W.E.B. Griffin - The Corps 03 - Counterattack

"Sir!" he barked.

Feldt made a vague gesture with his right hand in the direction of his forehead; it could only charitably be called a salute.

"What have you there, son?"

"Group Captain Deane’s compliments, Sir. He said he thought you should see these straight off."

He handed Feldt a large manila envelope. Feldt tore it open. It contained a slightly smaller envelope, this one stampedmost secret. Feldt opened this one and took out a half-dozen eight-inch-square photographs. Banning guessed they were aerials.

"These are from where?" Feldt asked after a moment. Banning heard no suggestion in his voice now that Feldt had been drinking.

"Buka Island, Sir," the RAAF man said.

"That will be all, thank you. Please convey to Group Captain Deane my deep appreciation."

"Sir!" the RAAF man barked again, saluted and stamped his foot, and quick-marched out of the room.

Feldt shoved the thin stack of photographs across the table to Banning and then stood up.

Banning saw a man in a field, holding his arms above his head. There were three views of this, each differing slightly, as if they had been taken within seconds of each other. Matching each view were blow-ups, showing just the man and a small area around him.

Feldt reappeared with a large magnifying glass with a handle. He dropped to his knees and examined each of the photographs with great care.

"Well, at least he was still alive when these were taken," Feldt said.

"What am I looking at?" Banning asked. He enunciated the words very carefully; for he now very much regretted helping himself so liberally to the Scotch, and he wanted at least to sound as sober as possible.

"Can I look?" Joe Howard asked.

"Sure," Feldt said, and then went on, "Sub-Lieutenant Jacob Reeves. From whom we haven’t heard in the last ten days or so. He’s on Buka. Important spot. I was afraid the Nips had nipped him. But it’s just that his wireless is out."

Banning looked at him. There had been no intent on Feldt’s part, he saw, to play with words. Feldt was perfectly serious when he said nipped by the Nips. He was now icily serious. "How do you know his radio is out?" Howard asked. "What the bloody hell else do you think ‘RA’ could mean?" Feldt asked impatiently, almost contemptuously. He pointed, and Banning saw what he had missed. The tall grass, or what ever the hell it was, in the field had been cut down so it spelled out, in letters twenty-five or thirty feet tall, the letters RA.

More gently now, as if he regretted his abruptness, Feldt said, "Interesting man, Jacob Reeves. He’s the far side of forty. Been in the islands since he was a boy. Been on Buka for fifteen years. Never married. Has a harem of native girls. I don’t think he’s been off the island more than three times since he’s been there. We had a hell of a time teaching him Morse code, at first. And of course, he doesn’t know a sodding thing about how a wireless works."

Banning raised his eyebrows at that.

"It could be anything from a loose wire," Feldt explained, "through a complete failure. Or his generator has gone out-he has a small gasoline-powered generator . . . God only knows."

"Where does he get gas for the generator?" Howard asked.

"There were supplies of it on Buka," Feldt said. "He took a truckload of supplies, presumably including fuel, when he went up into the hills. If he was out of petrol, I think he would have cut PET in the grass."

"Where did the pictures come from?" Banning asked.

"I asked Group Captain Deane to send an aircraft over there. He has a couple of Lockheed Hudsons."

Banning nodded. The twin-engine, low-winged monoplane with a twin tail obviously traced its heritage to the famous airplane in which Amelia Earhart had been lost trying to set an around-the-world speed record.

"I think we had better send Sub-Lieutenant Reeves one of your Hallicrafters sets, Major Banning," Feldt said. "I’m glad you mentioned the petrol. I have no idea how much he has left. If any. That bicycle generator is what he needs."

"They’re yours," Banning said immediately.

"That poses several questions. First, how we get it to him. He’s in the hills, so that eliminates either a submarine-even if I could get the use of one-or a ship."

"By parachute, then," Banning said. "Would your Group Captain Deane be able to do that?"

Feldt nodded, meaning that he could get an aircraft. "The question then becomes, can a Hallicrafters set be dropped by parachute?"

"I’m sure our Corporal Koffler could answer that," Banning said. "Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a reason why not."

"The question then becomes, would your Corporal Koffler be willing to go in with it?"

"Why would that be necessary?" Banning asked.

He immediately saw on Feldt’s face that his simple question had been misinterpreted; Feldt suspected that Banning was reluctant to send one of his men behind the Japanese lines.

"I’m afraid it really would be necessary, Banning," Feldt said. "Otherwise dropping the Hallicrafters would be useless; Reeves would have no idea how to operate it. And I don’t think he could work from a set of directions; his mind doesn’t work that way."

"How soon would you like Koffler to jump in?" Banning asked.

"Today’s Friday. How long would it take your man to prepare the Hallicrafters to be rigged for a parachute drop?"

"Again, I’ll have to ask him. But again, off the top of my head, I can’t imagine why it would take more than a couple of hours. I presume we can get parachutes from the RAAF7"

Feldt nodded. "I’ll ring Deane and ask him to arrange for your man to be flown up here tomorrow."

"Am I allowed to say something?" Howard asked.

Banning looked at him curiously, even impatiently.

"Sure," Feldt said.

"If I understand this correctly," Howard said, "what we have here is a very important Coastwatcher station-"

"Arguably, the most important station," Feldt agreed. "Certainly one of the most important."

"Staffed by one man who apparently knows very little or nothing about radios."

"That’s why we’re going to jump Koffler in to join him."

"Koffler doesn’t know a Zero from a Packard," Howard said. "If something happens to your man Reeves, Commander, what you’re going to have is a perfectly functioning radio station from which we’ll get no intelligence because Koffler won’t know what to send."

"Granted," Feldt said. "So what?"

"So what you need is a team. Send two people in. The other one should be someone who can identify Japanese aircraft and ships as well as your man Reeves. If something should happen to Reeves, that man could possibly keep the station operating. At least better than someone who was in high school this time last year."

"I don’t have anybody to spare at the moment," Feldt said.

"I grant your point. Reeves should have a replacement. I’ll work on it."

"The time to send him in is now," Howard argued. "You said that getting planes is difficult. You might not be able to get another; and even if you could, it seems to me the Japanese would sense that something important was going on in that area."

"Commander Feldt says he doesn’t have anyone to send," Banning said curtly.

"I was in the First Defense Battalion at Pearl," Howard said. "In addition to my other duties, I taught Japanese aircraft and vessel recognition."

"Fascinating," Commander Feldt said, softly.

"You’re not a parachutist," Banning said.

"Neither was Steve Koffler, this time last year," Howard argued.

"Ed," Feldt said softly, "I was given a briefing on agent infiltration by an insufferably smug British Special Operations Executive officer. He told me, among other things, that their experience parachuting people into France has been that they lost more people training them to use parachutes than they did jumping virtually untrained people on actual operations. Consequently, as a rule of thumb, they no longer subject agents going in to the risks of injury parachute training raises."