Call to Arms

by W. E. B Griffin

  Captain Carstairs hoisted himself out of his cockpit ahead of Pickering, and then he stood on the wing root in a position where he could look directly into Second Lieutenant Pickering’s face.

  “Am I to believe, Pickering, that this has been your first opportunity to attempt to fly aircraft?”

  “Yes, sir,” Pickering said. “Captain, I realize I screwed up. But I really think I can learn how to do it.”

  Carstairs looked directly into Pickering’s eyes for a long moment before he spoke.

  “Actually, Pickering, you didn’t do too badly,” he said, and a smile of relief appeared on Pickering’s face. “I would, in fact, go so far as to say I saw a suggestion—faint, but a suggestion—that you may have a natural talent for flying.”

  The smile of relief turned into one of joy.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You’re going to have to work a little harder than your friend Stecker,” Captain Carstairs said. “But if you apply yourself, there’s really no reason why you can’t get through the course.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Pickering said, absolutely seriously. “I’ll really try to do my best, sir.”

  Carstairs nodded at Pickering and then jumped off the wing root.

  Second Lieutenant Malcolm Pickering surprised Captain James L. Carstairs a second time that same day.

  At half-past six, Captain Carstairs was at the bar of the San Carlos Hotel in the company of Captain and Mrs. Lowell B. Howard, USMC, and Mrs. Martha Sayre Culhane. They were waiting for a table in the dining room; they had reserved a table for eight.

  There were two empty stools beside them at the bar.

  Second Lieutenant Pickering, trailed by Second Lieutenant Stecker, obviously freshly showered and shaved, crossed the room to them.

  “Good evening, sir,” Pickering said.

  “Pickering.”

  “Sir, are these stools occupied?”

  “No. Help yourself. We’re about to leave.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Pickering said. “Hello, Martha.”

  “Hello, Pick,” Martha Sayre Culhane said.

  “May I present Lieutenant Dick Stecker?” Pickering said.

  “Hello,” Martha Sayre Culhane said, and gave him her hand.

  “I’m a little surprised that you know Mrs. Culhane, Pickering,” Captain Carstairs said.

  “My mother introduced us on the golf course,” Martha said.

  Captain and Mrs. Howard were introduced.

  “You two here to have dinner?” Carstairs asked, to make conversation.

  “Yes, sir,” Pickering said.

  The headwaiter appeared, and beckoned to Carstairs.

  “There’s our table,” Carstairs said. And then he gave in to a generous impulse. “Listen, we’ve reserved a larger table than it looks like we’re going to need. Would you like to have dinner with us? It’s sometimes hard to get a table….”

  “Thank you, sir, but no,” Second Lieutenant Stecker said.

  “Shut up,” Pickering said. “Yes, sir. Thank you very much.”

  The invitation did not seem to please Martha Sayre Culhane.

  “They can probably get a table of their own without too much trouble,” she said. “They live here. In the penthouse.”

  It was a rude thing for Martha to say, Carstairs thought. He wondered how long she had been waiting in the bar; how much she’d had to drink.

  “Well, it must be nice to have a rich father,” Carstairs joked.

  “No, sir, we’re just a pair of payday-rich second johns,” Dick Stecker said. “My father’s a captain at Camp Elliott.”

  “But his father,” Martha Sayre Culhane said, inclining her head toward Pickering, “owns Pacific and Far East Shipping.”

  Martha really doesn’t like Pickering, Carstairs thought. I wonder why. I wonder what happened on the golf course.

  “I think,” Pickering said, “that on reconsideration, we had best decline with thanks your kind invitation, Captain.”

  Carstairs could think of no other way to get out of what had become an awkward situation.

  He nodded at Pickering and Stecker and, taking Martha’s arm, led her away from the bar.

  But at the entrance to the dining room, she shook loose from his hand and walked back to the bar. Carstairs, now sure that she was in fact drunk and about to make a scene, hurried after her.

  Martha put her hand on Pickering’s arm, and he turned to look at her.

  “For some reason,” she said, “you bring out the bitch in me. I’m sorry. Come and have dinner.”

  Pickering hesitated.

  “Please, Pick,” Martha said. “I said I’m sorry.”

  Carstairs saw the look on Pickering’s face and knew that he was absolutely incapable of refusing anything Martha Sayre Culhane asked. And then he had a sure, sudden insight why Pickering brought out the bitch in Martha. She was attracted to him, strongly attracted to him, and under the circumstances she didn’t know how to handle it.

  As Captain Carstairs had recently come to realize, he himself didn’t know how to handle Martha Sayre Culhane.

  Carstairs had known Greg Culhane at Annapolis, where Greg had been three years behind him. They had become closer when Greg had come to Pensacola. And Carstairs had been at Admiral Sayre’s quarters when Greg’s engagement to Martha had been announced, and he had been the best man at their wedding.

  And he had been considered part of the family after the telegram from the Secretary of the Navy had made official what Admiral Sayre had been told personally over the phone days before the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations. And he had sat with the family during the memorial service in the chapel where she and Greg had been married.

  And then Martha had started to hang around with him and his friends. The polite fiction was that Martha took comfort from the company of the other officers’ wives. That wasn’t true. Martha took comfort from the officers, and from Captain James L. Carstairs, USMC, in particular.

  This had not escaped the attention of Admiral Sayre, who had spoken to Carstairs about it: “Mrs. Sayre and I appreciate the time and consideration you’re giving Martha. She needs a friend right now, someone she can trust when she is so vulnerable, emotionally.”

  Carstairs was aware then that the admiral might well mean exactly what he said. But he also thought that the admiral might well be saying, “It would not especially displease Mrs. Sayre and myself if something developed between the two of you,” or the reverse of that: “I’m sure that a bright young man like you, having received a word to the wise, knows what somebody like me could and would do to you if I ever found out you had taken advantage of my widowed daughter’s emotional vulnerability to get into her pants.”

  Carstairs had not laid a hand on Martha Sayre Culhane. At first it had been unthinkable. He was, after all, a Marine officer, and she was the widow of a brother officer. But lately he had become very much aware of the significant difference between the words wife and widow, and he had been equally aware of her beauty. It was too soon, of course, for him to make any kind of a move. But eventually, inevitably, he had concluded (wondering if it made him some kind of a sonofabitch), time would put a scar on her wound, and nature would take over again, and there would be room in her life for a man.

  Martha’s behavior toward Lieutenant Pickering—that handsome, rich sonofabitch—made him now realize that even if she didn’t know it, there was already a thick layer of scar tissue covering her wound.

  Pickering slid off his bar stool. For a moment Martha held his hand, and then, as if she realized what she was doing, quickly let go of it.

  Captain Carstairs stepped out of the way, and then followed the two of them into the dining room.

  XI

  (One)

  Machine Gun Range #2

  Camp Elliott, California

  1030 Hours, 19 January 1942

  The pickup truck was a prewar Chevrolet. It had a glossy paint job, and on each door a representation of the Marine Corps insignia was pai
nted above the neatly painted letters “USMC” It even had chrome hubcaps.

  The pickup trucks issued currently (and for several months before the war started) were painted with a flat Marine-green paint; and none of these had chrome hubcaps or the Marine emblem on the door. They did have USMC on the door, but that had been applied with a stencil, using black paint.

  The driver of the pickup, seen up close, was even more unusual than the truck. He was a thin—even gaunt—man not quite forty-two years old. He was dressed in dungarees; and the letters USMC and a crude representation of the Marine Corps insignia had been stenciled in black paint on the dungaree jacket. The jacket was unpressed, and the silver oak leaves of a lieutenant colonel were half-hidden in the folds of the collar.

  The lieutenant colonel parked the Chevrolet in line with the other vehicles—an ambulance, two other pickups, and two of the recently issued and still not yet common trucks, ¼-ton, 4 × 4, General Purpose, called “Jeeps”—and got out. There were a captain, several lieutenants, and four noncoms standing in the shade of a small frame building, an obviously newly erected range house.

  It was two story. The second story was an observation platform, only half framed-in. A primitive flagpole of two-by-fours rose above the observation platform. Flying from this was a red “firing in progress” pennant.

  There were what the lieutenant colonel judged to be two companies of infantry (somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred men) sitting on the ground twenty-five yards away from the firing line. It was already getting hot, and the sun was shining brightly. Shortly, the lieutenant colonel decided, they would grow uncomfortable.

  The captain glanced at the newcomer and looked away. He had seen the man’s face, and guessed his age, and concluded that he was probably a gunnery sergeant. It did not enter the captain’s mind that the newcomer might be an officer, much less a lieutenant colonel. Officers were provided with drivers, and field-grade officers were customarily provided with Ford or Chevrolet staff cars.

  The captain’s ignorance was not surprising. This was the first time the lieutenant colonel had come to Machine Gun Range #2. He walked to the front of the pickup, leaned casually against the hood, studied the setup carefully.

  He saw that there were twelve machine-gun positions, each constructed more or less as a machine-gun position would be set up in a tactical situation. That is to say, a low semicircle of sandbags had been erected at each position, in the center of which sat a Browning machine gun, placed so that it would fire over the sandbags.

  Three different types of machine gun had been set up. Each of the four sandbag positions on the right of the firing line held a Browning Model 1919A4 .30-caliber weapon. This version of the Browning was “air cooled,” with a perforated jacket on the outside of its barrel intended to dissipate the heat generated by bullets passing through the barrel. The gun was mounted on a low tripod, a single, short leg forward, and two longer legs, forming a V, to the rear. There was a steel rod between the two rearward legs. Elevation of the weapon was controlled by a threaded rod connected to and rising upward from the steel rod to the rear action of the weapon. Traverse of the weapon was limited by the length of the steel rod connecting the two rear legs of the tripod.

  Four M1917A1 .30-caliber “water-cooled” Brownings had been set up in the center four firing positions. A jacket through which water was passed encased the barrel of the ’17A1s. And the mounting, otherwise identical to that of the ’19A4s, was different in one important respect: Traverse of the weapon was restricted only by the length of the hose connecting the water jacket to the water reservoir. In theory, the ’17A1 could be fired through 360 degrees. Elevation was controlled by curved steel plates connected to the machine gun itself and the top of the tripod.

  The four firing positions on the left of the firing line each held an M2 Browning. This was the .50-caliber1 version of the Browning. And it was essentially an enlargement of the .30-caliber ’19A4. The perforated steel cooling device on the barrel, however, ran only a short distance out from the receiver. The quick-replaceable barrel was fitted with a handle, for ease in handling; the cocking lever was enlarged and fitted with a wooden handle; and the “pistol grip” behind the trigger of the ’19A4 was replaced with a dual wooden-handled trigger mechanism.

  The lieutenant colonel found nothing wrong with the placement of the machine guns. And he saw why the weapons were silent; there was some sort of trouble with one of the 1917A1s. He saw an armorer on his knees with the ’17A1 in pieces before him. He was being watched by its fascinated two-man crew.

  The range was new, and consequently primitive. There was neither a target pit (a below-ground trench at the targets) or a berm (a mound of earth used as a bullet trap) behind the targets. The targets were constructed of two-by-fours, with target cloth stretched between them. The targets themselves were approximately life-size silhouettes of the human torso, rather than the expected bull’s-eye targets.

  The bullets fired from the machine guns impacted on low, sandy hills the lieutenant colonel judged to be a mile and a half from the firing line. He presumed that whoever had laid out the range was perfectly familiar with the ballistics of .30-and .50-caliber machine-gun projectiles and that a large area behind the hills had been declared an impact area and thus Off Limits.

  When he had seen what he wanted to see (and he was not here to judge machine-gun training; only professionally curious) the lieutenant colonel pushed himself off the hood of the pickup and walked toward the officers gathered in the shade of the range office.

  He was almost on them, as they chatted quietly together before one of the noncoms, when a staff sergeant glanced in his direction and saw the glitter of silver on his dungaree jacket collar points. He inclined his head toward the captain, who looked quickly in his direction.

  When the lieutenant colonel drew close, the officers and the noncoms came to attention, and the captain saluted and smiled.

  “Good morning, sir,” the captain said.

  “Good morning,” the lieutenant colonel said, with a salute that was far short of parade-ground perfect. “Are you in charge here, Captain?”

  “I’m the senior officer, sir,” the captain said.

  “That’s what I asked,” the lieutenant colonel said, reasonably, with a smile. He examined the lieutenants and picked one out. “Are you Lieutenant McCoy?”

  The lieutenant came to attention. “No, sir,” he said.

  “I was told I could find Lieutenant McCoy here,” the lieutenant colonel said.

  “He’s on the line, sir,” the captain said. “There’s a stoppage on one of the weapons.” He gestured in the direction of the pit where the lieutenant colonel had seen the armorer working on the machine gun.

  The lieutenant colonel started to walk toward it. The captain followed him. When they were out of hearing of the group in the shade of the range house, the lieutenant colonel stopped and turned to the captain.

  “I think I can find Lieutenant McCoy myself, Captain,” he said softly. “What I suggest you do is put one officer and one noncom in the observation tower, and then send the others over to the troops. If I were, say, a PFC, I would resent being ordered to sit in the sun while my sergeant stood in the shade. Much less my officers.”

  The captain came to attention, with surprise on his face.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” he said.

  The lieutenant colonel walked to the machine-gin pit where there was a malfunctioning weapon.

  One of the two troops saw him coming and said something to the third man, who was, the lieutenant colonel saw, just about finished reassembling the weapon. The man started to straighten up. The lieutenant colonel saw the gold bars of a second lieutenant on his dungaree shirt. The two Marines came to attention.

  “Finish what you’re doing,” the lieutenant colonel said, in Chinese.

  “Yes, sir,” McCoy replied in English, and went on with his work.

  “You two can stand at ease,” the lieutenant colonel ordered, and th
en switched to Chinese: “What was wrong with it?”

  “Dirt,” McCoy replied, again in English. “We just drew these guns. They’ve been in storage since the First World War. What stopped this one was petrified Cosmoline. It was too hard to wash out with gasoline, but then firing shook it loose. It jammed the bolt as it tried to feed.”

  “Your record, Lieutenant, says that you are fluent in Cantonese,” the lieutenant colonel said in Chinese.

  “I don’t speak it as well as you do, sir,” McCoy said, in Cantonese. He got the machine gun back together, opened the action, and stood up. “Is there something I can do for you, sir?”

  The lieutenant colonel ignored the question.

  “Isn’t there an armorer out here?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” McCoy said. “But I like to explain what went wrong, instead of just fix it.”

  “Where did you learn about machine guns?”

  “I was in a heavy-weapons company with the Fourth Marines in Shanghai, sir,” McCoy said.

  The lieutenant colonel was pleased with what he had found. The service record of Second Lieutenant McCoy had said that he was an Expert with a .30-and a .50-caliber Browning machine guns and that he was fluent in Cantonese. He was now satisfied that both were the case.

  “You’re the range officer, I understand?” the lieutenant colonel said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If you would feel comfortable in turning over that responsibility to one of the other officers, I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes.”

  “I’ll ask one of the other officers to take over for me, sir,” McCoy said.

  “I’ll wait for you in the pickup,” the lieutenant colonel said, smiling and pointing toward the Chevrolet.

  When McCoy got to the pickup truck, the lieutenant colonel was inside. He signaled for McCoy to get in. After McCoy was inside, he put out his hand. His grip was firm.

  “My name is Carlson, McCoy,” he said. “I’m pleased to meet you. I’m an old China Marine myself.”