Close Combat

by W. E. B Griffin

  Today, an Admiral was arriving at Noumea by aircraft. Unhappily, it was going to be impossible to provide this Admiral anything like a dignified exit from his aircraft via Admiral’s Barge. For one thing, there was no real Admiral’s Barge available, only a fairly ordinary whaleboat. For another, the weather was turning bad, the bay was choppy, and the huge four-engined PB2-Y was rocking nervously in the waves.

  But tradition dies hard in the U.S. Navy, and this was a three-star Vice Admiral arriving on an inspection tour. And so an effort had to be made. Before boarding the whaleboat at the wharf, the two greeting officers had changed from tieless open khaki shirts and trousers into white uniforms. And the crew had been ordered to change from blue work uniforms into their whites. And then when the only three-star Vice Admiral’s flag available was found to be too large for the flag staff on the whaleboat, a suitably taller staff had to be jury-rigged.

  It could only be hoped that the Admiral would understand their problems and not let the absence of the honors he was entitled to color his judgment of their entire operation.

  The door in the fuselage swung out, and a muscular young lieutenant commander in khakis stepped into the opening. The coxswain carefully edged the whaleboat closer to the door; it wouldn’t take much to ram a hole in the aluminum skin of the PB2-Y.

  The Lieutenant Commander jumped into the whaleboat. And as he landed, he lost his footing; but, with the help of two boat crewmen, he quickly regained it.

  A pair of leather briefcases, four larger pieces of luggage, and a long, cylindrical, leather chart case were tossed aboard the whaleboat by a hatless gray-haired man who was also wearing khakis. Then he, too, jumped aboard. He did not lose his footing.

  It was at that point that both dress white–uniformed greeting officers noticed the three silver stars on each collar of the gray-haired man’s open-necked khaki shirt.

  “Welcome to Noumea, Admiral,” the senior officer, a captain, said.

  “Thank you,” the Admiral said.

  “Admiral, the Admiral instructed me to give you this immediately,” the Captain said, handing the Admiral a manila envelope.

  “Thank you,” the Admiral repeated as he sat down in the whaleboat. He tore the envelope open, took out a sheet of paper, read it, and then handed it to the muscular Lieutenant Commander.

  The Lieutenant Commander read it.

  * * *

  URGENT

  UNCLASSIFIED

  FROM: CINCPAC 0545 18OCT42

  TO: CHIEF OF NAVAL OPERATIONS WASH DC

  COMMANDER, SOUTH PACIFIC AREA,

  AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND

  SUPREME COMMANDER SWPOA,

  BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA

  INFO: ALL SHIPS AND STATIONS, USNAVY PACIFIC

  EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY, VICE ADMIRAL

  WILLIAM F. HALSEY, USN, IS ANNOUNCED

  AS COMMANDER, US NAVY FORCES, SOUTH

  PACIFIC, VICE ADMIRAL ROBERT L.

  GHORMLEY, USN, RELIEVED.

  CHESTER W. NIMITZ, ADMIRAL, USN,

  CINCPAC.

  * * *

  “I’ll be damned,” the Lieutenant Commander said. He handed the sheet of paper back.

  Vice Admiral William F. Halsey jammed it in his trousers pocket. “I was thinking the same thing,” he said.

  [TWO]

  Personnel Office

  Marine Corps Recruit Depot

  San Diego, California

  1550 Hours 18 October 1942

  “Major, there’s just nothing I can do for the corporal,” the major in charge of the personnel office said to Major Jake Dillon. “If I could, I would, believe me.”

  “Welcome home, Easterbunny,” First Lieutenant Kenneth R. McCoy said bitterly.

  “You said something, Lieutenant?” the Major snapped. He did not like the attitude of the young officer, and wondered just who he was.

  “I was just thinking out loud, Major,” McCoy said. “So what happens to him now?”

  “We’ll send him over to the casual barracks until we receive orders on him, locate his service records….”

  “I’m prepared to sign a sworn statement that his records were lost in combat,” Dillon said. “How about that?”

  “In that case, we would begin reconstructing his records.”

  “How long would that take?” Dillon asked.

  “It depends. Perhaps a month, perhaps a little less, perhaps a little longer.”

  “And in the meantime, Sir,” McCoy said, “…until you can reconstruct his records…the corporal would be pulling details in the casual barracks, without any money? Is that about it?”

  “That’s about it, Lieutenant. And I don’t like the tone of your voice.”

  “With respect, Sir,” McCoy said sarcastically, “isn’t that a pretty shitty way to treat a kid who’s just back from Guadalcanal?”

  “That did it, Lieutenant,” the Major snapped. “I won’t be talked to like that. May I have your identity card, please?”

  “What for?” Dillon asked.

  “So that I can put him on report to his commanding officer for insolent disrespect.”

  “I’m his commanding officer,” Dillon said. “I heard what he said. I agree with him.”

  “And who is your commanding officer, Major?”

  “I don’t think you’re cleared to know who my commanding officer is,” Dillon said. “Come on, McCoy.”

  “I asked you who your commanding officer is, Major!”

  “Go fuck yourself, Major,” Dillon said, and with McCoy on his heels, marched out of the office.

  As they walked off the steps of the frame building and turned toward Corporal Robert F. Easterbrook, USMC, who was sitting on his seabag waiting for them, McCoy said softly, “Do you think we’ll get arrested now, or as we try to get off the base?”

  “Is that sonofabitch in the same Marine Corps as you and me?” Dillon asked bitterly, still angry. “Sonofabitch!”

  Easterbrook rose to his feet.

  “We ran into a little trouble, Easterbrook,” Dillon said.

  “Nothing to worry about,” McCoy said.

  “What happens now?” Easterbrook asked.

  “You and I are going to stay here, Corporal, while Lieutenant McCoy goes to the motor pool and gets us some wheels, and then we’re all going to Los Angeles.”

  “I’ve got to get to Washington,” McCoy said.

  “They have an airport in Los Angeles,” Dillon said. “I’d like to buy you guys a steak.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir,” McCoy said.

  Twenty minutes later, they were out of the U.S. Marine Recruit Depot, San Diego, and headed up the Pacific Highway toward Los Angeles in a Marine Corps 1941 Plymouth staff car that was driven by a PFC who looked as old as Major Dillon.

  “I didn’t ask. How did you get the staff car?” Dillon asked.

  “I told them that I was an assistant to Major Dillon of Marine Corps Headquarters Public Relations,” McCoy said, “and the Major needed a ride to Hollywood, so that the Major could ask Lana Turner to come to a party at the officers’ club.”

  “I thought maybe you waved that fancy ID card of yours at the motor officer.”

  “I was saving that for the MPs at the gate when they started to arrest you for telling that feather-merchant major in personnel to go fuck himself.”

  “I should have let him write you up,” Dillon said. “You can be a sarcastic sonofabitch, McCoy, in case nobody ever told you.”

  “Excuse me, Sir,” Corporal Easterbrook said, turning around in the front seat, his voice suddenly weak and shaky, “but I have to go to the head.”

  “Christ, why didn’t you go at ’Diego?” McCoy asked. But then he looked closer at Easterbrook and said, “Oh, shit!”

  “Meaning what?” Dillon asked.

  “Meaning he’s got malaria,” McCoy said. “Look at him.” He leaned forward and laid his hand on Easterbrook’s forehead. “Yeah,” he said, “he’s burning up. He’s got it, all right.”

  “Goddamn,” Dill
on said.

  “Sir, I got to go right now,” Easterbrook said.

  “Find someplace,” McCoy snapped at the driver. “Pull off the road if you have to.”

  The driver started to slow the car, but then put his foot to the floor when he saw a roadside restaurant several hundred yards away.

  With a squeal of tires, the PFC pulled into the parking lot, stopped in front of the door, then went quickly around the front of the car, pulled the passenger door open, and helped Easterbrook out.

  “He’s dizzy, Lieutenant,” the PFC said. “He’s got it, all right.”

  “Let’s get him to the toilet,” McCoy said.

  “Shit!” Major Dillon said.

  “Hey, he’s not doing this to piss you off,” McCoy said.

  Supported by McCoy and the PFC, Easterbrook managed to make it to a stall in the men’s room before losing control of his bowels. Then he became nauseous.

  “Let me handle him, Lieutenant,” the PFC said.

  “Sir, I’m sorry to cause all this trouble,” Easterbrook said.

  “Never apologize for something you can’t control,” McCoy said. “I’ll be outside.”

  Major Dillon was waiting on the other side of the men’s room door.

  “Well?”

  “He’s got malaria. Half the people on the ’Canal have malaria,” McCoy replied.

  “What do we do with him?”

  “He needs a doctor,” McCoy said.

  “You want to take him back to ’Diego and put him in the hospital?”

  “I said a doctor,” McCoy said. “General Pickering told me you know everybody in Hollywood. No doctors?”

  “You mean treat him ourselves?”

  “Why not? All they do for them in a hospital is give them quinine, or that new stuff…”

  “Atabrine,” Dillon furnished, without thinking.

  “…Atabrine,” McCoy went on. “And rest. If we put him in the hospital, they’ll just lose him. Christ, he probably couldn’t get into the hospital…. How’s he going to prove he’s a Marine without a service record?”

  “I’m not at all sure—” Dillon began and then interrupted himself: “I think they’d take my word he’s a Marine, even if those personnel feather merchants won’t pay him.”

  “Have you got someplace we can take him, or not? He be out of there in a minute.”

  “Goddamn you, McCoy. Why did you have to tell me he was about to go over the edge?”

  “Because he was.”

  “Dr. Barthelmy’s office,” Dawn Morris said into the telephone receiver. Miss Morris, who was Dr. Harald Barthelmy’s receptionist, was a raven-haired, splendidly bosomed, long-legged young woman. Though she was dressed like a nurse, she had no medical training whatever.

  “Dr. Barthelmy, please. My name is Dillon.”

  “I’m sorry, Sir, the doctor is with a patient. May I have him return your call?”

  “Honey, you go tell him Jake Dillon is on the phone.”

  Dawn Morris knew who Jake Dillon was. He was vice president of publicity for Metro-Magnum Studios…the kind of man who could open doors for her. The kind of man she’d planned to meet when she took a job as receptionist for the man Photoplay magazine called the “Physician to the Stars.”

  “Mr. Dillon,” Dawn Morris cooed. “Let me check. I’m sure the doctor would like to talk to you if it’s at all possible.”

  “Thank you,” Jake Dillon said.

  She left her desk and walked down a corridor into a suite of rooms that Dr. Barthelmy liked to refer to as his “surgery.”

  After his undergraduate years at the University of Iowa, and before completing his medical training at Tulane in New Orleans, Dr. Barthelmy spent a year at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. As a result, he’d cultivated a certain British manner: He’d grown a pencil-line mustache, and acquired a collection of massive pipes and a wardrobe heavy with tweed jackets with leather elbow patches. And he now spelled his Christian name with two “a’s” and addressed most females as “dear girl” and most males as “old sport.”

  The surgery was half a dozen consulting rooms, opening off a thickly carpeted corridor furnished with leather armchairs and turn-of-the-century lithographs of Englishmen shooting pheasants and riding to hounds.

  Dawn knew immediately where to find Dr. Barthelmy. One of his nurses, a real one, an old blue-haired battle-ax, was standing outside one of the consulting cubicles. This was standard procedure whenever Dr. Barthelmy had to ask a female patient to take off her clothes. A woman had once accused Dr. Barthelmy of getting fresh while he was examining her; he was determined this would never happen again.

  “I have to see the doctor right away,” Dawn said to the nurse.

  “He’s with a patient,” the nurse said.

  “This is an emergency,” Dawn said firmly.

  The nurse rapped on the consulting-room door with her knuckles.

  “Not now, if you please!” a deep male voice replied in annoyance.

  “Doctor, it’s Mr. Jake Dillon,” Dawn called. “He said it’s very important.”

  There was a long silence, and then the door opened. Dr. Barthelmy looked at her.

  “Mr. Dillon said it’s very important, Doctor,” Dawn said. “I thought I should tell you.”

  “Would you ask Mr. Dillon to hold, my girl?” Dr. Barthelmy said. “I’ll be with him in half a mo.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” Dawn said.

  The consulting-room door closed.

  “He’s on line five, Doctor,” Dawn called through it, and then went quickly back to her desk.

  She picked up the telephone.

  “Mr. Dillon, Dr. Barthelmy will be with you in just a moment. Would you hold, please?”

  “Yeah, I’ll hold,” Dillon replied. “Thanks, honey, but you stay on the line.”

  “Yes, of course, Mr. Dillon.”

  “Jake, old sport, how good to hear your voice.”

  “Harry, what do you know about malaria?”

  “Very little, thank God.”

  “Harry, goddamn it, I’m serious.”

  “It is transmitted by mosquitoes, and the treatment is quinine, or some new medicine the name of which at the moment escapes me. You have malaria, old boy?”

  “A friend of mine does.”

  “And you want me to see your friend? Of course, dear boy.”

  “I’m twenty minutes out of San Diego. By the time I get to my house, I want you there with the new medicine—it’s called Atabrine, by the way—a nurse, or nurses, and whatever else you need.”

  There was a just-perceptible pause before Dr. Barthelmy replied: “That sounded like an order, old sport. I’m not in the Marine Corps, as you may have noticed.”

  “Harry, goddamn it…”

  “Which house, old boy? Holmby Hills or Malibu?”

  “Malibu. I leased the Holmby Hills place to Metro-Magnum for the duration.”

  “Your contribution to the war effort, I gather?”

  “Fuck you, Harry. Just be there,” Dillon said, and hung up.

  Dawn waited until she heard the click when Dr. Barthelmy hung up, and then hung up herself.

  There are not many people, she thought, who would dare talk to Dr. Harald Barthelmy that way. Or, for that matter, call him “Harry.” Only someone with a lot of power. And getting to know someone with a lot of power is what I have been looking for all along. The question is, how am I going to get to meet Jake Dillon?

  Dr. Harald Barthelmy himself answered the question five minutes later. He came into the reception area, smiled at waiting patients, and said, “May I speak to you a moment, Miss Morris?”

  “Yes, of course, Doctor,” Dawn said, rising up from behind her desk and stepping into the surgery corridor with him. He motioned her into one of the consulting rooms.

  There was, she noticed, an open book facedown on the examination table. The spine read, “Basic Principles of Diagnosis and Treatment.”

  I’ll bet, Dawn thought, that that’s open to “Malaria
.”

  “If memory serves, Miss Morris, you told me you had accepted the receptionist position as a temporary sort of thing, until you can get your motion picture career on the tracks, so to speak?”

  “Yes, Doctor. That’s true.”

  “Something a bit out of the ordinary has come up. I don’t suppose you…monitored…my conversation with Mr. Dillon? Major Dillon?”

  “Oh, of course not, Doctor.”

  “I’d rather hoped you would have. No matter. You do know who Major Dillon is?”

  “I think so, Doctor.”

  “He is a quite powerful man in the motion picture community. He rushed to the colors, so to speak, the Marine Corps, of all things, when the trumpet sounded. But that has not diminished at all his importance in the film industry. Do you take my meaning?”

  “Yes, Doctor, I think so.”

  “To put a point on it, my girl, he could be very useful to someone in your position.”

  “I don’t quite understand…”

  “Mr.…Major Dillon—who is a dear friend, of long standing—has come to me asking a special favor. One of his friends—I don’t know who—is apparently suffering from malaria, and for some reason doesn’t want to enter a hospital. I can think of a number of reasons for that. He, or she, for example, may be under consideration for a part, for example, and does not want it known that he, or she, is not in perfect health. You understand?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “As a special favor to Mr. Dillon, I have agreed to treat this patient at Mr. Dillon’s beach house in Malibu. Malaria is not contagious. The regimen is a drug called Atabrine and bed rest. Mr.…Major Dillon has at his house a Mexican couple who would be perfectly capable of dispensing the Atabrine, but he would feel more comfortable if a nurse were present.”

  “I understand.”

  “Dear girl, do you think you could portray a nurse convincingly?” Dr. Barthelmy asked. “It would make things so much easier for me. God knows, I haven’t a clue where I could get a special-duty nurse on such short order.”

  “I’m sure I could.”