W E B Griffin - Men at War 4 - The Fighting Agents Read online

  Withers was the NCOIC (noncommissioned officer in charge) of the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Detachment on whose boat Buchanan had escaped

  from Luzon. He was a competent fellow; master sergeants of the Regular

  U.S.

  Army are almost by definition highly knowledgeable and resourceful He had, after all, managed to acquire and hide the boat and bring his detachment safely to Mindanao on it.

  Master Sergeant Withers was summoned.

  He was obviously uncomfortable, and after some gentle prodding. General Fertig got him to blurt out:

  "The truth of the matter is, General, I'm not sure I'm a master sergeant."

  "Would you care to explain that. Sergeant?"

  Withers explained that he had been a staff sergeant assigned to an Army ammunition depot on Luzon when he had been suddenly transferred to a Philippine Scout Explosive Ordnance Disposal Detachment.

  "There was fifteen Scouts, General... we lost ten before we finally got out. Anyway, Sir, two of them was technical sergeants. They didn't know nothing about explosives, they'd come out of the Twenty-sixth Cavalry with Lieutenant Whittaker when it got all shot up and was disbanded."

  "Lieutenant Whittaker? A cavalry officer? Was he killed, too?" General Fertig asked.

  "No, Sir, and he wasn't a cavalry officer, either. He was a fighter pilot. They put him in the cavalry after they ran out of airplanes, and then they put him to work blowing things up when the Twenty-sixth Cavalry got all shot up and they butchered their horses for rations. He was a fucking artist with TNT..."

  "What happened to him?"

  "I don't know," Withers said.

  "The brass on Corregidor sent for him. That's where we got Captain Buchanan. He was sent to fetch Lieutenant Whittaker, and he talked Lieutenant Whittaker into letting him come with us."

  It made sense, Fertig thought, that a demolitions expert... "a fucking artist with TNT"... would be summoned to Corregidor to practice his art just before- the fortress fell. Poor bastard, if he wasn't dead, he was now in a prison camp. With a little bit of luck, he could be here, and free. USFIP could use a fucking artist with TNT.

  "You were telling me, Sergeant," General Fertig said, "about your rank."

  "Yes, Sir. Well, Lieutenant Whittaker thought that since I knew about explosives, and the Scouts didn't, it would be awkward with two of the Scouts outranking me, so he said, right when I first reported to him, that I had been promoted to master sergeant. I'm not sure he had the authority to do that, Sir.

  I wasn't even on the technical sergeant promotion list."

  Sgt. Withers looked at General Fertig for the general's reaction. His face bore the look of a man who has made a complete confession of his sins and has prepared himself for whatever fate is about to send his way.

  "Sergeant Withers," General Fertig said.

  "You may consider that your promotion in the field, by my authority, has been confirmed and is now a matter of record."

  "Yes, Sir," Sgt. Withers said.

  "Thank you, General."

  "The reason I asked you in here, Sergeant," General Fertig said, "is to ask for your thoughts on a problem we have. We have need of a source of electrical power."

  "What for, Sir?"

  "To power our radio transmitter."

  Withers hardly hesitated.

  "There's a diesel on the boat--" "We sank the boat."

  "We sunk it before on Luzon," Withers said, undaunted.

  "The engine's sealed. I'll take my Scouts down there and get it."

  "And how will you get it up here?"

  "We'll steal a water buffalo and make a travois... like the Indians had?...

  No problem, General."

  "The sooner the better, Sergeant," General Fertig said.

  [TWO]

  Naval Communications Facility Mare Island Navy Yard

  The radioman second looked to be about seventeen years old. He was small and slight, and his light brown hair was cropped close to his skull. He wore government-issue metal-framed glasses, and his earphones made his head look very small.

  But he was good at his trade, capable of transcribing the International Morse Code coming over his Hallicrafters receiver far faster than it was being sent. He had time, in other words, to read what he was typing instead of just serving as a human link in the transmission process.

  He raised one hand over his head to signal his superior while with the other, with practiced skill, he took the sheet of paper in his typewriter out and fed a fresh sheet.

  The lieutenant junior grade who came to his station looked very much like the radioman second, except that he was perhaps four years older and just a little heavier But he was slight, too, and wore glasses and looked very young.

  He took the sheet of yellow paper from the radioman second and read it:

  MFS FOR US FORCES AUSTRALIA

  MFS FOR US FOR CBS AUSTRALIA

  AC MOW BRTSS DXSYT QRSHJ BRASH

  POFTP QOPOQ CHTFS SDHST AL ITS

  CGHRZ QMSGL QROTX VABCG LSTYB

  AC NOW BRTSS DXSYT QRSHJ BRASH

  CGHRZ QMSGL QROTX VABCG LSTYE

  "What the hell is this?"

  "Look at the third block, Sir," the radioman second said.

  "What about it?"

  "It was the emergency code, no SOI, when the Army was still using the old M94," the radioman second said.

  "Who's MFS?" the j.g. asked.

  "There's no such station, Sir," the radioman second said.

  "What do you think?"

  "I think it's the Japs playing games," the radioman said.

  "Well, what the hell, I'll send it over to the Presidio," the j.g. said.

  "Maybe they've still got an M94 around someplace."

  "You don't think I should give them a call back?"

  "They weren't trying to reach us, they were calling Australia. Let Australia call them back."

  [THREE]

  Motor Machinist's Mate First Class Charles D. Staley, USN, in compliance with his orders, presented himself at the National Institutes of Health building.

  Five weeks before, Staley had been running the tune-up shop at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center motor pool, outside Chicago. It was a hell of a thing for a first class petty officer with eighteen years' service to be doing with a war on; but Staley was a Yangtze River Patrol sailor, and he had learned that Yangtze River Patrol sailors who had managed to make it back to the Statesinstead of either getting killed or captured in the Philippines--seemed to get dumb billets like that. The Navy didn't seem to know what to do with them, so it gave them billets like running a motor pool, shit that had to be done but had little to do with ships or fighting a war.

  And then the personnel chief had called him in, and said there was a levy down from BuPers--the Navy Bureau of Personnel--for someone with his rate, who had been a China Sailor, and who was unmarried. The personnel chief said he had to volunteer, for the billet was "classified and hazardous." Reasoning that anything had to be better than cleaning carburetors, Staley volunteered.

  Five days later, his orders came through. For the first time in his service, Staley was flown somewhere in a Navy airplane. He was flown to Anacostia Naval Air Station in Washington, where a civilian driving a Plymouth station wagon met him and took him to a large country estate in Virginia about forty miles from Washington. Some very rich guy's house--there was a mansion, and a stable, and a swimming pool, set on 240 acres in the middle of nowhere--had been taken over by the government for the duration.

  A real hard-nosed civilian sonofabitch named Eldon C. Baker had given him and ten other guys a short speech, saying the purpose of the training they were about to undergo was to determine if they met the standards of the OSS.

  Staley didn't know what the hell the OSS was, but he'd been in the service long enough to know when to ask questions and when not to ask questions, and this was one of the times not to ask questions.

  Baker, as if he had been reading his mind, almost immediately made t
hat official.

  "This is not a summer camp," Baker said, "where you will make friends for life. You are not to ask questions about the backgrounds, including girlfriends and families, of other trainees, and if a trainee asks you questions that do not directly concern what is going on at the school, you will report that immediately to one of the cadre."

  Baker had made it clear that if you reported it, the trainee who had asked the questions would be immediately "relieved" (which Staley understood to mean thrown out on his ass), and if you didn't report it, you would be relieved.

  They would be restricted to the camp, Mr. Baker told them, for the length of the course, or unless "sooner relieved for cause."

  The training itself had been part boot camp--running around and learning about small arms; part how to fight like a Shanghai pimp--in other words, with a knife, or by sticking your thumbs into a guy's eyes, or kicking him in the balls; part how to blow things up; and part how to be a radio operator. Staley hadn't had any trouble with any of it, but some of the other guys had had a hell of a time, and although they had said as little as possible about themselves, ley had been able to figure out that most of the other guys were college guys, and he would have laid three to one that at least three of them were officers.

  Of the twelve guys who started, six made it through. Three got thrown out, one broke his leg climbing up the side of a barn, and two just quit.

  Some Army full-bull colonel, a silver-haired Irishman wearing the blue starred ribbon of the Medal of Honor (the first one Staley had ever seen actually being worn), came to the estate just before they were through with the course and shook their hands; Staley was able to figure out from that that whatever was going on involved more than one service.

  Two days before, the cadre had loaded them all in station wagons, taken them to Washington, and handed them $300 and a list of "recommended civilian clothing." Staley had bought two suits, six shirts, a pair of shoes, and some neckties.

  The night before, one at a time, Baker had called everybody in and given them their orders, which they were not to discuss with anyone else. Staley didn't know what to make of his. He was ordered to report in civilian clothing to the National Institutes of Health, in Washington, D.C.

  They had brought him there in one of the station wagons.

  There was a receptionist in the lobby, and a couple of cops.

  He went to the receptionist, not sure what to do about his orders. They were stamped secret, and you don't go around showing secret orders to every dame behind a plate-glass window with a hole in it.

  "I was told to report here," Staley said, when she finally looked at him.

  "May I have your name, Sir?" she asked.

  When he gave it to her, she looked at a typewritten list, then handed him a cardboard badge with visitor printed on it, and an alligator clip on the back of it so that he could pin it to the lapel of his new suit. Then she called one of the cops over.

  "Would you take Mr. Staley to Chief Ellis, please?" she said.

  The cop smiled and made a come with me gesture with his hand. Staley followed him to an elevator, and they rode up in it and then went down a corridor until they came to a door with a little sign reading "Director." Inside that door was an office with a couple of women clerks pushing typewriters, an older woman who was obviously in charge, and a door with another sign reading "Director" on it.

  "This is Mr. Staley," the cop said.

  "The Chief expects him," the gray-haired woman said with a smile. Then she looked at Staley.

  "Go on in," she said.

  Staley stopped at the door and, conditioned by long habit of the proper way to report to a commanding officer, knocked and waited to be told to enter.

  "Come in," a male voice called.

  There was another office beyond that door, furnished with a large, glistening desk, a red leather couch, and two red leather chairs. Sitting at the desk, side wards so he could rest his feet on the open lower drawer of the desk, was a chief boatswain's mate, USN, smoking a cigar and reading a newspaper.

  "Whaddayasay, Staley?" the Chief said.

  "Getting any, lately?"

  It took a moment before Staley was sure who the Chief was, then he said, "Jesus H. Christ! Ellis!"

  Ellis swung around in his high-backed chair and pushed a lever on an intercom box.

  "Could somebody bring us some coffee? "he asked. Then he turned to Staley and gestured toward the red leather couch.

  "Sit down," he said.

  "Take a load off."

  Chief Boatswain's Mate J. R. Ellis, USN, was wearing a brand-new uniform.

  There were twenty-four years' worth of hash marks on the sleeve. The uniform was his Christmas present to himself. It was custom-made. He had had custom-made uniforms before, but in China, when he'd been with the Yangtze River Patrol. But he hadn't been a chief then, and custom-made uniforms cost a hell of a lot less in China than they did in the States. Chief Ellis had figured, what the hell, he had never even expected that he would make chief, why the hell not get a stateside custom-made uniform. He could afford it.

  The last time Staley had seen Ellis had been in Shanghai, and Ellis had been right on the edge of getting busted from bosun's mate first and maybe even getting his ass kicked out of the Navy. Ellis had been on the Panay when the Japs sank it in December 1937. After he'd swum away from the burning Panay, Ellis just hadn't given much of a damn for anything. Staley understood that: How the hell could you take pride in being a sailor if your government didn't do a goddamn thing to the goddamn Japs after they sank a U.S. man-of war and killed a lot of sailors while they were at it?

  But he had never expected to see Ellis as a chief, and certainly not in a billet where he was obviously some kind of a big wheel.

  One of the typists came in with two cups of coffee, in nice cups and saucers, not mugs.

  "There's cream and sugar," she said, smiling at Staley, "but Chief Ellis never uses what he calls 'canned cow."" "Black's just fine, Ma'am," Staley said.

  When she left, curiosity got the better of him.

  "What the hell is going on around here, Ellis?" he asked.

  "I've been trying to figure out how to tell you that," Ellis said.

  "I guess the quickest way is the chain of command."

  "Huh?"

  "Tell me about the chain of command."

  Staley looked at him in confusion. Ellis was obviously dead serious.

  "Tell me," Ellis repeated.

  "Well," Staley said, "I'm first class, and you're a chief, so I report to you, and you report to some officer, and he reports to some senior officer, and it works its way to the top, all the way, I suppose, to the Chief of Naval Operations."

  "All the way to the President," Ellis corrected him.

  "The Chief of Naval Operations reports to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he reports to the President, who is Commander-in-Chief."

  "So?" Staley said.

  "The way it is here," Ellis said, "is that you report to me, and I report to the Colonel... you met him, he was out to look things over in Virginia...."

  "The guy with the Medal of Honor?"

  "Colonel William J. Donovan," Ellis said.

  "I work for him, and he works for the President. I mean, directly. He gets his orders from the President. Nobody else can tell him what to do."

  Staley said, "No shit?"

  "You're going to have to learn to watch your language around here, Charley," Ellis said, almost primly.

  "Sorry," Staley said.

  "Where do I fit in around here?"

  "You're going to be the Colonel's driver," Ellis said.

  "And don't look down your nose at it. There's more to it than driving a car."

  "Such as?"

  "There's a lot of people would like to see him dead, for one thing. Your first job is to see that don't happen."

  "Like a bodyguard, you mean? Is that what all that crap in Virginia was for?"

  Ellis nodded, but then explaine
d.

  "Baker got to the Colonel," he said.

  "Everybody who comes into the OSS gets run through that school. For a while, I thought they were going to make me go."

  "What exactly is this "OSS'?"

  "It stands for "Office of Strategic Services,"" Ellis said.