W.e.b. Griffin - The Corps II - CALL TO ARMS

Banning pressed the checkered round steel magazine-release button on the Colt.45 automatic. The magazine slipped out of the butt into his hand. He laid the pistol carefully on his lap, then thumbed the cartridges from the magazine, putting them one at time into the side pocket of the canvas foul-weather jacket. There were seven.

He loaded one cartridge back into the magazine, slipped the magazine into the pistol until he felt it click in place, and then worked the action. He pulled the slide back all the way, and then, still hanging on to it, let the spring move it forward into the battery.

He didn't think it had completely chambered the cartridge. He ran his thumb over the rear of the pistol where the slide mated with the frame. It was uneven. He pushed on the slide and it clicked into place.

He put the safety on and then stood up and put the pistol back in his waistband and pulled the foul-weather jacket to cover it.

Banning made his way very carefully from the head to the conning-tower ladder. When his hand found it, he gripped it firmly. He had learned that if there was someone on the ladder, there would be vibrations on the steel framework.

There were none, and he climbed the ladder into the upper compartment.

"Good morning, sir," someone said to him.

"Morning," Banning replied, smiling, as he felt for the ladder to the conning-tower bridge.

This time, there were vibrations in the steel frame. Banning stood to one side of the ladder.

"Sorry, Captain," a voice tinged with embarrassment said in his ear. "I would have-" The kid's breath smelled of peppermint chewing gum.

"It's all right, son," Banning said, reassuringly. He had recognized the voice as one of the enlisted men.

He moved in front of the ladder and went up it, until his head was through the hatch and he could smell the fresh salt air.

''Permission to come on the bridge, sir?" he asked.

"Come ahead, Captain," a voice he recognized as belonging to one of the young JG's said.

Banning went through the hatch, got to his feet, and put his hand out in search of the after bulkhead. When his fingers touched it, he went to it, turned and rested his back against it, and took a deep breath of the fresh, clean air.

"Good morning," Banning said.

Three voices replied. They were in front of him. With a little bit of luck, they would be looking forward, too, when the time came.

Banning took off his fore-and-aft cap and put it in the pocket of his foul-weather jacket.

Then he took a razor blade from his trousers pocket, got a good grip on it, and moved the hand that held it to the back of his head.

Sawing through the gauze bandage and the adhesive tape that held it in place was easier than he thought it would be. He felt the gauze slip off and fall across his face. He caught it, balled it up in his hand, and then reached his hand over the bulkhead and dropped it.

There now remained two pads of gauze, liberally greased with petroleum jelly, over his closed eyelids. The idea, the surgeon had told him, was to keep all light from the optic nerves, in the hope this might facilitate natural recovery from the trauma to the nerves.

Once a day the Pickerel's pharmacist mate had replaced the Vaseline-soaked pads, and then wrapped Banning's head with gauze and adhesive tape to keep them in place.

Banning put both hands to his eyes and jerked the pads away.

He felt a cold chill and heard himself grunt.

The pads were gone, and there was no light.

He was blind.

He felt faint, weak in his knees, and shivered.

All I have to do is put my hands over my face and go below and say I must have caught the bandage on something, and jerked it off.

Fuck it! Don't turn chicken at the last minute. You took a chance and you lost.

He put his hand under the foul-weather jacket and found the butt of the.45 Colt automatic. Following the U.S. Marine Corps' near-sacred tradition that one does not put one's finger on the trigger of a loaded firearm until one is prepared to fire, he took it in his hand, the trigger finger extended along the slide rather than on the trigger, and flicked the safety off.

Then he put his finger on the trigger.

Our Father Who art in Heaven, give me the balls to go through with this…

Banning became aware that his eyelids were squinted closed, as they were habitually whenever the Vaseline-soaked pads were removed.

He forced them open.

Shit! Nothing. Nothing more, anyway, than a glow to one side. If I'm not blind, I'm the next fucking thing to it.

Our Father Who art in-

That's the fucking luminous dial of a wristwatch! That's what that glow is!

Captain Banning removed his finger from the trigger of his pistol.

Captain Banning could now make out the upper edge of the forward bulkhead, and rising above that three vague but unmistakable silhouettes: the officer of the deck, the talker, and somebody else, another officer, with binoculars to his eyes.

Captain Banning snapped the safety of the Colt back on, took his hand from under the foul-weather jacket, and then leaned, weak and faint, against the bulkhead.

He had a sudden terrible necessity to void his bladder.

"Permission to leave the bridge, sir?"

"Granted," the officer of the deck said automatically, and then, remembering that Banning had only minutes before come onto the bridge, asked, "Is there something wrong, Captain Banning?"

"No, thank you," Banning said. "Everything's just fine." The light inside the conning tower hurt his eyes. He felt tears, and he closed them. He knew how to get down the ladder with his eyes closed.

With a little luck, he would go down both ladders and get to the head before his bladder let go and he pissed his pants. And then he would go to the captain's cabin and wake Red MacGregor and tell him. With a little more luck, he would be able to get the pistol back into the cabinet before MacGregor woke up.

(One)

San Francisco, California

0915 Hours, 14 January 1942

The office of the chairman of the board of Pacific Far East Shipping, Inc., occupied the southwest comer of the top (tenth) floor of the PFE Building. Its tinted plate-glass windows overlooked the harbor and the bridge; and an eight-by-twelve-foot map of the world was mounted on one wall. Every morning at six A.M., just before he went off duty, the night operations manager came up from the third floor and laid a copy of the more important overnight communications on the huge, near-antique (which is to say post-1800) mahogany desk of the chairman of the board. Then he went to the map and moved small devices on it.

The devices, mounted on magnets, were models of the vessels of Pacific Far East Shipping. They represented tankers, bulk carriers, passenger liners, and freighters of all sizes. There were seventy-two of them, and they were arranged on the map to correspond with their last-reported position around the world. Just over a month before, there had been eighty-one ship models scattered around the map.

Now nine models-representing six small interisland freighters ranging in size from 11,600 to 23,500 tons, two identical 39,400-ton freighters, and one 35,500-ton tanker- were arranged in the lower left-hand corner of the map as if anchored together in the Indian Ocean off Australia. Eight of them had been lost to Japanese submarines. The ninth, the tanker Pacific Virtue, had been offloading aviation gasoline at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese struck.

In a mahogany gimbal mount near Fleming Pickering's desk, there was a globe, five feet in diameter, crafted in the 1860s. And two glass cases holding large, exquisitely detailed ship models had been placed against the wall behind the desk. One of the models was of the clipper ship Pacific Princess (Hezikiah Fleming, Master), which had held the San Francisco-Shanghai speed record in her day; and the second was of the 51,000-ton Pacific Princess, a sleek passenger ship that was the present speed-record holder for the same run.