W.E.B. Griffin - The Corps VII - Behind the Lines

"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 and 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."