Counterattack Read online

  The Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation Building was both a structural and an architectural marvel. It was designed not only to remain standing after what the engineers called a “hundred-year earthquake,” but to reflect the dominant position of the corporation in Pacific Ocean shipping.

  An oil portrait of Ezekiel Pickering, completed after his death, was hanging in the office of the current Chairman of the Board. It showed him standing with his hand resting on a five-foot globe of the earth. The globe in turn rested in a mahogany gimbal. There were the traditional four gold stripes of a ship’s master around his jacket cuff, and a uniform cap with the gold-embroidered P&FE insignia was tucked under his arm.

  His lips were curled in a small smile. In his widow’s view, that smile caught her late husband’s steely determination. But Fleming Pickering had a somewhat different take on it: while the artist had indeed captured a familiar smile of his father, based on Fleming’s own personal experience with it, that smile meant, Fuck you. I was right and you were wrong; now suffer the cost of your stupidity.

  He had once told this to his wife, Patricia, and it had made her absolutely furious. But when he had told the same thing to old Andrew Foster, the hotelman had laughingly agreed.

  It was a quarter past two on a Friday afternoon, and Fleming Pickering was alone in his office. There was a glass of Old Grouse Scotch whiskey in his hand. He drank his Scotch with just a dash of water and one ice cube. His father had taught him that, too. Good whiskey has a distinct taste; it is stupidity to chill it with ice to the point where that taste is smothered.

  While there was always whiskey available in the office—kept in a handsomely carved teak cabinet removed from the Master’s cabin of the Pacific Messenger when she was retired from service and sent to the ship breakers—Fleming Pickering almost never drank alone. But the glass in his hand was the third today, and he was about to pour a fourth, when a light illuminated on one of the three telephones on the huge mahogany desk.

  Since Pearl Harbor, Pacific & Far Eastern had lost nine of its fleet, eight to Japanese submarines and one, the tanker Pacific Virtue, at Pearl. It had been caught by Japanese bombers while it was unloading aviation gasoline. Three other P&FE ships were now overdue. Fleming Pickering thought it reasonable to presume that at least one of them would never make port.

  He knew every officer on every crew, as well as a good many of the seamen, the black gang, and the stewards. He was not ashamed to have taken a couple of drinks.

  Pickering reached over and picked up the handset of the telephone.

  “Yes?”

  “A Captain Haughton for you,” said Mrs. Helen Florian, his secretary, adding: “A Navy captain.”

  I know what this sonofabitch is going to say, Pickering thought, as he punched the button that would put him on the line. “I’m afraid I have some bad news to report, Mr. Pickering.”

  “This is Fleming Pickering,” he said to the telephone.

  “Good afternoon, Sir. I’m Captain Haughton, of the Secretary’s staff.”

  “How may I help you, Captain?”

  “Sir, I’m calling for Secretary Knox. The Secretary is in San Francisco and wonders if you could spare him an hour or so of your time.”

  Well, no news is good news, I suppose.

  “What does he want?”

  I know goddamn well what he wants. He wants my ships. He’s a tenacious bastard, I’ll say that for him.

  “I’m afraid the Secretary didn’t confide that to me, Sir,” Captain Haughton said. “At the moment, the Secretary is on the Navy Station at Treasure Island. From there he’s going to the Alameda Naval Air Station to board his aircraft. Whichever would be most convenient for you, Sir.”

  “No,” Fleming Pickering said.

  “Excuse me, Sir?”

  Obviously, Pickering thought, Captain Haughton, wrapped in the prestige of the Secretary of the Navy, is not used to hearing “no” when he asks for something.

  “I said no. I’m afraid I don’t have the time to go to either Treasure Island or Alameda.”

  “We’d be happy to send a car for you, Sir.”

  “I have a car. What I don’t have is time. I can’t leave my office. But you can tell Mr. Knox that I will be in the office for the next several hours.”

  “Mr. Pickering, you do understand that the Secretary is on a very tight schedule himself,” Captain Haughton said, and then added something he instantly regretted. “Sir, we’re talking about the Secretary of the Navy.”

  “I know who he is. That’s why I’m willing to see him if he wants to come here. But you might save his time and mine, Captain, if you were to tell him that I have not changed my mind, and I will fight any attempt by the Navy to take over my ships.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Captain Haughton said. “I will relay that to the Secretary. Good afternoon, Sir.”

  Pickering put the handset back in its cradle.

  If I wasn’t on my third drink, would I have been less difficult? Well, fuck him! I told him in plain English that if the Navy tries to seize my ships, I’ll take it to the Supreme Court. He should have listened to me.

  He stood up from behind his desk, walked to the liquor cabinet, and made himself another Old Grouse and water. Then he walked to an eight-by-twelve-foot map of the world that hung on an interior wall. Behind it was a sheet of light steel. Models of the ships of the P&FE fleet, each containing a small magnet, were placed on it so as to show their current positions.

  After he checked the last known positions of the Pacific Endeavor, the Pacific Volition, and the Pacific Venture, he mentally plotted their probable courses. Then he wondered—for what might have been the seven hundredth time—whether it was an exercise in futility, whether he should move the three models down to the lower left-hand corner of the map to join the models of the P&FE ships he knew for sure were lost.

  Almost exactly an hour later, the bulb on one of his telephones lit up. When he picked it up, Mrs. Florian said, “Mr. Frank Knox is here, Mr. Pickering. He says you expect him.”

  Well, I’ll be goddamned. He really is a tenacious sonofabitch!

  “Please show Mr. Knox in,” Fleming Pickering said. He opened the upper right drawer of his desk, intending to put his Old Grouse and water out of sight.

  Then he changed his mind. As the door opened, he stood up, holding the glass in his hand. The Hon. Frank Knox walked in, trailed by a slim, sharp-featured, intelligent-looking Navy officer with golden scrambled eggs on the brim of his uniform cap. He had to be Captain Haughton.

  (Two)

  Before speaking, the Hon. Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy, stared for a moment at Fleming Pickering, Chairman of the Board of Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping. There was no expression on his face, but Pickering saw that his Old Grouse and water had not gone unnoticed.

  Christ, he’ll think I’m a boozer; I was half in the bag the last time, too.

  “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice,” Knox said. “I know you’re a busy man.”

  “I have three overdue ships,” Pickering replied. “It’s the reason I didn’t come to meet you. I didn’t want to get far from a telephone.”

  Knox nodded, as if he understood.

  “Mr. Pickering, may I present Captain David Haughton, my administrative officer?”

  The two shook hands. Pickering said, “We spoke on the telephone.”

  “I’d like to talk to Mr. Pickering alone, David, if you don’t mind,” Knox said.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Mrs. Florian,” Pickering said, “would you make the Captain comfortable? Start with a cup of coffee. Something stronger, if he’d like.”

  “Coffee will be fine,” Haughton said, as he followed Mrs. Florian out of the office.

  “May I offer you something?” Pickering asked.

  “That looks good,” Knox said, nodding at Pickering’s glass. “Dick Fowler told me you had cornered the Scotch market.”

  Is he indulging me? Or does he really want a drink?
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  “It’s Old Grouse,” Pickering said, as he walked to the liquor cabinet to make Knox a drink. “And I’m glad you’ll have one. I’m a little uneasy violating my own rule about drinking, especially alone, during office hours.”

  Knox ignored that. He waited until Pickering had handed him the glass, then he nodded his thanks and said, “Haughton doesn’t like you.”

  “I’m sorry. I suppose I was a little abrupt on the telephone.”

  “He doesn’t think you hold the Secretary of the Navy in what he considers to be the proper degree of awe.”

  “I meant no disrespect,” Pickering said.

  “But you aren’t awed,” Knox insisted. “And that’s what I find attractive.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “There was a movie—or was it a book?—about one of those people who runs a a motion-picture studio. He was surrounded by a staff whose primary function was to say ‘Right, J.B.,’ or ‘You’re absolutely right, J.B.,’ whenever the great man paused for breath. After our interesting encounter in Dick Fowler’s apartment, when I calmed down a little, I realized that sort of thing was happening to me.”

  “I don’t think I quite follow you,” Pickering said.

  “This is good stuff,” Knox said, looking down at his glass.

  “I’ll give you a case to take with you,” Pickering said. “I have a room full of it downstairs.”

  “Because I’m the Secretary of the Navy?”

  “Because I would like to make amends for my behavior in Fowler’s apartment. I had no right to say what I said.”

  “The important thing, I realized, was that you said it,” Knox said. “And you might have been feeling good, but you weren’t drunk. I think you would have said what you said if you hadn’t been near a bottle.”

  “Probably,” Pickering said. “That doesn’t excuse it, of course; but, as my wife frequently points out, when silence is called for, I too often say exactly the wrong thing.”

  “Are you withdrawing what you said?” Knox asked evenly.

  “I’m apologizing for saying it,” Pickering said. “I had no right to do so, and I’m sure that I embarrassed Richardson Fowler.”

  “But you believe what you said, right?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid I do.”

  “You had me worried there for a moment,” Knox said. “I was afraid I had misjudged you.”

  “It may be the Scotch, but I have no idea what we’re talking about,” Pickering said.

  Knox chuckled.

  “We’re talking about you coming to work for me.”

  My God, he’s serious!

  “Doing what?”

  “Let me explain the problem, and then you tell me if you think you could be helpful,” Knox said. “I mentioned a moment before that David Haughton doesn’t like you because you’re not sufficiently awed by the Secretary of the Navy. That attitude—not only on Dave Haughton’s part, but on the part of practically everybody else—keeps me from hearing what I should be hearing.”

  “You mean what’s wrong with the Navy?”

  “Precisely. Hell, I can’t blame Haughton. From the moment he entered Annapolis, he’s been taught as an article of faith that the Secretary of the Navy is two steps removed from God. The President sits at the right hand of God, and at his feet the Secretary of the Navy.”

  “I suppose that’s so,” Pickering said, chuckling.

  “To Haughton’s way of thinking, and to others like him, the Secretary of the Navy controls the very fate of the Navy. That being so, the information that is presented to him has to be carefully processed. And above all, the Navy must appear in the best possible light.”

  “I think I understand,” Pickering said. “And I can see where that might be a problem.”

  Knox removed his pince-nez, took a handkerchief from the sleeve of his heavy woolen suit—now that he noticed it, Pickering was sure the suit was English—and polished the lenses. He put them back on his nose, stuffed the handkerchief back up his jacket cuff, and looked directly at Pickering.

  “That might be an overstatement, but it’s close,” he said. “And to that problem is added what I think of as the Navy’s institutional mind-set. From the very beginning, from the first Secretary of the Navy, the men in blue have been certain that the major cross they have to bear is that the man with the authority is a political appointee who really doesn’t know—is incapable of knowing—what the Navy is really all about.”

  “Huh,” Pickering grunted.

  “Their quite understandable desire is—and I suppose always has been—to attempt to manage the Secretary of the Navy. To see that he hears what they want him to hear, and that he does not hear—or at least is presented with in the best possible light—what they’d rather he didn’t hear at all.”

  “One doesn’t think of the Navy as an institution,” Pickering said, “but of course that’s what it is.”

  “On October 13, 1775, Congress voted to equip seven ships to support George Washington,” Knox said. “Less than a month later, on November 10, 1775, the Congress authorized the Marine Corps. And before that, there were states’ navies—Rhode Island’s in particular. In July 1775, Washington sent a frigate of the Rhode Island navy to Bermuda to get gunpowder for the Continental Army. In 167 years, a certain institutional mind-set is bound to occur.”

  Pickering chuckled. There was something professorial in the way Knox had precisely recounted the origin of the Navy, and about the man himself, with his pince-nez and superbly tailored English suit. It was difficult to imagine him during the Spanish-American War, a Rough Rider sergeant charging up Kettle Hill with Lieutenant Colonel Teddy Roosevelt’s 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry.

  As it is difficult for me to accept that I once actually fixed a bayonet onto my ’03 Springfield, and that when the whistle blew, I went over the top and into no-man’s-land in Belleau Wood.

  “They had an interesting tradition, early on,” Pickering said. “Privateers. I don’t suppose I could talk you out of a Letter of Marque, could I?”

  Knox looked at him with annoyance, and then smiled. “You really think there’s a place in this war for a pirate?”

  “A pirate is an outlaw,” Pickering said. “A privateer was authorized by his government—and our government issued a hell of a lot of Letters of Marque—to prey on the enemy’s shipping. There’s a substantial difference.”

  “You sound as if you’re serious.”

  “Maybe I am,” Pickering said.

  Knox looked at him for a moment, his demeanor making it clear he was not amused that Pickering was proposing, even half-jokingly, an absurd idea. Then he went on, “I understand why you felt you couldn’t work for Bill Donovan, but I think you’ll have to grant that he has the right idea.”

  That was pretty stupid of me, Pickering thought. He’s going to think I’m a fool or a drunk. Or both.

  “Excuse me? What idea?”

  “The country will be better off—if the Army and the Navy let him get away with it, which is open to some doubt—if, that is to say, intelligence from all sources can be filtered through Donovan’s twelve disciples…and if they will use it as the basis for recommending to the President action that is in the best interests of the United States, as opposed to action recommended on the basis of the parochial mind-set of the Army or Navy.”

  “I agree,” Pickering said. “I’m a little surprised—maybe ‘disturbed’ is the word—to hear you doubt the Army and Navy will ‘let him get away with it.’”

  “I try to see things as they are,” Knox said. “And I’m fully aware that in addition to being at war with the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese, the Army and Navy are at war with each other.”

  Pickering chuckled again.

  “I laugh, too,” Knox said. “Even knowing that it’s not funny.”

  “Why do I think that the Navy is having a hard time managing you?” Pickering said.

  “Well, they’re trying,” Knox said. “And the odds would seem to
be in their favor. Franklin Roosevelt is partial to the Navy. He was once an Undersecretary, for one thing. For another, he has a lamentable habit of calling in Ernie King—”

  “Admiral King?” Pickering interrupted.

  Knox nodded. “King replaced Admiral Stark as Chief of Naval Operations on December 31. Stark was a good man, but after Pearl Harbor he had to go. Anyway, Roosevelt has already started giving Admiral King marching orders without asking or telling me about it. And he’s about to throw Admiral Bill Leahy into the equation.”

  “That you’ll have to explain,” Pickering said.

  “Leahy—and understand, Pickering, that I admire all the people I’m talking about—is functioning as sort of chief of military staff to Roosevelt, a position that does not exist in the law. They’re about to organize a committee, comprised of the Chief of Staff of the Army, the head of the Army Air Corps, the Chief of Naval Operations, and the Commandant of the Marine Corps. They’re going to call it the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or something like that. And Leahy will preside over that. Without any legal authority to do so, except a verbal one from Roosevelt.”

  “Huh,” Pickering snorted, and added, “You seem to be outnumbered, Mr. Secretary. But I don’t see what any of this could possibly have to do with me.”

  “My responsibility to the President, as I see it, is to present him with the most accurate picture that I can of the Navy’s strengths…and, more importantly, its weaknesses. His decisions have to be based on the uncolored facts, not facts seen through parochial, rose-colored glasses. I cannot, in other words, let myself be managed by Ernie King, or Bill Leahy, or the Association of Annapolis Graduates.”

  Knox looked at Pickering, as if waiting for his reaction. When there was none, he went on, “I’ve come to the conclusion that I need some—more than that, several—people like Bill Donovan’s disciples.”

  “And that’s where I come in? As one of them?”

  Knox nodded. “Interested?”

  “I don’t know what you’re really asking of me.”

  “I want you to be my eyes and ears in the Pacific,” Knox said. “You know as much about maritime affairs in the Pacific as anyone I know, including all of my admirals.”