Line of Fire

by W. E. B Griffin

"Aye, aye, Sir," Moore said and smiled at Joanne Miller.

  She surprised him by laying her hand on his forehead.

  "How long have you had malaria?" she asked.

  "I don't have malaria," he said.

  "The hell you don't," she said. "Glassy eyes, high temperature." She looked at Major Dillon. "He has malaria and he belongs in a hospital! Doesn't anybody give a damn?"

  "Shit," McCoy said.

  "I'm sorry you find that inconvenient, Lieutenant," Joanne Miller said icily.

  "Putting him in a hospital right now would be inconvenient."

  "People die of malaria, you damned fool!"

  "What would they do for him in a hospital that, can't be done here?"

  McCoy asked.

  "Well, they would put him on quinine, or a quinine substitute, for one thing. And put him in bed. And they wouldn't give him anything to drink."

  "Is there any reason that couldn't be done here? Is there anything else?"

  "Well, for one thing, where are you going to get the quinine?

  And who would take care of him?"

  "Nobody's listening to me," Moore said. "I'm all right."

  "Major, why don't you take the Lieutenant to the hospital and see that they give her whatever she needs?

  Maybe you better get a doctor over here to look at him." Dillon considered that a moment and then nodded.

  "You'd better bring a nurse, too," Joanne Miller said.

  "We already have two nurses," McCoy said.

  She looked at him and decided he was perfectly serious.

  "I'm on a seventy-two-hour pass. I can't stay here."

  "You've just been placed on temporary duty," McCoy said.

  "On whose authority?"

  "It can be arranged," Dillon said. "Would you mind coming with me, Lieutenant?"

  "I see this," Lieutenant John Marston Moore announced, as the beginning of a great romance."

  "You're a damned fool, you know that?" Joanne said, but when she stood up and looked down at him and saw him smiling, she found herself unable not to smile back.

  "Getting back to business," Pluto said, the moment the door had closed after Joanne and Dillon. "There has to be something. Maybe a place. Where did you meet? Under what circumstances? Did you ever"-he hesitated, and then went on-"go to a hotel or something."

  Barbara Cotter smiled, and Pluto thought he saw a suggestion of a blush.

  "What was the name of the hotel? Did anything special happen there?"

  "The first time I met Joe," Barbara said, half uncomfortably, half amused, "he was sent to me for a blood test. For syphilis: Hell of a way to start a romance, isn't it?" She looked at Pluto.

  "Is this the sort of thing you want?"

  "I think maybe," Pluto said. "Tell me about it."

  Chapter Fourteen

  [One]

  WATER LILY COTTAGE

  MANCHESTER AVENUE

  BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA

  1730 HOURS 30 SEPTEMBER 1942

  Major Jake Dillon returned from the local military hospital with everything necessary to treat a malaria patient, including a doctor. The only thing he didn't have with him was, a hospital bed.

  "I appreciate your coming over here, Sir," Major Banning greeted the doctor, a Lieutenant Colonel.

  The doctor's bearing, haircut, and ribbon-laden tunic told Lieutenant (J.G.) Joanne Miller, NNC, that he had not been recently commissioned into military service from civilian life.

  The doctor grunted at Banning and walked to the couch where Second Lieutenant John Marston Moore, USMCR, was resting.

  "How do you feel, son?"

  "I feel fine, Doctor," Moore said.

  Bullshit," the Colonel said. His ready use of the word confirmed Joanne's guess that this physician's patients over the years had not been in a position to complain about his bedside manner.

  He examined Moore quickly but carefully.

  "When did you stop taking Atabrine?"

  Moore thought a moment. "About six days ago, Sir."

  "Why? Did you really think they were giving it to you just so they could watch you turn yellow?"

  "It was... inconvenient... for me to get more, Sir."

  "Yeah, well, you see where that led us. It was inconvenient for me to come over here tonight, and it will be inconvenient to treat you here. You belong in a hospital."

  "Colonel," Banning said, "did Major Dillon explain why that-"

  "I've seen your orders, Major. I am suitably impressed. I said it would be inconvenient to treat him here, not that it couldn't be done."

  "Yes, Sir," Banning said.

  "So far as the malaria is concerned, the reason he relapsed is that he interrupted his Atabrine regimen.

  We put him back on Atabrine and he'll start feeling better by tomorrow morning. Now, what's wrong with your legs?"

  "They're all right, Sir."

  "Bullshit. You nearly jumped out of your skin when I touched them. Take your pants off."

  When Moore hesitated, the Colonel said, "That wasn't a suggestion, Lieutenant. And these ladies are nurses, they've seen men with their pants off before."

  Moore started to push his trousers down.

  "I don't know that, come to think of it," the Colonel said. He looked at Joanne Miller. "You are an RN, right? Any specialty?"

  "I'm a nurse-anesthesiologist, Doctor."

  He grunted and looked at Barbara Cotter. "What about you?"

  "I'm a psychiatric nurse, Doctor."

  "That probably comes in handy around here," the Colonel said, and then looked at Moore's legs. "Mary, Mother of God' What moron discharged you from a hospital?" He probed the legs knowledgeably with his fingers. Moore winced.

  "Believe it or not, before I became a member of the Palace Guard, I thought I was an orthopedic surgeon. What did that, a grenade?"

  "A grenade or a mortar round."

  "Well, there's no sign of infection, but you really need some physical therapy." He looked at the nurses.

  "Make him walk around, if nothing else. Put him on his belly and force the legs back until the threshold of pain. Fifteen, twenty movements, each leg, four times a day. Got it?"

  "Yes, Doctor," they said, almost in unison.

  "When I said `walk him around,' I didn't mean he's to get out of bed or off the couch for more than thirty minutes at a time unless there's a reason. Give him all he wants to eat, aspirin for the pain, and Atabrine every two hours until tomorrow morning, when every four hours will be enough. I'll come back tomorrow. Got it?"

  "Yes, Doctor," Barbara said.

  "Alcohol, Doctor?" Joanne asked.

  "A couple of drinks won't hurt him. Don't let him get fall down drunk."

  Why did I ask that? Joanne wondered.

  "Speaking of which, if someone were to offer me some of that Famous Grouse, I wouldn't turn it down,"

  the Colonel said."

  "Certainly," Banning said. "I could use one myself. Would you be offended, Sir, if I offered you a bottle of it?"

  "Offended? Jesus, how dumb do I look?"

  "Just don't tell anyone where you got it, please, Doctor," Banning said.

  "If you were trying to be subtle, Major, and trying to tell me to keep my mouth shut about tonight, save your breath. I don't even want to know what you and your people are up to, and I have been around the Service long enough to know what things you talk about and what things you don't." Thirty minutes after the doctor left, the telephone rang. Banning answered it, and then a moment later announced, "The weather's clearing at Townsville. We can go."

  He looked at Pluto Hon. "I just had an unpleasant thought. Will Moore be able to get into the dungeon?"

  What in the world, Joanne Miller wondered, is the dungeon?

  "With a little bit of luck, he won't have to," Hon said. "But yes, Sir. I took care of it."

  "And what about the truck and the car?"

  "They're supposed to be here," he looked at his wristwatch,, "in ten minutes, Sir."

  "Let's get
Dillon's skis outside, on the porch, so they won't have to come in here," Banning said.

  Dillon's skis? Joanne wondered. Is that what he said, "Dillon's skis"?

  Two large wooden crates were manhandled through the living room and out the door.

  "Pluto will come back as soon we find out if that substitution code works-or come up with something that does," Banning said to Moore. "With you sick, I hate to take him. There's no other way."

  "I'm all right," Moore said.

  "Yeah, sure you are," Joanne heard herself say.

  "We're leaving the car for you," Banning said. "You are not, repeat not, to give it to Mrs. Feller under any circumstances."

  "Aye, aye, Sir," Moore said.

  Banning looked at Joanne Miller. "When Hon comes back, one of you can pick him up at the airport."

  Lieutenant (J.G.) Miller decided she did not like Major Ed Banning.

  "Aye, aye, Sir," she said, as sarcastically salty as she could manage. As she said it, she came to attention.

  Her sarcasm went right over his head.

  "Good girl," he said, and smiled and left.

  Two minutes later, Lieutenants Miller and Cotter were alone in Water Lily Cottage with their patient.

  [Two]

  BILLETING OFFICE

  OFFICE OF THE HEADQUARTERS COMMANDANT

  SUPREME HEADQUARTERS

  SOUTH WEST PACIFIC OCEAN AREA

  BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA

  1905 HOURS 30 SEPTEMBER 1942

  There were only two female field-grade officers, a major and a lieutenant colonel, assigned to Supreme Headquarters, South West Pacific Ocean Area. Both of them were nurses. The Lieutenant Colonel was on the staff of the senior medical officer, and she was in charge of whatever concerned army nurses. The Major was on the staff of the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-4 (Mat‚riel), as the resident expert on medical supplies. Both had elected to live in the Female Bachelor Officer's Quarters provided for the nurses assigned to what was known as Mercy Forward. Mercy Forward was in fact a detachment Fourth U.S.

  Army General Hospital (code name, Mercy) to Brisbane from Melbourne to provide medical service MacArthur's headquarters.

  Major R. James Tourtillott, the SWPOA Deputy Headquarters Commandant, explained all this in some detail Ellen Feller, Department of the Navy Civilian Professional Employee (Assimilated Grade: Lieutenant Commander), to explain why there was no Female Field Grade Bachelor Quarters he could move her into.

  "Where have you been living, Mrs. Feller?" Major' Tourtillott asked. "Is there some reason you can't just stay there?"

  Yes, there is a goddamned reason! Major Ed Banning, that bastard, has turned Water Lily Cottage into a goddamned hospital, complete with two nurses: "Sorry, Mrs. Feller, you'll move into a BOQ until this is over. We just have to your room.

  Obviously, there is no reason, no reason at all, why Moore could not be treated for his malaria-if he really has malaria, he looks perfectly healthy to me-in Mercy Forward. And even if there is some

  "security reason," as Banning said, for keeping him out of the hospital, there is no reason at all why those two Navy nurses couldn't live in the Nurse's BOQ at Mercy Forward. They're only junior-grade lieutenants, after all, I'm an assimilated Lieutenant Commander.

  "There's a project, Major Tourtillott, a classified project I can't talk about, that seems to have evicted me."

  "I could call Mercy Forward and see if they could put you up with the nurses."

  "I don't want to move in with the nurses, for one thing, and for another, I have to be somewhere close to Supreme Headquarters. I'm on twenty-four-hour call."

  "I'm sure something can be worked out, Mrs. Feller,' Tourtillott said, thinking that the best solution for housing lame-duck female -I wonder what the hell she does? As an assimilated Lieutenant Commander, she's no secretary- would probably be to move her into the Devonshire, a small, luxurious hotel requisitioned to house full colonels and one-star generals; but he couldn't do that without the OK of the Headquarters Commandant. "But not today."

  "You don't seem to understand," Ellen Feller said. "I don't have a place to sleep." Major Tourtillott handed her a printed form.

  "This is a billeting voucher on Mason's Hotel," he said.

  "They'll put you up overnight, and if you'll come back, say at oh nine hundred, oh nine thirty, I'll have you fixed up by then."

  "Where is Mason's Hotel?"

  "Not far," Major Tourtillott said. "It's the best I can do right now."

  The reason I am being humiliated like this is because Banning hates me, has been waiting for an opportunity to humiliate me, and now he's found it in spades. Not only is he denying me access to whatever he and that offensive Major Jake Dillon are up to, but he is rubbing that humiliation in my face by ordering me out of Water Lily Cottage.

  He thinks he can just order me around like I'm one of his Marines.

  And he thinks there is absolutely nothing I can do about it, because he's the senior Office of Management Analysis officer e even if my assimilated rank is equal to his.

  Well, we'll see about that! Fleming Pickering won't let hint get away with this, once he hears about it!

  Room 6 of Mason's Hotel turned out to be a small, more or less square room on the upper floor of a fifty-year-old, wood-framed, tin-roofed, two-story building.

  There was a bed with a visibly sagging mattress; a chest of drawers; a mirror which had lost at least half of its silver backing; a table against a wall; a straight-backed chair-, a bedside table with a 25-watt lamp on it; and a bare 100-watt bulb hanging from the ceding. There was a sink; and behind a curtain there was a tin-walled cubicle with a shower head and concrete floor. The toilet was down the corridor.

  Mrs. Ellen Feller moved the 25-watt lamp from the bedside table to the table against the wall, pulled the chair up to it, and spent the next two hours composing a message to Brigadier General Fleming Pickering. It would go out that very night over the MAGIC channel, she decided, even if that meant she would have to pay for a taxi all the way out to the Supreme Headquarters, SWPOA building, spend thirty minutes in Pluto Hon's damned damp dungeon, and then either beg a ride back here from the staff duty officer or pay for another damned taxi.

  Putting her thoughts on paper, however, turned out to be much more difficult than she initially imagined.

  Her first draft, quickly balled up and tossed on the floor, sounded like whining. And that wouldn't do. To win her point, she had to paint herself as a member of the team who had been unjustly excluded from team activities.

  Neither was Fleming Pickering going to be automatically sympathetic to her eviction from Water Lily Cottage, she realized. Banning would just tell him that John Moore's nurses needed her room.

  Maybe Johnny Moore really has malaria.

  And then, slowly, as her fury waned, she saw other problems.

  For instance, she wasn't entirely sure that Fleming Pickering would even get her carefully worded message. It would have to pass over Rickabee's desk. And Colonel Rickabee and that bastard Banning were not only brother Marine officers, but personally close. Even if she sent it EYES ONLY

  PICKERING, Rickabee would see it. He would be prepared to argue Banning's case by the time he handed it to Pickering.

  And she couldn't send it EYES ONLY PICKERING and still look like a member of the team registering a justified complaint.

  Rickabee was Banning's immediate superior, not Pickering.

  Any complaints should be directed to him.

  And finally, of course, that rude bastard Dillon just might have been telling the truth. Pickering himself just might have told him to keep Ellen Feller out of whatever it was they were doing.

  Finally, she gave up. She retrieved all the crumpled-up balls of paper and put a match to them.

  There were more than two ways to skin a cat.

  General Willoughby was proud and sensitive about his role as MacArthur's intelligence officer. He would not be at all pleased to learn that a clandestine intelligence
operation, directed from Washington, was being conducted right under his nose.

  Let Willoughby send an EYES ONLY to Washington either on his own or at MacArthur's direction.

  It wouldn't be hard for Willoughby to "find out." She'd go to the dungeon in the morning, and she would personally carry to General Willoughby the first MAGIC that came through.

  Willoughby almost always wanted to chat a little. He'd offer her a cup of coffee and she'd accept it, of course.

  She would, she decided, wear the white cotton see-through blouse Willoughby always seemed to find so fascinating.

  On that happy note, Mrs. Ellen Feller (Assimilated Grade: Lieutenant Commander) took off her clothing, climbed into the bed with the sagging mattress, and went to sleep.

  [Three]

  At half past nine, Lieutenant (J.G.) Joanne Miller, NNC, came back into the living room. Second Lieutenant John Marston Moore, USMCR, was regally established there in a high-backed armchair, his feet on its matching footstool. He was wearing a hospital bathrobe, pajamas, and slippers. A card table had been arranged so that Joanne could sit on one side and Lieutenant (J.G.) Barbara Cotter on the other. The three of them had been playing gin rummy.

  Joanne had gone into the kitchen to make a fresh pot of tea and to get Lieutenant Moore's Atabrine. She had refused his request for another beer, and he had somewhat surprised her by not giving her an argument. Usually, when he asked for a beer and she turned him down, he gave her an argument. And that was beginning to get to her. But then he began to annoy her in a different way. Every time she glanced at him, she saw that he was looking at her.

  He's just a kid, a horny kid, she thought. If I ignore him, he'll stop.

  He swallowed the Atabrine, washing it down with a swallow of Coca-Cola.

  "How old are you?" she heard herself asking.

  "Twenty-two," he said.

  "You don't look it." She saw the strange look on Barbara's face.

  "Did I do something wrong, or what?" Moore asked.

  I'm twenty-four. What right have I got to think of him as a kid. "That just slipped out. Sorry."

  "I thought you were going to tell me it was past my bedtime or something," he said.

  "It is."