The Corps II - CALL TO ARMS

by W. E. B Griffin

  And then he would order the Pickerel submerged.

  There would be a note in the log, Captain Edward J. Banning, VSMC, buried at sea 0500, 14 January 1942, and the coordinates.

  There was a school of thought, of course, that felt that suicide was the coward's way out of a tough situation. Banning had spent much time pondering that line of reasoning, and he had come to the conclusion that in his case, it just didn't wash.

  The main pain in the ass for him in being blind had not turned out to be the inconvenience. The inconveniences-the difficulties of just living without sight: spilling food all over his chin, not knowing if he had been able to properly wipe his ass, the constant bumping painfully into things-he could probably get used to, in time.

  What was wrong with being blind was that it gave you so much time to think. That was really driving him crazy.

  Thinking about Ludmilla, for instance.

  Ludmilla, "Milla," was the only woman he had ever loved in his life. And he had left her on the wharf in Shanghai when he'd been flown to Cavite with the advance party of the 4th Marines. The Japs were in Shanghai now, and it was entirely possible that Milla had already done to herself what he was going to do if it was black when he took the bandages off.

  He knew that she had thought about it. Once in bed, she had told him that she had been close to it before she met him, that she just didn't think she had it in her to become a whore, and that death wasn't all that frightening to her. Certainly, she would have thought of that again when the Japanese drove down the Bund. There weren't very many options open to a White Russian woman in Shanghai besides turning herself into a whore for some Japanese officer. Milla still thought seriously about such things as honor and pride and shame, and she was very likely to have concluded that death was far preferable to the dishonor of being a Japanese whore.

  And Milla had been around the block. She'd already gone through one revolution, and what she had told him about what she had experienced in St. Petersburg-the complete breakdown of society as she had known it-couldn't have been much different from what the breakdown of society in Shanghai must have been once the Japanese had come in.

  Milla was practical. She would have understood that the chances of her ever again getting to be with her husband of eighteen hours-her American, Marine officer husband, gone off to fight what looked to be a losing war-were practically nil.

  And she would have concluded that the eleven good months that they had had together before they had made it legal had been a brief happy interval in a miserable, frightening life.

  And she didn't know, of course, that he was blind.

  "The trauma to your optical nerves, Captain, is one of those things, I'm afraid, we don't know a hell of a lot about. Obviously, the trauma was of such severity to cause loss of sight, but on the other hand, it isn't as if anything in there had been severed or destroyed, in which case there would be no hope. I really can't offer an opinion whether your impaired condition will in time pass, or whether the damage is permanent. We just don't have the experience in this area. I would not be surprised, either way. In any event, we should have some indication in two or three weeks."

  If the sonofabitch thought there was any real chance the "impaired condition" would "in time pass," they would not have sent him out on the Pickerel. The 4th Marines had been given the responsibility for defending Fortress Corregidor. They needed the regimental intelligence officer, presuming of course that he could see.

  He had been sent out, with the colonel's permission, on the Pickerel. Q.E.D.

  Banning knew what would come next. They would get him stateside, most likely to the Naval hospital at San Diego. And there they would do whatever was humanly possible for him.

  Following which he would be handed a white cane, his retirement orders, and a one-hundred-percent disability pension. They would then turn him over to the Veterans Administration until he learned how to maneuver with the white cane, or maybe with a seeing-eye dog.

  He could handle that, too, if he didn't have all this time to think about Milla and wonder what she was doing.

  The final conclusion he had drawn was that he could live without Milla, or the Corps, or his sight; but he could not give up all three at once.

  If he could see when he went to the conning tower and took the bandage off, then there was something. He wouldn't be with the regiment, but he would be what he had trained all of his adult life to be, a serving Marine officer in a war. Which meant he could do something about Milla, too-though he had no idea how.

  Banning pressed the checkered round steel magazine-release button on the Colt.45 automatic. The magazine slipped out of the butt into his hand. He laid the pistol carefully on his lap, then thumbed the cartridges from the magazine, putting them one at time into the side pocket of the canvas foul-weather jacket. There were seven.

  He loaded one cartridge back into the magazine, slipped the magazine into the pistol until he felt it click in place, and then worked the action. He pulled the slide back all the way, and then, still hanging on to it, let the spring move it forward into the battery.

  He didn't think it had completely chambered the cartridge. He ran his thumb over the rear of the pistol where the slide mated with the frame. It was uneven. He pushed on the slide and it clicked into place.

  He put the safety on and then stood up and put the pistol back in his waistband and pulled the foul-weather jacket to cover it.

  Banning made his way very carefully from the head to the conning-tower ladder. When his hand found it, he gripped it firmly. He had learned that if there was someone on the ladder, there would be vibrations on the steel framework.

  There were none, and he climbed the ladder into the upper compartment.

  "Good morning, sir," someone said to him.

  "Morning," Banning replied, smiling, as he felt for the ladder to the conning-tower bridge.

  This time, there were vibrations in the steel frame. Banning stood to one side of the ladder.

  "Sorry, Captain," a voice tinged with embarrassment said in his ear. "I would have-" The kid's breath smelled of peppermint chewing gum.

  "It's all right, son," Banning said, reassuringly. He had recognized the voice as one of the enlisted men.

  He moved in front of the ladder and went up it, until his head was through the hatch and he could smell the fresh salt air.

  ''Permission to come on the bridge, sir?" he asked.

  "Come ahead, Captain," a voice he recognized as belonging to one of the young JG's said.

  Banning went through the hatch, got to his feet, and put his hand out in search of the after bulkhead. When his fingers touched it, he went to it, turned and rested his back against it, and took a deep breath of the fresh, clean air.

  "Good morning," Banning said.

  Three voices replied. They were in front of him. With a little bit of luck, they would be looking forward, too, when the time came.

  Banning took off his fore-and-aft cap and put it in the pocket of his foul-weather jacket.

  Then he took a razor blade from his trousers pocket, got a good grip on it, and moved the hand that held it to the back of his head.

  Sawing through the gauze bandage and the adhesive tape that held it in place was easier than he thought it would be. He felt the gauze slip off and fall across his face. He caught it, balled it up in his hand, and then reached his hand over the bulkhead and dropped it.

  There now remained two pads of gauze, liberally greased with petroleum jelly, over his closed eyelids. The idea, the surgeon had told him, was to keep all light from the optic nerves, in the hope this might facilitate natural recovery from the trauma to the nerves.

  Once a day the Pickerel's pharmacist mate had replaced the Vaseline-soaked pads, and then wrapped Banning's head with gauze and adhesive tape to keep them in place.

  Banning put both hands to his eyes and jerked the pads away.

  He felt a cold chill and heard himself grunt.

  The pads were gone, and there w
as no light.

  He was blind.

  He felt faint, weak in his knees, and shivered.

  All I have to do is put my hands over my face and go below and say I must have caught the bandage on something, and jerked it off.

  Fuck it! Don't turn chicken at the last minute. You took a chance and you lost.

  He put his hand under the foul-weather jacket and found the butt of the.45 Colt automatic. Following the U.S. Marine Corps' near-sacred tradition that one does not put one's finger on the trigger of a loaded firearm until one is prepared to fire, he took it in his hand, the trigger finger extended along the slide rather than on the trigger, and flicked the safety off.

  Then he put his finger on the trigger.

  Our Father Who art in Heaven, give me the balls to go through with this…

  Banning became aware that his eyelids were squinted closed, as they were habitually whenever the Vaseline-soaked pads were removed.

  He forced them open.

  Shit! Nothing. Nothing more, anyway, than a glow to one side. If I'm not blind, I'm the next fucking thing to it.

  Our Father Who art in-

  That's the fucking luminous dial of a wristwatch! That's what that glow is!

  Captain Banning removed his finger from the trigger of his pistol.

  Captain Banning could now make out the upper edge of the forward bulkhead, and rising above that three vague but unmistakable silhouettes: the officer of the deck, the talker, and somebody else, another officer, with binoculars to his eyes.

  Captain Banning snapped the safety of the Colt back on, took his hand from under the foul-weather jacket, and then leaned, weak and faint, against the bulkhead.

  He had a sudden terrible necessity to void his bladder.

  "Permission to leave the bridge, sir?"

  "Granted," the officer of the deck said automatically, and then, remembering that Banning had only minutes before come onto the bridge, asked, "Is there something wrong, Captain Banning?"

  "No, thank you," Banning said. "Everything's just fine." The light inside the conning tower hurt his eyes. He felt tears, and he closed them. He knew how to get down the ladder with his eyes closed.

  With a little luck, he would go down both ladders and get to the head before his bladder let go and he pissed his pants. And then he would go to the captain's cabin and wake Red MacGregor and tell him. With a little more luck, he would be able to get the pistol back into the cabinet before MacGregor woke up.

  Chapter Ten

  (One)

  San Francisco, California

  0915 Hours, 14 January 1942

  The office of the chairman of the board of Pacific Far East Shipping, Inc., occupied the southwest comer of the top (tenth) floor of the PFE Building. Its tinted plate-glass windows overlooked the harbor and the bridge; and an eight-by-twelve-foot map of the world was mounted on one wall. Every morning at six A.M., just before he went off duty, the night operations manager came up from the third floor and laid a copy of the more important overnight communications on the huge, near-antique (which is to say post-1800) mahogany desk of the chairman of the board. Then he went to the map and moved small devices on it.

  The devices, mounted on magnets, were models of the vessels of Pacific Far East Shipping. They represented tankers, bulk carriers, passenger liners, and freighters of all sizes. There were seventy-two of them, and they were arranged on the map to correspond with their last-reported position around the world. Just over a month before, there had been eighty-one ship models scattered around the map.

  Now nine models-representing six small interisland freighters ranging in size from 11,600 to 23,500 tons, two identical 39,400-ton freighters, and one 35,500-ton tanker- were arranged in the lower left-hand corner of the map as if anchored together in the Indian Ocean off Australia. Eight of them had been lost to Japanese submarines. The ninth, the tanker Pacific Virtue, had been offloading aviation gasoline at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese struck.

  In a mahogany gimbal mount near Fleming Pickering's desk, there was a globe, five feet in diameter, crafted in the 1860s. And two glass cases holding large, exquisitely detailed ship models had been placed against the wall behind the desk. One of the models was of the clipper ship Pacific Princess (Hezikiah Fleming, Master), which had held the San Francisco-Shanghai speed record in her day; and the second was of the 51,000-ton Pacific Princess, a sleek passenger ship that was the present speed-record holder for the same run.

  According to the wall map, the Pacific Princess was sailing alone somewhere between Brisbane and San Francisco, trusting in her maximum speed of 33.5 knots to escape Japanese torpedos.

  Fleming Pickering looked up from his desk with mingled annoyance and curiosity when he heard the sound of high heels on the small patches of parquet floor exposed here and there beneath fine antique (seventeenth-century) Oriental rugs. He knew it was not his secretary, the only person permitted to come into his office unannounced when he was there. Mrs. Florian wore rubber heels. All the facts considered, his visitor had to be either his wife or a very brazen total stranger.

  It was his wife.

  After twenty-four years of marriage, Fleming Pickering was still of the belief that he was married to one of the world's most beautiful women. And she was one of the smartest, too. Smart enough to avoid waging a losing battle against growing older than thirty. Her hair was silver, and if she was wearing makeup (which seemed likely), it didn't appear to be layered on her face with a shovel.

  She sat down in one of the chairs facing his desk and crossed her legs, giving him a quick glance of thigh and black petticoat.

  "'Come into my parlor,' the spider leered at the fly," Fleming Pickering said. "To what do I owe the honor?"

  "God!" Patricia Foster Pickering groaned.

  "Really?" Flem Pickering joked. "The clouds opened, and a suitably divine voice boomed, 'Go to thy husband.''?"

  She shook her head, but had to chuckle, even though she didn't want to under the circumstances.

  "I hate to bother you," Patricia Pickering said. "You know I wouldn't come here unless-"

  "Don't be silly," he said. "Would you like some coffee?"

  "I would really like a double martini," she said.

  "That bad, huh?" he said.

  "I'll settle for the coffee," Patricia Pickering said.

  Fleming Pickering tapped three times with his toe on a switch under his desk. It was a code message to Mrs. Florian. One tap summoned her. Two taps meant "get this idiot out of here by whatever means necessary," and three meant "deliver coffee."

  "I just had a call from Ernie Sage," Patricia Pickering said.

  "And? What did he want?"

  "Little Ernie," she corrected him.

  "And what did she want?"

  "She's out here. In San Diego."

  He looked at her curiously, waiting for her to go on.

  "She wanted me to get a check cashed for her," Patricia said. "And to see if I knew someone in Diego who could find her someplace to stay."

  "I hate to tell you this, honey," he said. "But the way you're presenting this, it's not coming across as a serious problem."

  "She's out here with McCoy," Patricia said. "You remember him? Pick's friend from Quantico? You met him."

  "I remember him very well," Flem said. "What did they do, elope?"

  "That's part of the problem," she said. "No. They are not married."

  "A real Marine, that boy," Flem said. "I could tell the moment I saw him."

  "Flem, this is not funny," Patricia said.

  "Well, it's not the end of the world, either," he said. "She is not the first nice young woman in history to go to bed with a Marine before their union was solemnized before God and the world."

  She glared at him. And her face colored. "That was a cheap shot, damn you!" she said. But she smiled.

  "There's something about a Marine, you know," Flem Pickering went on. "My response to this situation is that I hope whatever it is Marines have will work for Pick, to
o. That he gets somebody as nice as Ernie. Let her who is without sin cast the first stone."

  "Well, thanks a lot," she snapped.

  "Honey, this is none of our business," Flem said.

  Mrs. Florian came into the office, pushing a serving cart with a silver coffee service on it.

  "I like your dress, Mrs. Pickering," she said.

  "I will not tell you it's an old rag I found in the back of my closet," Patricia said. "I bought it yesterday, and made them alter it right away. Surprising absolutely no one, Guess Who hasn't seemed to notice."

  "The way to catch my attention is to come in here not wearing a dress," Flem said.

  "I'd sock him for that," Mrs. Florian said, and left the office.

  "It is our business, Flem," Patricia said.

  "How do you figure that?"

  "Elaine is my best friend," Patricia said. "And Ernie's the closest thing I have to a daughter."

  "Does Elaine know about this?" he asked.

  "No. I asked Ernie, and she told me she was going to call her. And she went on to ask me to please not say anything until she works up the courage to do it."

  "Then don't say anything," he said.

  "I think I'm going to go to Diego and talk like a Dutch aunt to her," Patricia said.

  "All that would do would be to piss her off," Flem said.

  "I love your language," Patricia snapped.

  "It caught your attention, didn't it?" he replied, unrepentant.

  She met his eyes, raised her eyebrows, and then shifted her gaze and sat up in the chair to pour coffee. She handed him a cup and then slumped back in her chair, holding her cup with both hands.

  "I think it's entirely possible that Ernie may need a friend," Flem said. "If she thinks you're going to say exactly the same thing her mother would say, she won't come to you."

  She looked at him again but said nothing.

  "I seem to recall when I was a handsome young Marine just home from France, that your own mother had a long talk with you about not letting me get you alone-in case I tried to kiss you. I gather she was afraid I'd give you trench mouth."