In Danger's Path

by W. E. B Griffin

  McCoy translated the numbers from Signal Operating Instruction Number Three.

  Four Able meant that the Catalinas had successfully completed their rendezvous with the Sunfish and taken off again with the meteorologists and their equipment aboard. Two Fox gave the time of their departure. Two X-Ray gave the estimated time—six hours and thirty minutes—it would take them to reach the gypsies.

  “Acknowledge, Jerry,” McCoy ordered. “Tell them to monitor continuously, and sign off.”

  “Gotcha,” Sampson said, and began to tap on his key.

  “What do they say, McCoy?” Technical Sergeant Abraham demanded.

  I can either tell him to call me Captain, or I can ignore the old sonofabitch.

  “Captain Sampson, starting in thirty minutes, send SN for ten seconds once a minute.”

  McCoy hoped that Sampson would reply, if not “Aye, aye, sir,” then “Yes, sir.”

  “Gotcha,” Sampson said.

  “Captain,” the old radioman said. “I could do that.”

  “Have you got a watch?” McCoy asked.

  “No, sir.”

  McCoy unstrapped his. “I’ll want this back,” he said, and handed it to him.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Captain Sampson, why don’t we go check on the fires?” McCoy said.

  Sampson finally caught on. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “And you, too, Chief,” McCoy said to Chief Brewer.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Brewer said.

  McCoy looked at Technical Sergeant Abraham. “The aircraft are due in here from forty-five minutes to an hour. You are in charge of keeping everybody away from them when they land. I don’t care how you do it. I don’t want anybody chopped up by a propeller, or the aircraft damaged by excited people.”

  “What difference does it make if you’re going to destroy them anyway?” Abraham replied.

  “What did you say?” McCoy said.

  “I think you heard me,” Abraham said.

  “Let me tell you something, Sergeant,” McCoy said. “The moment I got here, you were recalled to active duty for the duration of the war plus six months. That means you’re back in the Corps. And that means when you get an order, all you say is ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ You don’t question the order. Do you read me, Sergeant?”

  After a moment, Sergeant Abraham said, “Aye, aye, sir.”

  McCoy opened his door and stepped out of the ambulance. Chief Brewer got out on the other side, and a moment later Sampson came out the back door.

  Earlier, McCoy and Zimmerman had driven over an area of the desert long enough to serve as a runway. Once they’d determined a suitable place for it, they’d walked all over it, carefully searching for holes or rocks that would damage the Catalina’s landing gear. When the “runway” had been marked off, he ordered the building of two fires, to be ignited on order, marking the ends of the runway. When—if—the Catalinas appeared, they would be lit and made as smoky as possible. This would indicate to the Catalina pilots not only the position of the runway but the direction of the wind, which would tell them the direction to land.

  Because material for building fires was scarce, there was a good deal of resentment when the gypsies were ordered to part with material to build them.

  Furthermore, McCoy suspected (a suspicion Milla confirmed) that he was going to be looking at more resentment as soon as most of the women—and even some of the men—realized that their long ordeal was far from over the minute he showed up.

  McCoy had some new ideas about how to get the women, the children, and even some of the men out of the desert, but that wasn’t going to happen now. What was going to happen now was that once the Catalinas had off-loaded their cargo and anything on them that might be useful, thermite grenades would be set off on the wing, over the fuel tanks, and the aircraft destroyed.

  Then they’d leave the burned aircraft where they were, and take the wagons, the carts, and the two vehicles as far away as they could get as quickly as they could go. The hope was that if reports of two aircraft flying into the desert triggered aerial reconnaissance of the area, the reconnaissance pilots would think both had crashed and burned. If people were then sent in to check on the “crashed and burned” aircraft and no bodies were found, it was hoped that it would be deduced that the aircrews had bailed out. Thus any subsequent search would look for airmen, not a caravan of pony- and camel-drawn wagons.

  There was going to be disappointment and resentment when the aircraft were destroyed. According to Milla, as soon as the women were informed that aircraft were coming, some of them immediately decided they’d be able to fly out on them. That wasn’t going to happen.

  [FIVE]

  Aboard Sea Gypsy Two

  Somewhere Above the Gobi Desert

  Mongolia

  1525 2 May 1943

  Lieutenant Malcolm S. Pickering, USMCR, climbed into the cockpit of the Catalina with the call sign “Sea Gypsy Two,” slipped into the copilot’s seat, and strapped himself in. Moments before, he had been sleeping in the fuselage. Lieutenant Pickering and the pilot-in-command, Captain James B. Weston, USMC, had alternated flying the aircraft and sleeping during the long haul from Pearl Harbor. They didn’t actually follow a schedule. Instead, one or the other kipped out when he felt the need to take a nap.

  “Anytime, Jim,” Pick said.

  Weston took his hands off the control wheel in an exaggerated gesture. “You’ve got it,” he said, as Pick put his hand on the wheel. For some time they’d been flying the airplane without the assistance of its autopilot. Though it had worked well on the eleven-hour leg from Pearl Harbor to the rendezvous with the Sunfish, it had gone out either during landing at the rendezvous, or while taking off. At near takeoff velocity, they had run into a large swell that had really shaken the bird.

  “Where are we?” Pickering asked.

  “I would estimate that we are perhaps two hundred feet above and three hundred feet behind that airplane out there,” Weston said, indicating the Catalina with “Sea Gypsy One” as its call sign.

  “In other words, you have no idea?”

  “I just told you where we are,” Weston said.

  “There’s not much down there, is there?”

  “If there was something down there, there would probably be fighter strips to protect it,” Captain James B. Weston, USMC, replied. “You have to learn to look on the brighter side of things.”

  “Do you have any idea where we are in relation to where we are supposed to be?”

  “We should be where we’re going in about an hour, God willing, and if the creek don’t rise. I have faith in Major Williamson.”

  “And if the sainted Major Williamson has fucked up somehow?”

  “He’s not the sort to fuck up, Pickering,” Weston said loyally.

  “Excuse me,” Pick said sarcastically.

  “On the other hand,” Weston said, a smile at the edge of his mouth. “You are a bona fide—capital F—fuckup, having been caught in carnal dalliance.”

  “Fuck you, Captain, sir.”

  “You know where that word comes from, don’t you, Mr. Pickering?”

  “I have no fucking idea.”

  “England. When the cops locked up some guy for what you were doing, they wrote ‘F.U.C.K.’ in the blotter, standing for: For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.”

  “My education is now complete,” Pick said. “Thank you so much!”

  “Was she worth it, Mr. Pickering?”

  “I am under orders, sir,” Pick said sarcastically, “as you well-know, not to discuss the reasons I ‘volunteered’ for this.”

  “We’re no longer at Ewa,” Weston said. “And we’re friends, right?”

  Pick didn’t reply.

  “I’m curious, that’s all,” Weston said. “If you’re uncomfortable talking about the lady who got you in so much trouble, don’t. Your silence will, of course, confirm my worst suspicions.”

  Pick looked at him. It had been decided from the first day that Ma
jor Williamson would train Lieutenant Stevenson as his copilot, and Weston would train Pickering as his. They had spent a lot of time together, both in the cockpit of the Catalina and at Muku-Muku.

  During that time, Weston did not join Major Williamson and Lieutenant Stevenson on their frequent tours of the various officers’ clubs on Oahu. Soon Pick had come to the conclusion that Weston was depriving himself of that pleasure because he was aware that they were off-limits to him, and didn’t want to leave him alone. Even though being left alone at Muku-Muku was not the same thing as being locked in a basement with nothing to eat and drink but bread and water.

  Pick had long before decided that Jim Weston was a really nice guy, even if he, like Williamson, was obviously out of his mind for volunteering for an idiot mission like this one.

  I don’t want this guy to think I did something reallyimmoral, like getting caught with some sixteen-year-old girl.

  “I loved, Captain, sir, not too badly, but rather unwisely,” Pick said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “In hindsight, she wasn’t worth getting myself all fucked up like this, but at the time I was thinking with my talley-wacker, not my head,” Pick said. “And she did have magnificent teats.”

  “What was wrong with her? You said you weren’t serious about her?”

  “I was solely interested in carnal pleasure, the sinful lusts of the flesh, as they are known,” Pick said. “The beloved of my life having recently told me that she had no interest at all, thank you, in becoming my blushing bride.”

  “You got a Dear John?”

  “Delivered in person. She went with me to a hotel—you know the San Carlos, in P’Cola?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “And no sooner had I closed the door and started to open the champagne than she delivered the Dear John in person. And then walked out the door, leaving me with chilled champagne, an untouched bed, and a badly broken heart.”

  “You know the other guy?”

  “I don’t think there was another guy,” Pick said. “That’s why it hurt. I think she just didn’t like me, period.”

  “So you were on the rebound when you met this other woman?”

  “I was, in the best traditions of a Marine officer, looking out for the welfare of my men. She was one of the chaperones at a service club dance for the enlisted men, and I went there to thank her for saving my innocent men from the wild women and other sinful pleasures of Memphis.”

  Jim Weston chuckled. “And?”

  “Out of a sense of duty, I danced with the lady. Whereupon she told me—while rubbing her belly against mine—that, one, her husband was out of town a lot, two, that he was considerably older than she was and, three, that she was lonely. One thing, as they say, led to another.”

  “So what happened?”

  “She was well-known in Memphis. There was talk. The admiral commanding Memphis NAS placed me under arrest, had me hauled before him, and offered me my choice of volunteering for this, or a court-martial.”

  “That’s hard to believe,” Weston said.

  “Write this down. It is a court-martial offense to have carnal knowledge of any female to whom you are not joined in holy matrimony.”

  “If they enforced that, three quarters of the pilots I know would be in the Portsmouth Naval Prison.”

  “Not including you, sir! Please don’t tell me that, and shatter my impression of you as the perfect Marine officer.”

  “That’s all you did, diddle this one lady?”

  “I diddled her more than once, of course,” Pick said. “But, baring my breast, there were a few other little things, like being out of uniform, et cetera, et cetera, but nothing serious. And you miss the point. I embarrassed the Admiral.”

  “Did the Admiral know your father is a general?”

  “He said that was the only reason he was giving me a chance to volunteer.”

  “Does your father know?”

  “By now, I’m sure he does. But he probably thinks I’m doing the noble thing. I’m not sure if I like that or not.”

  Turnabout is only fair play, Jim Weston decided at that moment. And I’m more than a little sick of people thinking I’m here because I’m being noble. And I think Pickering is entitled to know the real reason why I’m here.

  “Can I tell you something in confidence?”

  “That you have had carnal knowledge of a female to whom you are not joined in holy wedlock? I’m shocked to the core!”

  “I’m serious, Pick. I wouldn’t want this to go any further.”

  “Sure. My lips are sealed. Boy Scout’s Honor.”

  “I didn’t volunteer to fly this bus to be noble, either,” Weston said. “But pretending to be noble was the only way I could get Williamson—who really is noble—to take me along.”

  “I don’t follow that at all, sorry,” Pick said. “You didn’t want to volunteer, but you did anyway? What are you talking about?”

  “I needed to leave where I was,” Weston said, “and the only way I could get Major Williamson to take me along—he thought I had paid my dues to the Corps with that year in the Philippines; and between you and me, so do I—was to convince him that I was just as noble a Marine officer as he was, eager to sacrifice all for the glory of the Corps. That was pure bullshit, but he swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker.”

  “You were at P’Cola, right? They were going to teach you how to fly all over again, was the story I got from Charley Galloway. You didn’t want to do that?”

  “There was a girl,” Weston said. “Actually two girls.”

  “Really? Two at once?” Pick said. There was a tone of admiration in his voice.

  “Two. One in Philadelphia, a Navy nurse. I think I’m in love with her.”

  “And the other?”

  “She was already at Pensacola. And I think I’m in love with her, too.”

  “Well, then, you do have a problem,” Pick said. “You were actually dumb enough to propose to both of them at the same time?”

  “Actually, they sort of proposed to me,” Weston said. “You know.”

  “You mean, you diddled them, and in the morning they smiled sweetly at you and said, ‘When do you think we should be married?’”

  “Not exactly like that,” Weston said.

  “I’ve been down that road several times. There is a very simple solution. You let them know that you’re diddling someone else. Or two or more someone elses. You get a lot of tears, and on occasion, a slapped and/or scratched face; and they invariably take ten minutes to tell you what an unmitigated sonofabitch you are, but you’re off the hook.”

  “I’m not so sure I want off the hook,” Weston said. “My problem is that I would like to marry both of them.”

  “They have laws against marrying more than one at a time,” Pick said.

  “Yeah, I know,” Weston said. “The girl in Philadelphia, the one who got herself transferred to Pensacola to be near me, is really sweet. I’d hate to hurt her feelings.”

  “But the one in P’Cola is a great piece of ass, right?”

  “The best I’ve ever had,” Weston confessed.

  “Then dump the nurse and marry the good piece of ass,” Pick said. “Sex is what makes the world go around.”

  “I don’t mean to give the impression that the girl in Pensacola is a tramp or anything like that.”

  “Of course not,” Pick said. “But fucking is like golf. The more you do it, the better you get at it.”

  “The one in Pensacola was married,” Jim Weston said. “Maybe that has something to do with that. She really likes to do it. I mean, if you’re married, you get to like it, and then if you don’t get it anymore you really miss it, right? Once we…started—”

  “You mean began to screw?”

  “Yeah. Once we began to screw, she couldn’t seem to get enough. Once we did it in her father’s quarters with her parents not fifteen feet away.”

  “They call that condition ‘hot pants.’ In my experience it
is a condition to be carefully nurtured. You said she was married?”

  “Was,” Weston said.

  “You ever happen to ask her what happened to her husband? What did she do, fuck him to death? That’s not a bad way to go—better than getting shot down, for example—but it is something you should think about.”

  “That’s what happened to her husband. He got shot down at Wake Island. He was my best friend. Greg Culhane. I was his best man at their wedding.”

  Weston looked over at Pickering. There was something very odd in Pick’s expression.

  “I told you, Pick, she’s a nice girl.…”

  “When we get on the ground, I’m going to kill you!” Pick said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “When I get you on the ground, you miserable sonofabitch, you’re going to wish the Japs had caught you on Mindanao!”

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “Get out of here, or I’ll kill you right now!”

  Captain Weston considered his options and finally decided that the best thing to do under the circumstances was leave Pickering alone until he calmed down. “I’m going to take a leak,” he said. “If you need me up here, wiggle the wings.” He unstrapped himself and went back into the cabin.

  [SIX]

  Aboard Sea Gypsy One

  Somewhere Above the Gobi Desert

  Mongolia

  1635 2 May 1943

  During preparations for the flight back in Hawaii, it was decided that one of the meteorologists who had some knowledge of radio and navigation would ride with Major A very Williamson on Sea Gypsy One. While at Ewa, Lieutenant Stevenson had trained him in the use of the radio direction finder, even though he suspected that the instrument wasn’t going to work very well when they reached the Gobi.

  The radio direction finder, a loop antenna that could be rotated through a 360-degree arc, was mounted on top of the fuselage toward the rear of the aircraft. When a radio signal was detected, the direction of the transmitting station could be determined by a signal-strength meter. When the meter indicated the strongest signal, the position of the antenna showed the direction of the transmitter.

  Lieutenant Stevenson’s expectation that there’d be problems proved to be correct: First, Station Nowhere was transmitting a signal for only ten seconds in each minute. And second, the signal was so weak that the needle on the signal-strength gauge hardly flickered.