The Corps IV - Battleground

by W. E. B Griffin

  "You don't have any film for me, by any chance, do you?" "There's four boxes for you at Espiritu, but I didn't have the weight left."

  "Christ, I'm running low."

  "I had the medic and those two to carry. They had the priority. Next time, I hope."

  "If you can't bring all of it, bring at least one. Or open one. Bring what you can. I'm really running low. And film doesn't weigh that much."

  "I'll do what I can, Jake."

  "Thank you," Dillon said, and walked back to Dailey and Moore.

  "I think I know where Sergeant Moore is going," Dillon said. "Is there any place I can carry you, Colonel?"

  "I'm reporting for duty as Division G-2," Dailey said.

  "I thought that might be it," Dillon said. "Hop in, I'll give you a ride."

  "Thank you," Dailey said. "What's your function around here, Major?"

  "I'm your friendly neighborhood Hollywood press agent," Dillon said, as he got behind the wheel.

  "I'm afraid I don't understand?"

  "I've got a crew of combat correspondents recording this operation for posterity," Dillon said.

  "How is it you know Sergeant Moore?"

  "I was in Melbourne-with Frank Goettge, the man you're replacing-a while back. At Fleming Pickering's place. Moore worked for him." He turned to look at Moore in the back seat. "You knew he was gone from here, didn't you?"

  "I knew he was going, Sir," Moore said. "I didn't know he was gone."

  "Well, don't worry, they'll find a lot for you to do here. You heard what happened to Colonel Goettge and the others?"

  "No, Sir."

  Dillon told them.

  When they reached the G-2 Section, Dillon got out of the Jeep.

  "Major Jack NMI Stecker is acting G-2," he said. "I'll introduce you. He'll be damned glad to see you."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "Because they took him away from his battalion to put him in G-2 when Goettge got himself killed, and he's very unhappy about that."

  Dillon entered the G-2 section. It was dark inside, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. Before they did, before he could make out more than shadowy bodies, he called out: "Christmas present, Jack. Your replacement."

  There was silence for a moment, and then a dry voice said, "At least he didn't go 'Ho, Ho, Ho.' I suppose we should be grateful for that."

  Major Dillon's eyes had by then become acclimated to the lower light. He could now make out a familiar face.

  "I beg your pardon, General. I didn't know you were in here."

  "I wonder if that would have made any difference?" General Vandergrift asked, and then advanced on Dailey.

  "I'm General Vandergrift, Colonel," he said offering his hand. "I hope that wasn't more of Major Dillon's Hollywood hyperbole, and you are indeed the intelligence officer we've been promised."

  "Sir," Dailey said, coming to attention, "Lieutenant Colonel Dailey, Sir. Reporting for duty as G-2."

  "I'm very pleased to meet you, Colonel," Vandergrift said.

  "Welcome aboard. This is Major Stecker, who has been filling in."

  Stecker offered his hand. Vandergrift spotted Moore, and offered him his hand.

  "You came in with Colonel Dailey, Sergeant?"

  "Yes, Sir."

  "He was Flem Pickering's-I don't know what, orderly, I guess-in Australia," Dillon volunteered.

  "Is that what you've been doing, Son?" Vandergrift asked. "Orderly?"

  "No, Sir. I'm a Japanese-language linguist, Sir."

  "In that case, I'm sure Major Stecker is even more glad to see you than he is to see Colonel Dailey," Vandergrift said. He looked at Major Jake Dillon and shook his head.

  "Think about it, Jake," he said. "Did you really think they would airship an orderly in here?"

  Stecker walked over to Moore and examined him closely.

  "Give me a straight answer, Sergeant. How well do you speak-more important, how well do you read-Japanese?"

  "Fluently, Sir."

  "Sergeant!" Stecker said, raising his voice. A head appeared from behind the canvas that separated the outer "office" from "the map room."

  "Sir?"

  "Take the sergeant here up to the First Marines. He's a Japanese-language linguist."

  "Belay that, Sergeant," General Vandergrift said. "I'm sure you have more important things to do, and Major Dillon has just kindly offered to take the sergeant, haven't you, Major?"

  "Yes, Sir," Dillon said. "I'd be happy to."

  "Sergeant," Jack Stecker said, "there's several boxes of stuff at the First, taken from the bodies of Japanese. We haven't had anybody who can read it. I want anything that looks official, anything that can help us identify enemy units, anything that would be useful to know about those units. Do you understand what I'm talking about?"

  "Yes, Sir. I think I do."

  "If you come across something, give it to Captain Feincamp. He's the S-2. I'll get on the horn and tell him you're coming."

  "Aye, aye, Sir."

  "Anything that looks to you like it might be interesting. Don't bother with actually translating it. Just make a note of what it is. I'll decide whether or not you should make a translation."

  "Aye, aye, Sir."

  "Have you got a weapon?"

  If I tell him about the.45, he's probably going to take it away from me.

  Sergeant John Marston Moore, surprised with how easily it came, lied.

  "No, Sir."

  "Sergeant!" Stecker raised his voice again, and again the head appeared at the canvas flap.

  "Sir?"

  "Give the sergeant that extra Thompson."

  "Aye, aye, Sir."

  "You can use a Thompson?" Stecker asked Moore.

  "Yes, Sir."

  "I think that probably I'll have you-Colonel Dailey will have you-work here. But right now, we need to go through the stuff the First has collected."

  "Yes, Sir."

  The sergeant appeared and handed Moore a Thompson submachine gun and two extra magazines.

  "Thank you."

  "Drive slow, Jake," Stecker said. "Sergeant Moore is a very valuable man. We can't afford to lose him."

  "Right," Dillon said. "OK, Sergeant. Let's go."

  An alarm went off in the back of General Vandergrift's head. Something was wrong, but he couldn't put a handle on it.

  Stecker's words, he finally realized. "We can't afford to lose him."

  It was that, and the reference to Flem Pickering. And what Flem had said about Lieutenant Cory, whose place this young sergeant was taking.

  The morning he left, Pickering had told him about MAGIC, and about his concern that Cory might have known about it. If Cory had that knowledge, he should never have been sent to Guadalcanal.

  The sergeant, obviously, does not know about MAGIC. For one thing, that sort of secret is not made known to junior enlisted men. For another, he worked for Fleming Pickering. Therefore, if he knew, Pickering would have made sure he would not be sent to Guadalcanal

  But this lieutenant colonel: He was an intelligence officer, he's senior enough to have had responsibilities which would have given him the Need to Know. And they rushed him here to replace Goettge. Since so few people actually knew about MAGIC, it was possible that whoever had rushed him over here hadn't even considered that possibility.

  And this fellow-General Vandergrift had made a snap, and perhaps unfair, judgment that Lieutenant Colonel Dailey was not too smart; otherwise he would not have been assigned as a liaison officer to SHSWPA-if he was privy to MAGIC, it might well have been decided to send him to Guadalcanal anyway.

  "Colonel," General Vandergrift asked. "Does the phrase MAGIC mean anything to you?"

  "No, Sir," Lieutenant Colonel Dailey replied. "I've heard the word, Sir, but..."

  "It's not important," General Vandergrift said.

  (Five)

  S-2 SECTION, FIRST MARINES

  GUADALCANAL, SOLOMON ISLANDS

  2005 HOURS 19 AUGUST 1942

  Sergean
t John Marston Moore, USMCR, sat on the dirt floor of the S-2 bunker in the brilliant light of a hissing Coleman gasoline lamp. His legs were crossed under him, and his undershirt was sweat soaked. He had long before removed his utility jacket. The Thompson submachine gun Major Stecker had given him now rested on it.

  He was about two-thirds of the way, he judged, through the foot-and-a-half-tall pile of personal effects removed from Japanese bodies; and he had been at it steadily since shortly after eleven, less time out for "dinner"-a messkit full of rice, courtesy of the Japanese; a spoonful of meat and gravy, courtesy Quartermaster Corps, U.S. Army; and two small cans of really delicious smoked oysters, again courtesy of the Japanese.

  He had found virtually nothing that Major Stecker could possibly use. He had learned that the Marines already knew the identity of the Rikusentai engineers-the 11th and 23rd Pioneers-who had been building the airfield.

  He had been able to augment this by finding, in written-but-not-mailed letters home, references to the names of the commanding officers. He had written them down. He couldn't see how the names of three or four junior Japanese officers would be of much use, except perhaps as a psychological tool for prisoner interrogation.

  That seemed to be a moot point. For one thing, Moore had learned there were damn few prisoners. The story of the Japanese warrant officer who led Colonel Goettge and the others into the trap had quickly spread through the division. The Marines had decided that discretion-don't take a chance, shoot the fucker!-overwhelmed the odd and abstract notion that prisoners had an intelligence value.

  Tell that to Colonel Goettge!

  For another, there seemed to be very few people around capable of interrogating prisoners at all, unless they happened to speak English, much less of outwitting them with psychological tricks.

  He had spent long hours reading letters from home. It had been emotionally unnerving. He had lived in Japan. Tokyo was really as much home to him as Philadelphia. When he found an envelope bearing a Denenchofu return address, he knew it was entirely possible that he and the writer, somebody's mother, had met and bowed to each other at the door of a shop.

  Much of the stuff was stained with a dark and sticky substance, now beginning to give off a sickly sweet smell, that he could not pretend was mud or oil or plum preserves.

  Moore heard someone coming into the sandbagged tent. He turned and looked over his shoulder. It was Captain Fein-camp, the First Marine's S-2, and he had with him a lieutenant and a technical sergeant, a balding, lean man in his late thirties.

  "How you coming, Sergeant?" Feincamp asked.

  "I haven't found anything interesting so far, Sir," Moore replied.

  "He's a linguist," Captain Feincamp explained to the lieutenant. "They just flew him in. There's a replacement for Colonel Goettge, too."

  And then he explained to Moore the reason why the lieutenant and the technical sergeant were there.

  "They just came off patrol, Sergeant," he said. "They ran into some Japs and had themselves a little firefight. I think maybe you'd better listen in on this."

  "Yes, Sir," Moore said, grateful for the chance to stop rummaging through personal effects.

  He spun around on the dirt floor.

  The lieutenant and then the technical sergeant handed him several wallets and some more personal mail.

  "We're the first ones back, I suppose," the lieutenant said. "Maybe you can make something out of this shit."

  Moore took it, glanced through it, and quickly decided it was more of the same sort of thing he'd been looking at for hours.

  Feincamp produced a map. The lieutenant looked at it for a moment, and then pointed.

  "Right about here on the beach, Captain," he said. "Captain Brush called a lunch break. I told him that I'd been there before, and twenty, thirty minutes inland was an orange farm..."

  "A what?"

  "Orange trees."

  "Orange grove," Feincamp provided.

  "Yes, Sir. Well, the captain said we could walk another half hour if it meant fresh fruit, so we started inland. Ten, fifteen minutes later, right about here..." he pointed, "all hell broke loose. We lost Corporal DeLayne right away. He took a round in the head."

  "The big blond kid?"

  "Yes, Sir."

  "Damn."

  "So Captain Brush told me to take a squad around here, on the right flank, and the rest started for where the fire was coming from. Straight ahead. When we started that, they started withdrawing, and we started after them."

  Moore saw that the technical sergeant was admiring a Japanese helmet he had taken as a souvenir.

  "So then it was sort of like the wild west for maybe twenty minutes. But we whipped their ass!"

  "Casualties?"

  "A pisspot full of them. We counted thirty-one Japs, and I'm sure we missed some."

  "I was speaking of Marines," Feincamp said coldly.

  "Three KIA, Sir. Three wounded."

  "Sergeant," Moore suddenly interrupted, "let me see that helmet, please?"

  The technical sergeant looked at him doubtfully.

  "Huh?"

  "May I please see the helmet?" Moore asked.

  "You want a helmet, Sergeant, you just take a walk up the beach."

  "Give him the helmet, Sergeant," Captain Feincamp ordered softly.

  The technical sergeant reluctantly handed it over.

  "What is it, Sergeant?" Feincamp asked, after a moment.

  "This isn't a Rikusentai helmet, Captain," Moore said.

  "It isn't a what?" the lieutenant asked.

  Moore ignored the question.

  "Were the Japanese all wearing helmets like this?" he asked.

  "They was-the ones that was wearing helmets-were wearing helmets like that," the technical sergeant said.

  "With this insignia?" Moore pursued, pointing to a small, red enamel star on the front of the helmet.

  "I don't know," the lieutenant said. "What was that you said before?"

  "The Rikusentai, the construction troops who were building the airfield, are in the Japanese Navy. The Navy insignia is an anchor and a chrysanthemum. This is an Army helmet."

  "Meaning what?"

  "Meaning, possibly," Moore thought aloud and immediately regretted it, "that the Ichiki Butai is already ashore."

  "What the fuck is whatever you said?" the technical sergeant asked.

  "The Ichiki Butai is an infantry regiment-the 28th-of the 7th Division. First class troops under Colonel Kiyano Ichiki. The Japanese are going to send them here from Truk. If I'm right, and they're already here, that would be important."

  "How the hell do you know that?" Captain Feincamp asked. "What units the Japs intend to send?"

  "I know, Sir. I can't tell you how I know."

  "The captain," the technical sergeant said furiously, "asked you a question. You answer it!"

  Captain Feincamp raised his hand to shut off the technical sergeant.

  "How do we know the Japs didn't issue Army helmets to- what was it you called them?" Captain Feincamp asked.

  "The Rikusentai, Sir," Moore furnished. "It's possible, of course. But that Major in G-2..."

  "Major Stecker?"

  "Yes, Sir, I think so. He told me to look for anything out of the ordinary."

  "Captain," the lieutenant said thoughtfully. "I have something... I mean, out of the ordinary. The Japs we killed seemed to be heavy on officers. Maybe half of them were."

  "You just forgot to mention that, right?" Feincamp said, sarcastically.

  "Sorry, Sir. I didn't think it was important."

  "What I think you had better do, Lieutenant," Feincamp said, "is get down to Division G-2, and tell Major Stecker what happened... No, tell the new G-2; I forgot about him. I'm going to send your sergeant and Sergeant Moore back down the beach to see what else Moore can come up with."

  "Aye, aye, Sir."

  "I don't think I have to tell you, Moore, do I, what to look for?"

  "No, Sir."

  (Six)
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