Behind the Lines

by W. E. B Griffin

  “What would you say are the chances that the President has already seen, or will soon see, that goddamn special channel?”

  “One hundred percent, Bill. If Frank Knox doesn’t show it—hasn’t already shown it—to him, I’m sure he’ll get it back-channel. Nimitz to Leahy to FDR.”

  “I don’t like to be sandbagged like that. I’ll burn Pickering’s ass for this.”

  “For what?

  “What do you mean, for what? Did you read that?”

  “General Pickering, in compliance with his orders, is making every reasonable effort to include our guy on the mission. He’s on the submarine. If he doesn’t go ashore, it will be because the officer in charge decides that his presence would pose a threat to the mission.”

  “Our guy is a captain. This McCoy is only a lieutenant. Our guy should be the officer-in-command.”

  “This one made the Makin Island raid with Roosevelt’s son,” Morrissette said. “And if you think Pickering hasn’t made sure that FDR knows that, you’re underestimating him again.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You’ll have a hard time convincing FDR that Pickering’s sandbagging you by putting this lieutenant in charge. This lieutenant is a Marine Raider, and Marine Raiders generally—and especially one who was on the Makin raid with young Roosevelt—are the apples of FDR’s eye.”

  “You don’t really expect me to take this lying down?”

  “Are you asking for advice?”

  “Yeah. Advise me.”

  “Make your peace with Pickering.”

  Donovan looked at him for a long moment.

  “Thank you, Mo,” he said. “Is there anything else?” Morrissette shook his head, no.

  XV

  [ONE]

  Headquarters, U.S. Forces in the Philippines

  Davao Oriental Province

  Mindanao, Commonwealth of the Philippines

  1845 Hours 23 December 1942

  It was raining, and Captain James B. Weston, USFIP, stumbled while climbing—and nearly slipped off—the rain-stick ladderlike stairs leading to the quarters of Brigadier General Wendell W. Fertig. He managed not to drop his Thompson submachine gun, but his campaign hat fell into the darkness, and he had to climb back down the stairs and look for it on his hands and knees under the house.

  Finally, he gained the porch and walked down it to the door. Hanging over the door as a blackout device was a piece of canvas—reclaimed by United States Forces in the Philippines after six months of service to the Japanese on a captured U.S. Army ton-and-a-half truck.

  Someone remembered reading that the light of a candle could be seen from an aircraft on a dark night for seven miles. It sounded a bit incredible, but Headquarters USFIP was in no position to put their incredulity to the test, and General Fertig had ordered blackout curtains over all doors and windows after nightfall, whenever lanterns or candles were alight inside.

  Weston pushed aside the blackout curtain and stepped inside. The only light came from one kerosene lamp and three homemade lamps consisting of burning wicks in the necks of Coca-Cola bottles filled with coconut oil; but Weston’s eyes, accustomed to the absolute blackness of the night, took a moment to adjust.

  After they adjusted, he saw General Fertig behind his desk, and two of the three members of the USFIP Signal Section—Second Lieutenant Robert Ball (signal officer) and Sergeant Ignacio LaMadrid (chief radio operator)—sitting on rattan chairs. Ball and LaMadrid held Coca-Cola bottles containing the getting-better-all-the-time USFIP brewed beer, and four bottles of beer, three of them empty, were on Fertig’s desk.

  The cocktail hour, Weston thought, to which I was not invited.

  “You sent for me, Sir?” he asked.

  “As our intelligence officer, and, of course, as a Marine, Captain Weston,” Fertig said. “I’m sure you are a veritable cornucopia of arcane information vis-à-vis Naval lore.”

  “Sir?”

  I don’t think anybody but The General was invited to his cocktail hour.

  “Lieutenant Ball, Sergeant LaMadrid, and myself have all been wondering what the Navy expects to find in heaven,” Fertig said.

  Is he plastered?

  “I don’t think I understand, Sir.”

  “I’m disappointed,” Fertig said. “I was hoping the answer to that intriguing conundrum would immediately occur to you.”

  “Sorry, Sir, I just don’t understand.”

  “What occurred to me was that what a sailor would hope to find would be a bevy of naked beauties and real, cold beer, but that doesn’t seem to fit. Show that to Captain Weston, would you, please, Lieutenant Ball?”

  Ball handed Weston a sheet of paper, its carbon-paper characters hard to read in the dim light.

  1234567890123456789012345

  LUDMILLAZHIVKOVZANESVILLE

  “That came in about an hour ago,” Lieutenant Ball said.

  “A strong signal, Sir,” Sergeant LaMadrid amplified, “and it was repeated, two, three times, from both Australia and Pearl Harbor.”

  “Use what Nave—Navy—” Weston read haltingly, “will find in heaven as sim sub code. ‘Use what Navy will find in heaven’? What the hell does that mean?”

  Jesus, that sounds familiar, Jim Weston thought, and then felt a chill.

  “ ‘If the Army and the Navy,’ ” he intoned softly, “ ‘ever look on heaven’s scenes, they will find the streets are guarded by United States Marines.’ ”

  “Bingo!” Lieutenant Ball said. “That has to be it.”

  “The Marine Hymn,” Weston said. “How long will it take you to decrypt the message using that?”

  “About ten minutes,” Ball said. “After we get the message.”

  “That’s all you’ve got? You don’t have the message?”

  “That’s all we have,” Sergeant LaMadrid said.

  “I’m sure there will be more,” Fertig said. “And while we’re waiting, Captain Weston, would you care for a beer?”

  “Yes, thank you, Sir.”

  The Signal Officer of USFIP, the Intelligence Officer, his deputy, and the Commanding General had considerably more trouble decrypting the number blocks of Message Two when it arrived two hours later.

  The highest number used was 53. It was therefore logical to presume that the phrase to use for simple substitution contained fifty-three characters.

  STREETSGUARDEDBYUSMARINES

  1234567890123456789012345

  This was twenty-five characters, although it was possible that the phrase would be repeated twice. They could, Lieutenant Ball said, come back to this later if nothing else seemed to work.

  STREETSAREGUARDEDBYUNITEDSTATESMARINES

  12345678901234567890123456789012345678

  was thirty-eight characters, too short by itself and too long if the phrase was to be duplicated.

  THESTREETSAREGUARDEDBYUNITEDSTATESMARINES

  12345678901234567890123456789012345678901

  was forty-one characters, also too short and too long.

  THESTREETSAREGUARDEDBYUSMARINES

  1234567890123456789012345678901

  was thirty-one characters, also too short by itself, but if used twice, not too much longer (sixty-two characters versus the required fifty-three). It was worthy of further consideration. Perhaps the extra nine characters in the repeated phrase would not prove to be important.

  Finally, the complete phrase from the Marine Hymn—as precisely as it could be remembered by Weston and Second Lieutenant Percy L. Everly—was tried:THEYWILLFINI7THESTREETSAREGUARDEDBYUNITEDSTATESMARINES

  12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123

  It was precisely fifty-three characters. It had to be the substitution phrase. The number blocks of Message Two were decrypted. They made some—not very much, but some—sense.

  Lieutenant Percy L. Everly had a stab at it. “Lille—who the hell is Lille?—and Erny—that has to be Zimmerman—will eat beans—what the hell does that mean?—thirty miles suuth—that could be, probably is, ‘sou
th’ but south of what?—this murning—this morning.”

  “Sir,” Sergeant LaMadrid said, “that’s ‘liller.’ With an ‘r,’ Sir, before the ‘and.’ ”

  “Killer!” Lieutenant Everly said. “Goddamn, LaMadrid, you’re not as dumb as you look. ‘Killer and Erny,’ that’s what it is.”

  “Killer and Erny meaning the people you knew, Lieutenant Everly?” General Fertig asked.

  “Yes, Sir. China Marines, Sir. Ernie Zimmerman and Killer McCoy.”

  “Will eat beans thirty miles south this morning?” Weston thought aloud. “The key words are ‘beans’ and ‘thirty miles south.’ What the hell can that mean?”

  “Beans, beans, beans, lima beans, string beans ... isn’t there a village called ‘St. Rose of Lima” or something like that?” Ball asked.

  “Yes, there is,” General Fertig said. “And there is also a village called Boston on the east coast. Boston baked beans. Weston, for God’s sake I hope you still have our one National Geographic Society map of this island?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “I suggest you bring it,” Fertig said.

  “Thirty miles south of St. Rose of Lima is fifty miles from nowhere, up here in the hills,” Captain Weston said, using his finger as a pointer on the tattered map. “Thirty miles south of Boston is this little bump sticking into the ocean.”

  “I believe they call that a ‘promontory,’ Captain Weston,” Fertig said. “How far is that from here?”

  Weston measured it with a scrap of paper applied to the legend on the National Geographic Society map.

  “Sixty miles, Sir.”

  “If we are to accept that these two people will be eating beans there this morning, we have to define ‘morning,’ ” Fertig said. “One of two things is true. They are already on Mindanao, and are suggesting this as a rendezvous point. Or they will land there, presumably from a submarine. I think I’d bet on the latter. If this assumption is correct, and we further assume a submarine would prefer to surface no longer than is absolutely necessary, I would suggest ‘morning’ would mean at first light.”

  “My God,” Ball said. “Do you really think someone’s coming this morning?”

  “Are there any arguments to my assumptions?” Fertig asked.

  There were none.

  “The next question would then seem to be, gentlemen, what are we going to do about it? There is no way we could get anyone from here—you said sixty miles, Weston?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “No way we can get anyone to this point,” Fertig went on, “sixty miles distant from here by first light. The possibility exists that whoever these people are, they will attempt to make contact with USFIP, fail to do so, and withdraw.”

  “General, Sir, excuse me?” Sergeant LaMadrid said.

  “Yes, Sergeant?”

  “I have the motorcycle, General, Sir.”

  “Shit,” Lieutenant Percy L. Lewis said. “I forgot about that.”

  “Can we get the motorcycle down to the road at night?” Fertig asked.

  “More important, is it running?” Weston asked. “Do we have gas for it? Will it make it for sixty miles?”

  “It doesn’t have a muffler. It’ll call every Jap in ten miles,” Everly said.

  “It has the gasoline,” Sergeant LaMadrid said. “And it will go the distance if the oil does not exhaust itself. I will conduct it with great care.”

  “You’re not going, Sergeant,” Fertig said. “I can’t afford to lose my radio operator.”

  “I’ll go,” Weston said immediately.

  “Can you ride a motorcycle, Mr. Weston?” Lieutenant Everly asked.

  “It can’t be that hard,” Weston said. “It’s only a bicycle with a motor, right? I can ride a bike.”

  “I’ll go,” Everly said. “I can ride a motorcycle.”

  “You’ll both go,” General Fertig said. “You will both attempt to make your presence known to the submarine, if there is a submarine. If there is a submarine, Captain Weston will remain on the beach to do whatever has to be done, and Lieutenant Everly will get back on the motorcycle to establish contact with the patrol which Captain Hedges will be leading from here, and lead it to the rendezvous point. If there is no submarine, Lieutenant Everly will meet Captain Hedges, who will then return the patrol here. In that circumstance, you will have to get back here by yourself, Weston.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir.”

  “We will have to establish, right now, the path of the patrol, and Everly will have to memorize it. It would be best, Weston, if you were unaware of the patrol’s route.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir.”

  The thinking behind that isn’t hard to figure out, Weston thought. There is a very good chance that I’ll be captured. If I don’t know the patrol’s route, then I can’t tell the Japanese, no matter what they do to me.

  “When the patrol leaves, we will relocate Headquarters, USFIP,” Fertig said. “If this maneuver proves successful, I will get word of the new location to you. If it doesn’t, it won’t matter whether you know where we are or not.”

  “Yeah,” Lieutenant Everly said thoughtfully, and quickly corrected himself: “Yes, Sir.”

  “Captain Weston, would you please give my compliments to Captain Hedges and ask him to join me?”

  “Aye, aye, Sir.”

  “Sergeant LaMadrid, would you please instruct Lieutenant Everly in the operation of your motorcycle, and then, using the new Marine Hymn substitution code, transmit the following message to both Australia and Pearl Harbor: ‘We’ll bring the hot dogs. Fertig.’ ”

  “Sir,” Weston said.

  “What is it?”

  “May I suggest the message be ‘We’ll try to bring the hot dogs’?”

  “Oh, ye of little faith,” Fertig said. “Send ‘We’ll bring the hot dogs,’ Sergeant LaMadrid.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Sergeant LaMadrid said.

  [TWO]

  Approximately 30 miles south of Boston

  Davao Oriental Province

  Mindanao, Commonwealth of the Philippines

  0501 Hours 24 December 1942

  It was raining. It had alternated between raining and drizzling all night. The road was slippery and they spilled five times, but suffered nothing more than damaged egos and Christ only knew how much mud and slime forced into the actions of their weapons.

  United States Forces in the Philippines, having decreed a state of martial law, had issued an order that all road signs that might be useful to the Japanese be destroyed, removed, moved, obliterated, or otherwise rendered unusable. The Filipinos had carried out the order with an efficiency that disheartened and frustrated Captain Weston. Since they couldn’t go into Boston and start counting from there, he needed road markers to tell them how far they were south of Boston.

  The next-to-last spill occurred when Weston spotted a nearly concealed concrete mile marker the Filipinos had missed. He applied the brakes too suddenly when he wanted a closer look.

  Using Mile Marker 19 as a reference point, they continued 10.0 miles farther down what had been Highway 1. And then, hiding the motorcycle a hundred yards off the road—in a spot where Weston was convinced it would next be seen by archaeologists in the year 1999—they proceeded on foot through the rain-soaked jungle until they heard, but did not see, the surf crashing on the beach.

  They then proceeded at approximately a hundred yards’ distance from the beach—and the Japanese patrols that might be on the beach—until they reached the tip of what Weston would never forget was called a promontory.

  Not without effort, they climbed the tallest trees they could find that might offer a view of the shoreline and ocean, then climbed down again when they could see nothing but other trees. Everly fell the last twenty feet and sprained his ankle. This would pose problems when the time came for him to return to the motorcycle, presuming he could find the motorcycle.

  Then, with one hundred yards separating them—if there was a patrol, one of them might stand a chance of escapi
ng—they crawled through the steaming slime to the end of the vegetation, and there took up their vigil.

  To protect them both against an inadvertent discharge in case the trigger snagged in the vegetation, Captain Weston had carried his weapon without a round ready to be chambered and fired when he pulled the trigger. Now, his heart leaping, he pulled back the bolt on the Thompson, rolled over on his back, and prepared to fire at whatever was coming through the jungle at him.

  “Easy, Mr. Weston,” Everly hissed. “Easy does it.”

  “You scared the shit out of me.”

  “Did you see the Japs?”

  Weston’s heart jumped. He shook his head, no.

  “Four of them, headed north,” Everly said. “A corporal and three privates.”

  “They’ve gone?”

  Everly nodded.

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “There’s two people out there in a black rubber boat,” Everly said.

  Weston looked. Visibility was very poor, and the sea very wide, but eventually he saw two men, dressed in black, in a small, black rubber boat, their backs bent to lower their silhouette, paddling slowly through the black water toward the shore.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “The Japs may come back, or they may not,” Everly said. “Your call, Mr. Weston.”

  “What do you mean, ‘my call’?”

  “Do you want to take the chance that they won’t come back? If they do come back, they’re going to see the boat for sure. If they haven’t already seen it, and already started somewhere where they can report it. They didn’t have a radio that I could see.”

  Weston thought the situation over.

  “I don’t think they’re just marching down the beach,” Everly went on. “A truck must have put them off down that way.” He pointed south. “They’ll have a walk on the beach, and the truck will pick them up somewhere down that way.” He pointed north. “Unless they climb a telephone pole and tap into the line, which I don’t think is likely, they’re going to have to go someplace, in the truck, to get on a telephone. Even if they’ve seen the boat, four of them aren’t going to do anything; they’d want more people, and they sure as hell are under orders to report something like this.”