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

"You really believe that?" Pickering asked doubtfully.

"Yeah, Flem, I do. And if you rush over there crying, ‘Father, I cannot tell a lie. I chopped down the cherry tree,’ you’ll put the system out of kilter. It would not, Flem, be in the best interests of the country."

"My God!"

"Welcome to the real world, Captain Fleming," Fowler said dryly.

"You’re suggesting that’s the reason he got me this commission," Pickering said.

"It’s certainly one of them. I’m on his side, Flem. He knows that. I really should know what the hell is really going on."

"Then why doesn’t he just call you in and tell you? Brief you, as they say?"

"The Senate is full of monstrous egos. If he briefed me, he would have to brief a dozen other people. Two dozen. Some of whom, I’m sorry to say, should not be trusted with this kind of information."

"You’re right, I’m naive. Until just now, I thought what I was doing was lending my shipping expertise."

"That too," Fowler said. "But think about it. What does this Wake Island atrocity have to do with that? You don’t really have that ‘need to know’ you threw in my face."

Pickering put on a fresh pair of shoes, tied them, and stood up, holding the wet pair in his hand.

"I think I’m going to have a stiff drink," he said. "Interested?"

"Fascinated," Fowler said, touching his arm. "But one final comment, Flem. Knox has paid you one hell of a compliment. Since he can’t tell anyone what material should be passed to me, he had to have someone in whose intelligence and judgment he felt safe. He picked you."

"You didn’t get into that?"

"No. For obvious reasons."

"I feel like Alice must have felt when she walked through the looking glass," Pickering said.

He went back into the sitting room, opened the door to the corridor, and put the wet shoes outside. Then he went to the bar and poured an inch of Scotch into a large-mouthed glass.

"I would have made that for you," Ellen Feller said.

"Ellen, would you get Secretary Knox on the phone for me?" Pickering said.

"What are you doing, Flem?" Fowler asked, concern in his voice.

"Why don’t you just listen? And see if everybody has guessed right about my judgment and intelligence?"

He walked to where Ellen was dialing a telephone on a small, narrow table against the wall.

"Captain Pickering for Secretary Knox," she said when someone answered the phone. Pickering wondered how she knew where Knox would be at this time of day.

Knox came on the line. "Yes, Pickering?"

"I thought I had best report on the funeral of Colonel Neville, Sir."

"Well, thank you. But it wasn’t really necessary. I trust you."

"It went well, Sir."

"Good."

"If you have nothing more for me tonight, Sir, I think I’m going to just get in bed. I got chilled out at Arlington."

"Well, we can’t have you coming down with a cold. I need you. But why don’t you put off actually going to bed for a while? I ran into Senator Fowler, and he said he was going to drop in on you for a drink. We can’t afford to disappoint him. We have very few Republican friends on the Hill, you know."

"I understand, Sir."

"Yes," Knox said. "Good night, Captain."

Pickering hung the telephone up and turned to look at Fowler, who met his eyes.

"Ellen," Pickering said, "you might as well run along. Senator Fowler and I are going to sit here and communicate with John Barleycorn. I’ll see you in the morning."

"There are some things in here you should read, Captain," she said.

"Leave them. I’ll read them when I get up in the morning."

"There’s a couple of ‘eyes only’ in there," she said, nodding toward a leather briefcase, "which should go back in the vault. I could either wait, or arrange for a courier."

"I’ll call for a courier when I’m through with them," Pickering said. "Thank you, Ellen."

"Yes, Sir."

When she had gone, Fowler said, "Very nice. Speaking of naive, does Patricia know about her?"

"What the hell do you mean by that?"

"Now I know that Patricia has the understanding of a saint, but there are some women whose active imaginations would jump into high gear if they learned their husbands were spending a lot of time in a hotel suite with an attractive-very attractive- female like that."

"Dick... Jesus! A, I don’t run around on Patricia, never have, and you know it. B, she’s some kind of a missionary."

"Oh, a missionary! I forgot. Missionaries are neutered when they take their vows. They don’t have whoopee urges. The reason your missionary lady looks at you the way she does is because she sees in you a saint who would never even think of slipping it to her."

"You’re a dirty old man, Dick," Pickering said. He walked to the briefcase, picked it up, worked the combination lock, and opened it. He spent a full minute looking at the folders it contained without removing them, and then he handed the briefcase to Senator Fowler.

"In for a penny, in for a pound," he said. "Read what’s in there, and then I’ll answer any questions."

Fowler handed the briefcase back to him.

"You still don’t understand the rules of the game, do you?" he said.

"I guess not."

"Right now I can put my hand on the Bible and swear that you never showed me one classified document, and you can swear that you never showed me one. I want to keep it that way."

"So what do you want?"

"I want a briefing," Fowler said. "I want your opinion of what’s going on."

"With a map and a pointer?" Pickering asked sarcastically.

"A map would be nice," Senator Fowler said. "You probably won’t need a pointer. Have you got a map?"

Pickering saw that Fowler was serious.

"Yeah," he said. "I’ve got a map. It’s in the safe. I had a safe installed in here to make sure people who don’t have the need to know don’t get to look at my map."

"Why don’t you get it, Flem?" Senator Fowler said, ignoring the sarcasm. "Maybe thumbtack it to the wall?"

Fleming went into his bedroom, and returned a moment later with several maps.

"I don’t have any thumbtacks," he said seriously. "I’ll lay these on the floor."

"Fine."

"OK, what do you want to know?"

"I know a little bit about what’s going on in Europe," Fowler said. "And your area of expertise is the Pacific. So let’s start with that."

I have a counterpart, maybe in the Army, who’s doing this for him for Europe. I’ll be damned!

"Where should I start?"

"December seventh," Fowler said. "I know you’re not prepared for this, Flem. Would it help if you went on the premise that I know nothing about it?"

"OK," Pickering said, getting on his knees beside the large map. "Here’s the way the pieces were on the board on December seventh. The U.S. Pacific Fleet was here, at Oahu, in the Hawaiian Islands. That’s about three thousand nautical miles from San Francisco, and four thousand from Tokyo. It’s as far from San Francisco to Hawaii as it is to New York. And it’s about as far from San Francisco to Hawaii as it is from New York to London.

"Wake Island is here, 2,200 miles from Tokyo and 2,500 from Pearl Harbor. Guam, here, is two thousand miles from Tokyo, and four thousand from Pearl, and it’s about two thousand miles from Tokyo to Luzon, in the Philippines, and 8,500 from the West Coast to Luzon."

Pickering sat back and rested on his heels.

"So, Factor One is that distances in the Pacific favor the Japanese."

"Obviously," Fowler said.

"Factor Two is protection of the sea lanes. We lost most of our battleships at Pearl Harbor. How well they could have protected the sea lanes is a moot point, but they’re gone. And, obviously, their loss had a large part to do with the decision to pull back Task Force 14 to Pearl, and not to reinforce Wake Island."