were doing was reading captured Japanese documents; the more people who knew what the Japanese were doing and thinking, the better.

  Unless, perhaps, they were reading intercepted Japanese encrypted radio messages—and didn’t want the Japanese to know that their code was broken. That would explain a good many things—why so few people had access to MAGIC material, why anyone who had knowledge of MAGIC was absolutely forbidden to go anywhere where there was any chance at all of their falling into Japanese hands.