The Corp - Counterattack Part 4

"That was yesterday. In Was.h.i.+ngton, the question is, 'What have you done for me today, and what can you do for me tomorrow?' Anyway, the facts are that everybody has drawn their knives to cut Donovan's throat. I'm betting on Donovan, but I've been wrong before."

"Really?" Pickering teased.

"That's what you'd be getting into if you went to work for him, Flem. When do you see him?"

"He wanted me to have dinner with him tonight, but I wasn't in the mood. I told him I would come to his office in the morning."

"Boy, have you got a lot to learn!" Fowler said.

"Meaning I should have shown up, grateful for the privilege of a free meal from the great man?"

"Yeah. Exactly."

"f.u.c.k him," Fleming Pickering said. "So far as I'm concerned, Bill Donovan is just one more overpaid ambulance chaser."

"You'd better hope he doesn't know you think that."

"He already does. I already told him."

"You did?" Senator Fowler asked, deciding as he spoke that it was probably true.

"He represented us before the International Maritime Court when a Pacific & Orient tanker rammed our Hawaiian Trader. You wouldn't believe the bill that sonofab.i.t.c.h sent me."

"I hope you paid it," Fowler said wryly.

"I did," Pickering said, "but not before I called him up and told him what I thought of it. And him."

"Oh, Christ, Flem, you're something!" Fowler said, laughing.

"I couldn't get near the club car, much less the dining car, on the train from New York," Pickering said. "All I've had to eat all day is a roll on the airplane and some hors d'oeuvres. I'm starving. You have any plans for dinner?"

Fowler shook his head no.

"Until you graced me with your presence, I was going to take my shoes off, collapse on the couch, and get something from room service."

There was a knock at the door. It was Max Telford.

"Come on in, Max," Pickering called. "The Senator was just extolling the virtues of your room service."

"I've got someone with me," Telford said, and a very large, very black man, in the traditional chefs uniform of starched white hat and jacket and striped gray trousers, pushed a rolling cart loaded with silver food warmers into the room.

"h.e.l.lo, Jefferson," Pickering said, as he crossed the room to him and offered his hand. "How the h.e.l.l are you? I thought you were in New York."

"No, Sir. I've been here about three months," the chef said. "I heard you were in the house, and thought maybe you'd like something more than crackers and cheese to munch on."

"Great, I'm starving. Do you know the Senator?"

"I know who the Senator is," Jefferson Dittler said.

"d.i.c.k, Jefferson Dittler. Jefferson succeeded where Patricia failed; he got Pick to wash dishes."

"Lots of dishes," Dittler laughed. "Then I taught him a little about cooking."

"Oh, I've heard about you," Senator Fowler said, shaking hands. "You're the fellow who taught Pick how to make hollandaise in a Waring Blender."

"That was supposed to be a professional secret," Dittler said.

"Well, Pick betrayed your confidence," Fowler said. "He taught that trick to my wife."

"He's a nice boy," Dittler said.

Pickering turned from the array of bottles and handed Dittler a gla.s.s dark with whiskey. "That's that awful fermented corn you like, distilled in a moldy old barrel in some Kentucky holler."

"That's why it's so good," Dittler said. "The moldy old barrel's the secret." He raised his gla.s.s. 'To Pick. May G.o.d be with him."

"Here, here," Senator Fowler said.

Fleming Pickering started lifting the silver food covers.

"Very nice," he said. "One more proof that someone of my superior intelligence knows how to raise children for fun and profit. Jefferson never did this sort of thing for me before Pick worked for him."

"He's a nice boy," Jefferson Dittler repeated, and then, his tone suggesting it was something he desperately wanted to believe, "Smart as a whip. He'll be all right in the Marines."

(Three) Building "F"

Anacostia Naval Air Station Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

20 December 1941 The interview between Mr. Fleming Pickering, Chairman of the Board of the Pacific & Far Eastern s.h.i.+pping Corporation, and Colonel William J. Donovan, the Coordinator of Information to the President of the United States, did not go well.

For one thing, when Mr. Pickering was not in Colonel Donovan's outer office at the agreed-upon time, 9:45 A.M., Colonel Donovan went to his next appointment. This required Mr. Pickering, who arrived at 9:51 A.M., to cool his heels for more than an hour with an old copy of Time magazine. Mr. Pickering was not used to cooling his heels in anyone's office, and he was more than a little annoyed.

More importantly, Mr. Pickering quickly learned that Colonel Donovan did not intend for him to become one of the twelve disciples that Senator Fowler had mentioned, but rather that he would be an adviser to one of the disciples-should he "come aboard."

That disciple was named. Mr. Pickering knew him, both personally and professionally. He was a banker, and Pickering was willing to acknowledge that Donovan's man had a certain degree of expertise in international finance, which was certainly closely connected with international maritime commerce.

But the United States was not about to consider opening new and profitable s.h.i.+pping channels. Victory, in Fleming Pickering's judgment, was going to go to whichever of the warring powers could transport previously undreamed of tonnages of military equipment, d.a.m.n the cost, to any number of obscure ports, under the most difficult conditions. In that connection there were two problems, as Pickering saw the situation.

First, there was the actual safe pa.s.sage of the vessels-getting them past enemy surface and submersible wars.h.i.+ps. That was obviously going to be the Navy's problem. The second problem, equally important to the execution of a war, was cargo handling and refueling facilities at the destination ports. A s.h.i.+p's cargo was useless unless it could be unloaded. A s.h.i.+p itself was useless if its fuel bunkers were dry.

Carrying the war to the enemy, Pickering knew, meant the interdiction of the enemy's sea pa.s.sages, and denying to him ports through which his land and air forces had to be supplied.

If the President was going to get evaluations of the maritime situation, it seemed perfectly clear to Fleming Pickering that it should come from someone expert in the nuts and bolts, someone who could make judgments based on his own experience with s.h.i.+ps and ports, not someone whose experience was limited to the bottom line on a profit-and-loss statement, or whose sea experience was limited to crossing the Atlantic in a first-cla.s.s cabin on the Queen Mary or some other luxury liner.

Someone like him, for example.

This was not overwhelmingly modest, he realized, but neither was it a manifestation of a runaway ego. When Fleming Pickering stepped aboard a P&FE s.h.i.+p-or, for that matter, s.h.i.+ps of a dozen other lines-he was addressed as "Captain" and given the privilege of the bridge.

It was not simply a courtesy given to a wealthy s.h.i.+p owner. When Fleming Pickering had come home from France in 1918, he had almost immediately married. Then, to the horror of his new in-laws, he'd s.h.i.+pped out as an apprentice seaman aboard a P&FE freighter. As his father and grandfather had done before him, he had worked his way up in the deck department, ultimately sitting for his master's ticket, any tonnage, any ocean, a week before his twenty-sixth birthday.

He had been relief master on board the Pacific Vagabond, five days out of Auckland for Manila, when the radio operator had brought to the bridge the message that his father had suffered a coronary thrombosis and that in a special session of the stockholders (that is to say, his mother), he had been elected Chairman of the Board of the Pacific & Far Eastern s.h.i.+pping Corporation.

Pickering tried to make this point to Colonel Donovan and failed. He was not particularly surprised when Donovan politely told him, in effect, to take the offer of a job as adviser to the disciple or go f.u.c.k himself. The disciple was one of Donovan's Wall Street cronies; Pickering would have been surprised if Donovan had accepted the wisdom of his arguments.

And, he was honest enough to admit, he would have been disappointed if he had. He didn't want to fight the war from behind a G.o.dd.a.m.ned desk in Sodom on Potomac.

"General Mclnerney will see you now, Mr. Pickering," the impeccably shorn, s.h.i.+ned, and erect Marine lieutenant said. "Will you come with me, please, Sir?"

Brigadier General D. G. Mclnerney, USMC, got to his feet and came around from behind his desk as Fleming Pickering was shown into his office. He was a stocky, barrel-chested man wearing Naval Aviator's wings on the breast of his heavily berib-boned uniform tunic.

"Why, Corporal Pickering," he said. "My, how you've aged!"

"h.e.l.lo, you baldheaded old b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Pickering replied. "How the h.e.l.l are you?"

General Mclnemey's intended handshake degenerated into an affectionate hug. The two men, who had become friends in their teens, beamed happily at each other.

"It's a little early, but what the h.e.l.l," General Mclnerney said. "Charlie, get a bottle of the good booze and a couple of gla.s.ses."

"Aye, aye, Sir," his aide-de-camp replied. Although he was a little taken aback by the unaccustomed display of affection, and it was the first time he had ever heard anyone refer to General Mclnerney as a "baldheaded old b.a.s.t.a.r.d," he was not totally surprised. Until a week ago, General Mclnerney's "temporary junior aide" had been a second lieutenant fresh from Quantico, whom General Mclnerney had arranged to get in the flight-training program at Pensacola.

His name was Malcolm Pickering, and this was obviously his father. The General had told him that they had served together in France in the First World War.

"Pick's a nice boy, Flem," General Mclnerney said, as he waved Pickering into one end of a rather- battered couch and sat down on the other end. "I was tempted to keep him."

"I'm grateful to you for all you did for him, Doc," Pickering said.

"h.e.l.l," Mclnerney said, depreciatingly, "the Corps needs pilots more than it needs club officers, and that's what those paper pushers in personnel were going to do with him."

"Well, I'm grateful nonetheless," Pickering said.

"I got one for you," Mclnerney said. "I called down there to make sure they weren't going to make him a club officer down there, and you know who his roommate is? Jack Stecker's boy. He just graduated from West Point."

Fleming Pickering had no idea what Mclnerney was talking about, and it showed on his face.

"Jack Stecker?" Mclnerney went on. "Buck sergeant? Got the Medal at Belleau Wood?"

The Medal was the Medal of Honor, often erroneously called the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation's highest award for valor in action.

"Oh, yeah, the skinny guy. Pennsylvania Dutchman. No middle name," Pickering remembered.

"Right," Mclnerney chuckled, "Jack NMI Stecker."

"I always wondered what had happened to him," Pickering said. "He was one hard-nosed sonofab.i.t.c.h."

The description was a compliment.

The aide handed each of them a gla.s.s of whiskey.

"Mud in your eye," Mclnerney said, raising his gla.s.s and then draining it.

"Belleau Wood," Pickering said dryly, before he emptied his gla.s.s.

"Jack stayed in the Corps," Mclnerney went on. "They wanted to send him to Annapolis. Christ, he wasn't any older than we were, he could have graduated with a regular commission when he was twenty-three or twenty-four, but he wanted to get married, so he turned it down. Until last summer he was a master gunnery sergeant at Quantico."

"Was?"

"They made him a captain; he's at Diego."

"And now our kids are second lieutenants! Christ, we're getting old, Doc."

"Jack had two boys. The older one went to Annapolis. He was an ensign on the Arizona. He was KIA on December 7."

"Oh, Christ!"

The two men looked at each other a moment, eyes locked, and then Mclnerney shrugged and Pickering threw up his hands helplessly.

"So what brings you to Was.h.i.+ngton, Flem?" Mclnerney asked, changing the subject. "I thought you hated the place."

"I do. And with rare exceptions, everyone in it. I'm looking for a job."

"Oh?"

"I just saw Colonel William J. Donovan," Pickering said. "He sent for me."

"Then I guess you know what he's up to."

"I've got a pretty good idea."

"Out of school, he's giving the Commandant a fit."

"Oh? How so?"

"The scuttleb.u.t.t going around is that Roosevelt wants to commission Donovan a brigadier general in the Corps."

"But he was in the Army," Pickering protested.

"Yeah, I know. The President is very impressed, or so I hear, with the British commandos. You know, hit-and-run raids. He wants American commandos, and he thinks they belong in the Corps. I hope to h.e.l.l it's not true."

"It sounds idiotic to me," Pickering said.

"Tell your important friends. Senator Fowler, for example."

"I will."

"Just don't quote me."

"Don't be silly, Doc."