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

He looks more and more like a politician,Flem Pickering thought, aware that it was unkind. Years ago, as a very young man, Pickering had heard and immediately adopted as part of his personal philosophy an old and probably banal observation that to have friends, one must permit them to have one serious flaw. So far as Pickering was concerned, Richardson Fowler’s flaw was that he was a politician, the Junior Senator from the Great State of California.

Flem Pickering had a habit of picking up trite and banal phrases and adopting them as his own, ofttimes verbatim, sometimes revising them. So far as he was concerned, Richardson Fowler was the exception to a phrase he had lifted from Will Rogers and altered. Will Rogers said he had never met a man he didn’t like. Pickering’s version was that-Richardson Fowler excepted-he had never met a politician he had liked.

He had tried and failed to understand what drove Fowler to seek public office. It certainly wasn’t that he needed the work. Richardson Fowler had inherited from his father the San Francisco Courier-Herald, nine smaller newspapers, and six radio stations. His wife and her brother owned, it was said, more or less accurately, two square blocks of downtown San Francisco, plus several million acres of timberland in Washington and Oregon.

If Fowler was consumed by some desire to do good, to lead people in this direction or that, it seemed to Pickering that the newspapers and the radio stations gave Fowler the means to accomplish it. He didn’t have to run for office-with all that meant-for the privilege of coming east to the hot, muggy, provincial, small Southern town that was the nation’s capital, to consort with a depressing collection of failed lawyers and other scoundrels.

But, oh, Flem Pickering,he thought, what a hypocrite you are! Right now you are delighted to have access to a man with the political clout you pretend to scorn.

Senator Fowler dropped his heavy, battered, well-filled briefcase at his feet and crossed the room to Pickering. They shook hands, and then the Senator put his arm around the younger man’s shoulders and hugged him.

"I was worried about you, you bastard," he said. "You and Patricia. She here with you?"

"She’s in San Francisco," Pickering said. "She’s fine."

"And Pick?"

"He’s at Pensacola, learning how to fly," Pickering said. "I thought you knew."

"I knew he was going down there," the Senator said. "I had dinner with him, oh, six days, a week ago. But he never came to say good-bye to me."

There was disappointment, perhaps even a little resentment, in his voice. Senator Fowler had known Pick Pickering from the day he was born.

"If you were a second lieutenant and they gave you two days off, would you spend them seeing an aging uncle-politician, or trying to get laid?" Pickering asked with a smile.

The Senator snorted a laugh. "Well, he could have tried to squeeze in fifteen minutes for me between jumps," he said. He turned and walked to an antique sideboard loaded with whiskey bottles. "I have been thinking about having one of these for the last two hours. You all right?"

Flem Pickering raised his nearly full glass to show that he was.

Senator Fowler half-filled a glass with Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch, added one ice cube, and then sprayed soda into it from a wire-wrapped soda bottle.

"This stuff," the Senator said, raising his glass, "is already getting in short supply. Goddamn German submarines."

"I have four hundred and eleven cases," Fleming Pickering said. "If you treat me right, I might put a case or two aside for you."

Fowler, smiling, looked at him curiously.

"Off the Princess, the Destiny, and the Enterprise, " Pickering explained.

The Pacific Princess, 51,000 tons, a sleek, fast passenger liner, was the flagship of the Pacific and Far Eastern Shipping Corporation. The Pacific Destiny and the Pacific Enterprise, 44,500 tons each, were sister ships, slightly smaller and slower, but, some said, more luxurious.

"Is that why you’re here?" Senator Fowler asked. "The Navy after them again? Flem ..."

Pickering held up his hand to shut him off. "I sold them," he said.

"When rape is inevitable, etcetera, etcetera?" Fowler asked.

"No," Pickering said. "I think I could have won that one in the courts. The Navy could have commandeered them, but they couldn’t have forced me to sell them."

Senator Fowler did not agree, but he didn’t say so. "And it wasn’t patriotism, either," Pickering said. "More like enlightened self-interest."

"Oh?"

"Or a vision of the future," Pickering said.

"Now you’ve lost me," Senator Fowler confessed.

"We came home from Hawaii via Seattle," Pickering said, pausing to sip at his drink. "On the Destiny. We averaged twenty-seven knots for the trip. It took us one hundred twenty hours-"

"Fast crossing," Fowler interrupted, doing some quick, rough arithmetic. "Five and a half days."

"Uh-huh," Pickering said, "testing the notion that a fast passenger liner can run away from submarines."

"Not proving the theory? You made it."

"The theory presumes that submarines are not sitting ahead of you, waiting for you to come into range," Pickering said. "And there may not have been any Japanese submarines around."

"OK," Senator Fowler agreed. "Theory."

"While we were in Seattle, I drove past the Boeing plant. Long lines of huge, four-engine airplanes, B-17s, capable of making it nonstop to Hawaii in eleven, twelve hours."

"Uh-huh," Fowler agreed. He had flown in the B-17 and was impressed with it. "That airplane may just get our chestnuts out of the fire in this war."

Pickering went off at a tangent.

"You heard, Dick, that some military moron had all the B-17s in Hawaii lined up in rows for the convenience of the Japanese?"

Fowler shook his head in disbelief or disgust or both. "There, and in the Philippines," he said. "Christ, they really caught us with our pants down."

"I talked to an Army Air Corps pilot in the bar of the hotel," Pickering said. "He said a flight of B-17s from the States arrived while the raid was going on. And with no ammunition for their machine guns."

"I heard that, too."

"Anyway," Pickering said, "looking at those B-17s in Seattle, it occurred to me that they could more or less easily be modified to carry passengers, and that, presuming we win this war, that’s the way the public is going to want to cross oceans in the future. Twelve hours to Hawaii beats five or six days all to hell."

"Out of school-this is classified-Howard Hughes proposes to build an airplane-out of plywood, no less-that will carry four hundred soldiers across the Atlantic."

"Then you understand what I’m saying. The day of the passenger liner, I’m afraid, is over. And since the Navy was making a decent offer for my ships, I decided to take it."

"A decent offer?"

"They’re spending the taxpayers’ money, not their own. A very decent offer."

"All of them?"

"Just the liners. I’m keeping the cargo ships, and I will not sell them to the Navy. If the Navy tries to make me sell them, I’ll take them to the Supreme Court, and win. Anyway, that’s where I got all the Scotch. I can also make you a very good deal on some monogrammed sterling silver flatware from the first-class dining rooms."

Fowler chuckled. "I’m surprised the Navy let you keep that."

"So am I," Pickering said.

"What are you going to do with all that money?" Fowler asked.

"Get rid of it, quickly, before that sonofabitch across the street thinks of some way to tax me out of it," Pickering said.

"You are speaking, Sir," Fowler said, mockingly sonorous, "of your President and the Commander in Chief."

"You bet I am," Pickering said. "I told my broker to buy into Boeing, Douglas, and whatever airlines he can find. I think I’d like to own an airline."