Griffin W.E.B. - The Corps 08 - In Dangers Path

You don't need a drink, you need a cold shower. A long, ice-cold shower

. A long ice-cold shower gave him goose bumps and the shivers but did little to erase from his mind the image of Janice taking off her uniform. He put on a terry-cloth bathrobe he found hanging on the bathroom door, went into the bedroom, and decided he really did need a drink, for medicinal purposes.

As he felt the scotch warming his body, there was a knock at the door. He opened it and looked out, but there was no one in the corridor.

Jesus Christ, that's Janice knocking at the connecting door

! He went to it. «Jim?»

«Yes.»

Who the hell did she expect

? «Open the door.» He unlocked the door.

She was wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe identical to his. He had a very clear mental image of her just before she slipped into it. «Turn off the lights,» she said. «What?»

«You heard what he said, about turning the lights off before you open the curtains.»

«Right,» Jim said, and went around the room, turning off the lights. When he had finished, he couldn't see his hand in front of his face, but then there was the sound of curtains being opened. And in a moment, his eyes adjusted to the light.

Janice was standing by the window.

He went and stood behind her.

She smelled now of soap, not perfume. Her hair was still wet.

He put his hand on her shoulder. He could feel the warmth of her body even through the thick robe.

«How beautiful,» Janice said, and leaned back against him.

He looked out the window. The sky was clear and the moon was full. He could see people walking on the boardwalk, and the surf crashing onto the beach.

«Yeah,» he said.

Her hand came up and caught his.

«Do you love me?»

«Oh, God. yes!»

She pushed herself erect and turned around and stood on her tiptoes to raise her face to his. He kissed her and wrapped his arms around her.

He thought for a moment, terrified, that he had gone too far with the kiss, with holding her so tight, for she struggled to free herself. He let her go.

And then he saw what she was doing. She was shrugging out of the terry-cloth robe. She had been wearing nothing under it.

«Don't say anything,» Janice said. «Just take me to bed.»

Chapter Thirteen

note 50

The Joint Chiefs of Staff

The Pentagon

Washington, D.C.

0805 15 March 1943

As Chief, Communications & Communications Security, Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colonel H. (Hulit) A. (Augustus) Albright, Signal Corps (Detail, General Staff Corps), U.S. Army, had the day-to-day responsibility for the operation and the security of the Special Channel over which magic intelligence data was transmitted—a responsibility he had held virtually from the beginning of the Special Channel.

His immediate superior was Major General Charles M. Adamson, USA, the Secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The title «Secretary» was somewhat misleading. In almost any other military organization. General Adamson would have been known as Chief of Staff. But someone had apparently decided that a Chief of Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was going to be more than a little confusing, and his position was defined as «Secretary.»

General Adamson customarily signed interoffice memoranda and other material with his initials, CMA. Early on, Colonel Albright concluded that these letters actually stood for «Covering My Ass.» General Adamson's interoffice memoranda were quite skillfully written to ensure that if anything went wrong, the blame could be laid on any shoulders but his own.

Colonel Albright, a short, barrel-chested man, had been commissioned from the ranks. Specifically, he had served as an enlisted man in the Signal Corps, rising in two years to corporal. He had also sufficiently impressed several senior officers there with his unusual intelligence and character that they had encouraged him to study for and take the competitive examination for entrance to West Point, with the result that he was offered an appointment to the United States Military Academy.

He graduated from the USMA seventh in a class of 240, earning the right to choose his branch of service. Against the advice of his classmate, Cadet Charles M. Adamson, who reminded him that very, very few Signal Corps officers ever rose to be generals, he chose the Signal Corps.

Four years at the U.S. Military Academy in the company of Cadet Adamson had convinced Cadet Albright that Adamson was a pompous horse's ass who had arrived at the visionary conclusion that the key to a successful military career was never to make a decision of any kind without first finding someone to lay the blame onto if anything went wrong.

When the two met at a West Point class reunion in 1939, Albright was forced to admit that Adamson had indeed found a faster route to military advancement than he had. By dint of hard work (he'd taken a master's degree and then earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT, among other things), Albright had earned the reputation of being one of the Army's most knowledgeable officers in radio communication, with a sideline specialty in cryptography. He had risen to major. Adamson, meanwhile, had spent the ensuing years shooting and polishing artillery pieces and making the right kind of friends. He was a full colonel.

At the reunion, Adamson somewhat grandly announced to Albright that if he was given command of a division—an outcome as inevitable as the rising of the sun, he seemed to think—he would see what he could do about having Albright assigned as his signal officer.

This was not at all a pleasant prospect for Major Albright. Having all his teeth extracted without novocaine seemed on the whole more desirable than serving under his old classmate. But he smiled and said nothing.

They next met several years later, at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Albright was by then a lieutenant colonel, and Adamson was a major general and the Secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. «This means,» he explained to his old friend, «that I'm finally in a position to do something for you.»

«I truly appreciate the offer,» Albright replied, «but I'd like to think I'm really making a genuine contribution to the war effort doing what I've been doing.» At that time, he was involved in developing a more efficient and reliable Radio Ranging and Direction system, called «Radar,» as well as doing some work he considered important in the area of cryptography.

«Odd that you should mention that, Augie,» General Adamson said. «Cryptography's more or less what I came to see you about.»

Lieutenant Colonel H. (Hulit) A. (Augustus) Albright preferred to be informally addressed as «Hugh»; he despised «Augie.»

«Yes, sir?»

«What I'm about to tell you, Augie, is Top Secret, and not to leave this room,» General Adamson said.

«Yes, sir?»

«Navy cryptographers at Pearl Harbor have managed to break some of the most secret Japanese codes,» General Adamson announced.

That was not news to Colonel Albright. Not only had he learned from peers in the Navy Department that they were working hard on that problem, but he had arranged for a Korean-American mathematics professor named Hon Song Do, whom he had known at MIT, to be commissioned into the Signal Corps and assigned to the Pearl Harbor code-breaking operation. He hadn't actually been

told

, in so many words, that the codes had been broken, but he

knew

.

«Yes, sir?»

«Now, I have been charged by Admiral Leahy with setting up an absolutely secure transmission channel for the transmission of this data between Pearl Harbor, Washington, and General MacArthur's headquarters in Australia. And I think, Augie, that you're just the man to handle it.»