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

"Where are you going?"

"To the rehearsal," Pickering said. "I just sent Knox a letter

Ellen Feller read his mind.

"I’ve taken care of everything in Hawaii. If it’s in Hawaii now, it will be on his desk, decrypted, in three hours."

"Have you got a car?" Haughton asked.

Pickering nodded. "Why?"

"Well, Ellen’s luggage is still at the airfield. If you’ve got a car, you could pick that up; and at the same time, I can check in about the plane."

Pickering pointed out the door, where the drop-head Jaguar was parked in front of a sign readinggeneral and flag officers only.

"That’s beautiful," Ellen said. "What is it?"

"It’s an old Jaguar. The roof leaks."

Haughton chuckled. "I see you are still scrupulously refusing to obey the Customs of the Service."

Pickering was surprised at how furious the remark made him, but he forced a smile.

"Shall we go?"

Ellen Feller sat between them on the way to the airport. Whether by intent or accident, her thigh pressed against his. That warm softness and the smell of her perfume produced the physiological manifestation of sexual excitement in the male animal.

An inspection of the aircraft had revealed nothing seriously wrong, Haughton was told. They would be leaving in an hour.

There was a small officers’ club. They had three drinks, during which time Ellen Feller’s leg brushed, accidentally or otherwise, against Pickering’s. Then they called Haughton’s flight. They watched him board the Mariner for New Zealand.

Fleming Pickering would not have been surprised at anything Ellen did now that they were alone. She did nothing, sitting ladylike against the far door, all the way out to the cottage.

"What’s this?" she asked.

"It’s a cottage I rented. I told you-"

"I would have bet you were taking me to an officers’ hotel!" she said.

Why the hell didn‘t I? I could have gotten her a room if I had to call General Sutherland himself.

"No."

"Fleming, don’t look so guilt-stricken," Ellen said. "We both know you wouldn’t do this if Mrs. Pickering were around."

He didn’t reply for a moment. Then he pulled up on the parking brake, took the key from the ignition, got out of the car, and walked up to the house and unlocked the door.

The telephone rang. He walked across the living room to it.

"Pickering."

"Captain Pickering?"

"Yes."

"Sir, this is Major Tourtillott, Billeting Officer at the Lennon."

"Yes, Major."

"Sir, there was a Naval officer, a Captain Haughton, looking for you."

"Yes, I know, he found me."

"Sir, he was trying to arrange quarters for a Navy Department civilian, a lady, an assimilated Oh-Four."

"A what?"

"An assimilated Oh-Four, Sir. Someone entitled to the privileges of an Oh-Four, Sir."

"What the hell is an Oh-Four?"

"An Army or Marine Corps major, Sir, or a Navy Lieutenant Commander."

"The lady has made other arrangements for tonight, Major. I’ll get this all sorted out in the morning. She is a member of my staff, and quarters will be required."

"Yes, Sir. I’ll take care of it. Thank you, Sir."

Pickering hung the telephone up and turned to see what had happened to Ellen Feller.

She wasn’t in the small living room. He found her in the bedroom, in bed.

"I’ve been flying for eighteen hours," she said. "I’m probably a little gamey. Will that bother you? Should I shower?"

Fleming Pickering shook his head.

(Three)

Aboard USSLowell Hutchins Transport Group Y

17 degrees 48 minutes south latitude,

150 degrees west longitude

4 August 1942

Just about everyone on board knew that five months ago the USS Lowell Hutchins had been the Pacific and Far East passenger liner Pacific Enchantress; no one had any idea who Lowell Hutchins was, or, since Naval ships were customarily named only after the dead, who he had been.

She had been rapidly pressed into service, but the conversion from a plush civilian passenger liner to a Naval transport was by no means complete. Before she had sailed from the States with elements of the 1stMarine Division aboard, she had been given a coat of Navy gray paint. It had been hastily applied, and here and there it had already begun to flake off, revealing the pristine white for which Pacific and Far East vessels were well known.

The furniture and carpeting from the first-class and tourist dining rooms had been removed. Narrow, linoleum-covered, chest-high steel tables had been welded in place in the former tourist dining room. Enlisted men and junior officers now took their meals from steel trays, and they ate standing up.

Not-much-more-elegant steel tables, with attached steel benches, had been installed in the ex-first-class dining room. Generally, captains and above got to eat there, sitting down, from plates bearing the PandFE insignia.

Most of the former first-class suites and cabins, plus the former first- and tourist-class bars, libraries, lounges, and exercise rooms, had been converted to troop berthing areas. It had been relatively easy to remove their beds, cabinets, tables, and other furniture and equipment and replace them with bunks. The bunks were sheets of canvas, suspended between iron pipe, stacked four high.

The bathrooms were still identified by porcelainbath plates over their doors, although they had now become, of course, Navy "heads." It would have taken too much time to remove the plates. And it would also have taken too much time to expand them. So a "bath" designed for the use of a couple en route to Hawaii now served as many as thirty-two men en route to a place none of them had ever heard of a month before, islands in the Solomon chain called Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and Florida.

There was not, of course, sufficient water-distilling capability aboard to permit showers at will. Showers, and indeed drinking water, were stringently rationed.

The former tourist-class cabins had proved even more of a problem for conversion. To efficiently utilize space, the beds there had usually been mattresses laid upon steel frameworks, with shelves built under them. These could not be readily moved. These rooms had become officers’ staterooms for captains and above, sometimes with the addition of several other bunks. Because they afforded that most rare privilege of military service, privacy, the few single staterooms now became the private staterooms of senior majors, lieutenant colonels, and even a few junior full colonels.

The most luxurious accommodations on the upper deck had been left virtually unchanged. Even the carpets were still there, and the oil paintings on the paneled bulkheads, and the inlaid tables, and the soft, comfortable couches and armchairs. These became the accommodations of the most senior of the Marine officers aboard, the one general officer and the senior full colonels. These men took their meals with the ship’s officers on tables set with snowy linen, glistening crystal, and sterling tableware.

It was almost taken as gospel by those on the lower decks that this was one more case of the brass, those sonsofbitches, taking care of themselves. But the decision to leave the upper-deck cabins unchanged had actually been based less on the principle that rank hath its privileges than on the practical consideration that to convert them to troop berthing would have required two hundred or so men to make their way at least twice a day from the upper deck to the mess deck through narrow passageways. That many men on that deck might actually interfere with the efficient running of the ship.

Brigadier General Lewis T. Harris, Deputy Commander, 1stMarine Division, and the senior Marine embarked, actually had a strong feeling of uneasiness every time he took his seat in the ship’s officers’ mess.

Because he often went twice a day to see it, he knew what was being served in the troop messes. The troop mess-jammed full of men, some of them seasick, standing at tables with food slopped around steel mess trays-offered a vivid contrast to the neatly set table at the officers’ mess, with its baskets of freshly baked rolls and bread, and white-jacketed stewards hovering at his shoulder to make sure the levels in his delicate china coffee cup and crystal water glass never dropped more than an inch, or to inquire How the General Would Like His Lamb Chop.