Behind the Lines

by W. E. B Griffin

  “From personal experience, and I think Captain Sessions will go along with me on this, Macklin is a hell of a load to put on this major’s shoulders.”

  Sessions’s smile vanished.

  “Captain Macklin has to go, Ken,” Pickering said. “That’s out of my hands.”

  McCoy nodded, then said, “Zimmerman. It’s a dirty trick to play on Zimmerman.”

  “Christ!” Sessions said. He had not thought of Zimmerman.

  “First of all,” Pickering said, “no one seems to know where Gunny Zimmerman is, except with the 2nd Raider Battalion somewhere behind the Jap lines on Guadalcanal. It’s entirely possible that he won’t arrive in Australia until after this mission has been mounted. And if he does show up, it is entirely possible that he will be suffering from malaria. I have been informed that seventy-odd percent of the First Marine Division has it. And if that’s true, he will of course require hospitalization, and for a month or six weeks. By then the mission will have been mounted.”

  McCoy shrugged and nodded, and then went on. “Fertig. Sending Macklin seems to be a dirty trick to play on him.”

  “I’ve thought about that. That’s out of my hands, too. Anyway, if Major Brownlee is as good as Sessions and Rickabee seem to think, he should be able to handle Captain Macklin. Anything else?”

  “No, Sir,” McCoy said.

  “You’re not getting out of hazardous service, Ken, if that’s what you’re thinking. As soon as we do—you do—everything possible to ensure that Major Brownlee has everything he needs, and this mission is under way, I’m going to send you back to the States to rejoin the Mongolia Operation.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir,” McCoy said.

  “OK,” Pickering said. “Unless anyone has something else, that’s it. You get some sleep, Ed, you obviously need it. And you, Ken, start doing what has to be done to help Major Brownlee.”

  [TWO]

  Water Lily Cottage

  Brisbane, Australia

  1305 Hours 24 November 1942

  “This thing is really primitive, isn’t it?” Major Hon Song Do, Signal Corps, USA, said wonderingly, as he examined the Device, Cryptographic, M94 on the dining-room table.

  Sitting around the table were Colonel Jack (NMI) Stecker, Major Hon, Captain Edward Sessions, First Lieutenant Kenneth R. McCoy, Second Lieutenant John Marston Moore, and Staff Sergeant Stephen M. Koffler. Everyone was equipped with a pad of notepaper, pencils, and a coffee cup and saucer. In the middle of the table were two silver coffeepots.

  McCoy was puffing—blowing smoke rings—on a thin, black cigar. Hon thought it was a symbol—unconscious on McCoy’s part—of where he stood in the estimation of General Pickering. Good cigars were in very short supply in Australia. Pickering had obtained two dozen boxes of first-class, long, thin, black Philippine cigars from the master of a Pacific & Far East freighter that had called at Brisbane. They were being smoked by the Supreme Commander, SWPOA, General Pickering himself, and First Lieutenant K. R. McCoy.

  “You really never saw one of them before, Sir?” Captain Edward Sessions, USMC, asked, surprised.

  “Not even in a museum,” Pluto replied. “And you can—what is it you jarheads say, McCoy, ‘belay’?—belay that ‘Sir’ business.”

  “Watch that ‘jarhead’ business, Major!” Colonel Stecker said sternly, but with a smile.

  “Screw you, Major Dogface, Sir,” McCoy said.

  Stecker laughed out loud.

  “OK,” Pluto said. “Just to set the priorities. The expert here is Koffler, since he has been on the receiving end of a homemade SOI before.” (A Signal Operating Instruction specified which one of a large number of available codes was to be used at specific times and dates.)

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Pluto,” Stecker said. “What’s a ‘homemade SOI’?”

  “In any SOI,” Pluto said, “it is presumed both parties to the encryption processes have access to the same symbols....”

  “Symbols? What symbols?” McCoy asked, confused.

  “When ‘A’ equals ‘X,’ ‘A’ is the symbol for ‘X.’ OK?”

  “Got it.”

  “Colonel,” Pluto said, “to resume the answer I was giving before being so rudely interrupted by Lieutenant McCoy: Before we sent McCoy and Hart into Buka, we had to presume (a) that the Japanese were intercepting the radio traffic between here and Buka; (b) that the SOI that Koffler was using was no longer secure; and it followed, that (c) the Japanese were decrypting our traffic. It followed from that that if we used the existing SOI to inform Buka when and where we were going to land McCoy and Hart on Buka, we would also be informing the Japanese. So we had to get Koffler a new SOI—which meant a homemade SOI.”

  “How did you do that?” Stecker asked.

  Hon waved at Second Lieutenant Moore.

  “We devised a simple code, Colonel, using symbols known to both us and the Coastwatchers on Buka, but not to the Japanese,” Moore explained. “Specifically, we used some—rather intimate—biographical data.”

  “And that worked, Koffler, right?” Pluto asked.

  “It worked. We had a hell of a hard time figuring some of it out, but it worked.”

  “What does that mean, ‘intimate biographical data’?” Stecker asked.

  “Take a look at these, Colonel,” Moore said, as he dug in his briefcase and came up with a thin sheaf of three-by-five-inch cards.

  He walked around the table to Stecker and laid the cards before Stecker. Koffler got up and went to Stecker; and after a moment, so did McCoy and Sessions. A moment later they were all looking over Stecker’s shoulder.

  “The first card is the first paragraph of the message we sent to Koffler,” Moore explained. “We used the old code, because we didn’t want to admit to the Japanese we knew they had broken it.”

  USE AS SIMPLE SUBSTITUTION X JULIETS NAME X ROMEOS NAME X WHAT SHE THOUGHT HE HAD WHEN THEY MET X NAME OF TEST X RESULT OF TEST X

  “What’s this Romeo and Juliet business?” Stecker asked.

  Pluto turned from helping himself to a cup of coffee.

  “As we understood it, Colonel,” he said, dry amusement in his thick Boston/MIT accent, “the great romance between Lieutenant Howard—Romeo—and Juliet—Lieutenant (j.g.) Barbara Cotter, of the Navy Nurse Corps—began at the Navy Hospital, San Diego, when he went for a blood test. The Marine Corps wanted to make sure he did not have syphilis before they made him an officer. Since Miss Cotter, to whom he went to be tested, did not at first know the purpose of the Wasserman test, she treated him accordingly. As a social pariah, so to speak. But Love At First Sight triumphed in the end.”

  Stecker laughed.

  “Really?”

  “We believed it was an occasion he would remember,” Pluto said.

  “What you do for simple substitution,” Moore went on, “is write the symbols, without spaces, in a line.” He exposed the second three-by-five card. “Under a line of numbers from which the decimal digit after the first nine digits has been dropped.”

  12345678901234567890123456789012345678

  BARBARAJOSEPHSYPHILISWASSERMANNEGATIVE

  “OK,” Stecker said.

  “Card Three is the simple substitution encrypted message,” Moore said, and flipped it over.

  18x19x09x37x11

  15x23x08x09x11

  01x02x03x04x05

  06x07x23x31x05

  “Card Four shows the decryption,” Moore said, and flipped the last card over. “It was obviously of a personal nature.”

  “So I see,” Stecker said, smiling.

  “What we’re going to try to do here today is set up the same sort of thing to communicate with General Fertig,” Pluto said. “So that we can let him know to expect the people from the OSS, and possibly——General Pickering wants to talk about this to Commander Feldt and Colonel DePress before he decides—when and where they will land from the submarine.”

  “OK,” Stecker said.

  “There’s an additional problem
here,” Pluto said. “We only have ‘intimate’ personal data on General Fertig himself. We have virtually nothing on the Army officers with him. Not only were their records apparently destroyed at the time of surrender, but any dependents are now either dead or interned. In any event, they are not available to help—as Mrs. Fertig is in Colorado. In the presumption that the Japanese will break our simple substitution rather quickly, we are reluctant to use more of General Fertig’s personal data than we absolutely have to. If we do, the Japanese will be able to build a dossier on him we don’t want them to have.”

  “What about the Marines?” Stecker asked.

  “We have their names . . .” Pluto said.

  “Right here,” Moore chimed in, dipping into his briefcase again.

  “. . . but they’re not of much use,” Pluto continued. “With the exception of the pilot, they’re all former enlisted members of the Fourth Marines. All unmarried, according to the Marine Corps in Washington, and all of them have listed their official home of record as ‘c/o Headquarters, USMC, Washington, D.C.’ I found that a little strange.”

  “You do that, Pluto, if you don’t have a home,” McCoy said. “Or you have a home you’d just as soon forget.”

  Hon had the sudden insight that the official records of Lieutenant K R. McCoy listed ‘c/o Headquarters, USMC, Washington, D.C.’ as his home of record.

  “What about the pilot?” Stecker asked. “They generally keep more extensive records on officers than they do on enlisted men.”

  “Unmarried,” Moore interjected, consulting a sheet of paper. “His parents are dead. He listed his next of kin as an aunt. ONI contacted her. She hasn’t seen him in ten years.”

  “You have the names of the enlisted men?” McCoy asked. “I used to be in the Fourth.”

  “So did I,” Colonel Stecker said, and put out his hand.

  Moore handed him two typewritten sheets of paper. He ran his finger down the names on one page, and then turned to the second.

  “I know this character,” he said. “Professional private. Hell of a Marine twenty-eight days a month. Then forget him for three days until he’s blown his pay.”

  “Do you think he has a family?” Pluto asked.

  “Not.” Stecker chuckled wryly. “And I really doubt if he’d remember me.”

  He handed the sheets of paper to McCoy.

  Almost immediately, McCoy said, “I know this guy. Mean sonofabitch.”

  “You’re sure, Ken?”

  “There aren’t very many Marines named Percy,” McCoy said, and then his memory cleared. “Christ, if I’m right, this guy worked for Banning after I left China.” He raised his eyes to Pluto. “How quick could we get an answer from Banning if we asked him?”

  “Using the special channel, we can have an answer in twenty-four hours, maybe less,” Moore said.

  “How often are we in contact with Fertig?” McCoy asked.

  “Once a day in the morning,” Pluto said. “But I think they monitor all the time. You want to try to call them?”

  “I want to ask Banning if this is the same Percy,” McCoy said. “And try to talk to ... Percy.”

  “I’m sure General Pickering will authorize use of the special channel,” Colonel Stecker said.

  “You mean now, Ken?” Pluto asked. “Before we go on with this?”

  McCoy didn’t answer. He walked back to his seat, picked up his pencil, and began to print characters on the pad of paper.

  “What are you doing, Ken?” Sessions asked.

  McCoy’s left hand waved in a don’t bother me now gesture.

  Pluto looked at Stecker, who shrugged and held both hands palm up in a let’s see what he’s up to gesture.

  Two minutes later, McCoy pushed the pad to Pluto.

  “What can you spell with that alphabet, Pluto?” McCoy asked. “The line on top.”

  Pluto looked at the sheet of paper.

  ACDEHILMNOPRSUX

  ABFGIJK

  QTUVWY

  BFGJKVWY

  QUENTIN ALEXANDER MCPHERSON

  “There’s no ‘W,’ no ‘Y,’ ” Pluto said

  “It’s got all the vowels,” McCoy argued.

  “OK,” Pluto said. “Using obvious substitution, ‘M’for ‘W,’ ‘U’ for ‘V,’ et cetera, it would be useful.”

  “Slide me that, please,” Colonel Stecker ordered, his curiosity aroused. He read it, then looked at McCoy.

  “Who is Quentin Alexander McPherson?” he asked.

  Looking quite pleased with himself, McCoy smiled at Stecker.

  “I thought of this when you said you’d been with the Fourth Marines, Gunny Stecker,” he said.

  He stood up, put his hands on his hips, thrust out his stomach, and in a harsh guttural mimicry announced, “The next time one of youse swine think youse can ruin my VD record by bringing some ay-moral, slant-eyed, diseased, Chinese bimbo into my barracks, I will cut yer talleywacker off with a dull bayonet and shove it down yer throat, or my name ain’t Quentin Alexander McPherson.”

  Stecker chuckled.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I remember First Sergeant McPherson.”

  “If Pluto’s Sergeant Percy Everly is my Percy Everly,” McCoy went on, “the one thing about his service with Baker Company, 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, that he will never forget is First Sergeant Quentin Alexander McPherson. And if he remembers him, he’ll remember Zimmerman, too; he made the mistake of taking him on.”

  TOP SECRET

  SUPREME HEADQUARTERS SWPOA

  NAVY DEPT WASH DC

  VIA SPECIAL CHANNEL

  DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN

  ORIGINAL TO BE DESTROYED AFTER ENCRYPTION

  AND TRANSMITTAL

  FOR COLONEL F. L. RICKABEE

  CHIEF USMC OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT ANALYSIS

  BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA

  MONDAY 23 NOVEMBER 1942

  DEAR FRITZ:

  BECAUSE OF A PRIORITY PROBLEM AT PEARL HARBOR, SESSIONS AND SUPPLIES ARRIVED ALONE THIS MORNING. MAJOR BROWNLEE AND CAPT MACKLIN EXPECTED HERE ON FOLLOWING PLANE TOMORROW MORNING. WILL ADVISE.

  MCCOY BELIEVES SERGEANT PERCY L. EVERLY WITH FERTIG MAY HAVE SERVED WITH BANNING IN 4TH MARINES. IF THIS IS SO, IT IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT THAT BANNING FURNISH IMMEDIATELY REPEAT IMMEDIATELY WHATEVER PERSONAL INFORMATION RE: EVERLY BANNING FEELS MIGHT BE VALUABLE IN ESTABLISHING SOI OF TYPE USED VIS-A-VIS HOWARD AND KOFFLER.

  DESPITE THE HIGH REGARD WITH WHICH EVERYONE IN THE NAVAL SERVICE SEEMS TO REGARD CAPTAIN MACKLIN, I HAVE BEEN WONDERING WHY HE IS A CAPTAIN AND MCCOY ISN’T. PLEASE SEE WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT THIS.

  REGARDS,

  FLEMING PICKERING, BRIGADIER GENERAL, USMCR

  TOP SECRET

  [THREE]

  Headquarters, U.S. Forces in the Philippines

  Davao Oriental Province

  Mindanao, Commonwealth of the Philippines

  0810 Hours 24 November 1942

  “Come up, gentlemen, please,” Brigadier General Wendell W. Fertig, Commanding General, USFIP, said, making the appropriate gesture with his hand.

  He was sitting at a rattan table on the verandah of his headquarters, a thatched-roof building on stilts built against a hill.

  Second Lieutenant Robert Ball, the USFIP signal officer, and his chief radio operator, Sergeant Ignacio LaMadrid, Philippine Army, who had been standing near the top of the ladderlike steps to the verandah, climbed the rest of the way up.

  Both saluted, and Fertig returned the salute.

  “We’ve got a message from Australia, Sir,” Ball said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “They rarely do, do they, Lieutenant?” Fertig said, and put his hand out to take the sheet of paper in Ball’s hand.

  It appeared to be a carbon copy of a decrypted message, but it was in fact the original. Though two typewriters, eight reams of typewriter paper, and a ream of carbon paper had been acquired—from the basement of the ruins of the burned Manuel Quezon Primary School—for the use of HQ, USFIP, neither had a ribbon
. It was consequently necessary to make a paper-carbon-paper sandwich to type anything on the ribbonless machines; the original looked like a carbon.

  “It’s longer than usual, isn’t it?” Fertig said as he began to read.

  “Yes, Sir,” Ball agreed.

  The great bulk of their traffic from Supreme Headquarters, SWPOA, was usually very brief: Your request being considered, or various paraphrases, all meaning the same thing. We’re still thinking about whether or not we’re going to help you.

  GYB TO MFS

  USING FULL REPEAT FULL NAME OF FIRST DOG BAKER FOURTH

  REPEAT BAKER FOURTH SEND LAST REPEAT LAST NAME MOTOR

  SERGEANT MISSIONARY RESCUE CONVOY GYB STANDING BY

  “What the hell does this mean?” Fertig asked, baffled.

  Lieutenant Ball and Sergeant LaMadrid responded with a shrug.

  “Sergeant, would you please ask Captains Weston and Buchanan to join us?” General Fertig ordered.

  “Yes, Sir,” LaMadrid said, saluted, and went back down the ladder.

  Captains Buchanan and Weston appeared several minutes later. Captain Buchanan was freshly shaved and was wearing a neat khaki uniform. He had even hemmed the trousers and sleeves where they had been cut off. Captain Weston was wearing a pith helmet with a Marine Corps insignia, baggy and somewhat soiled loose white cotton garments of local manufacture, and a full beard.

  “I believe, Sir, they’re after a simple substitution code,” Buchanan offered. “In other words, if we have the full name they mention, we use that to construct a simple substitution code.”

  “What name?”

  “First sergeants are called First Dogs,” Buchanan said.

  “That could mean Baker Company of the Fourth Marines, Sir,” Weston offered, becoming convinced as he spoke that that was exactly what it meant. “We sent out Everly’s name. He was in the 4th Marines.”