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  “I’m not sure that’s true,” Pickering said.

  “I’m not talking about Naval tactics, about which I am prepared to defer to the admirals, but about logistics, by which I mean tonnages and harbors and stevedoring and time/distance factors. I don’t want my admirals to bite off more than they can chew as they try to redeem themselves in the public—and their own—eye after Pearl Harbor. Logistics affects strategy, and advising the President on strategy is my business. I want the facts. I think you’re the man who can get them for me.”

  “Yeah,” Pickering said thoughtfully. “I could do that, all right.”

  “My original thought was to offer you an assistant secretaryship, but I don’t think that would work.”

  Pickering looked at him curiously.

  “You’d be political. Both the political appointees and the Navy would hate you and try to manage you. And they’d probably succeed. If you were in uniform, however, the political appointees would not see you as a threat. As a naval officer, as a captain on the staff of the Secretary of the Navy…”

  “A Navy captain?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’s the Navy going to react to an instant captain?”

  “We’re commissioning a lot of ‘instant captains.’ Civil engineers, doctors, lawyers, all sorts of professionals. Even a few people who are already entitled to be called ‘captain,’ like yourself.” Knox paused and smiled at Pickering. “Since you already know the front of the ship is the bow and the floor is the deck, you’ll be way ahead of most of them.”

  Pickering chuckled.

  “Does this interest you, Pickering?”

  “You think I could do something worthwhile?”

  “Yes, I do. I really do.”

  “Then I’m at your service, Mr. Knox,” Pickering said.

  Knox walked up to him and offered his hand. “I’d like to have you as soon as possible. When do you think…?”

  “Tomorrow morning be all right?” Pickering replied.

  Now it was Knox’s turn to chuckle.

  “Things don’t move quite that quickly, even for the Secretary of the Navy,” he said. “Could you call Captain Haughton back in here, please?”

  Pickering picked up one of the telephones.

  “Would you ask Captain Haughton to come in here, please, Mrs. Florian?”

  The slim Navy officer, his eyes wary, appeared a moment later.

  “David, Mr. Pickering has kindly offered me a case of this excellent Scotch. Would you see that it gets on the plane?”

  “Yes, of course, Mr. Secretary.”

  “And before we get on the plane, I want you to find out who handles officer procurement out here. Then call them and tell them I want a suitable officer assigned to walk Mr.—Captain—Pickering through the processing. Make it clear to them that this is important to me. As soon as we can get him sworn in, Captain Pickering will be joining my staff.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir,” Haughton said. He looked at Pickering, briefly but intently. He was obviously surprised at what he had just heard.

  “And stay on top of it when we get back to Washington,” Knox ordered. “I don’t want the process delayed by bureaucratic niceties. Tell them they are to assume that if any waivers are required, I will approve them. And while I’m thinking about it, tell the Office of Naval Intelligence that while we’ll go through the normal security-clearance process with Captain Pickering, I have—based on my own knowledge of Captain Pickering, and on the unqualified recommendation of Senator Fowler—already granted him an interim top-secret clearance. Have that typed up. Make it official.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir.”

  Knox turned to Pickering. “That should get the ball rolling. Haughton will be in touch. Thank you, Pickering. Not only for the Scotch. And now I have to get out of here. They’re waiting for me at Alameda.”

  “May I send someone for the Scotch, Captain Pickering?” Haughton asked.

  “It won’t take a minute to get it. You can take it with you.”

  “Whatever you say. I’ll get the driver.”

  “It doesn’t weigh all that much,” Pickering said, without thinking. “I’ll get it.”

  Haughton gave him a quick, dirty look.

  Well, here you go, Fleming Pickering, not five minutes into your naval career, and you’re already pissing people off.

  “Let’s get it now,” Knox said. “Before he has a chance to change his mind.”

  Pickering led them to the storeroom on the ground floor that held the greater part of the whiskey removed from the sold Pacific passenger liners. He pulled a case of Old Grouse off a stack. When he started to carry it out, he saw that Haughton was uncomfortable, visibly unable to make up his mind whether he should volunteer to carry the case of whiskey himself—or to insist on it.

  A sailor who had been leaning against the front fender of a 1941 Navy gray Chrysler quickly stood erect when he saw them coming out of the building. He opened the rear door, then quickly moved to take the case of whiskey from Pickering.

  At least he knows what he’s doing, Pickering thought.

  Knox nodded to Pickering and got in the car. Haughton, at first hesitantly, and then enthusiastically, offered his hand to Pickering.

  “Welcome aboard, Captain,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Pickering said. He did not like the feel of Haughton’s hand.

  He watched the Chrysler move down Nob Hill, and then went back to his office.

  He made himself another drink, and drank it looking out his window at San Francisco bay. Then he looked for a moment at his father’s picture. He wondered what the Old Man would have said: Hooray for you for enlisting! or, You damned fool! Then he sat on the edge of his desk and called his home.

  “Hi!” he said, when Patricia’s cheerful voice came on the line.

  “You’ve heard, haven’t you?” Patricia Pickering said.

  “What?” he replied, only afterwards remembering that she was talking about the overdue Endeavor, Volition, and Venture. They had, shaming him, slipped from his immediate attention.

  “What’s on your mind, Flem?” Patricia asked.

  “Frank Knox, the Secretary of the Navy, was just in to see me.”

  “About the ships? Oh God, that sounds ominous!”

  “He wants me to go into the Navy,” Pickering said.

  There was a pause before Patricia replied, “If you had turned him down, you would have said ‘wanted.’”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  He heard her inhale deeply; it was a moment before she spoke.

  “When do you go? What are you going to do?”

  “Soon. Work for him. He’s arranging for me to be commissioned as a captain.”

  “Oh, goddamn him!”

  “I suppose I should have discussed this with you,” Pickering said.

  “Why should you start now, after all these years?” It was a failed attempt at lightness; a genuine bitterness came through.

  “I’m sorry, Pat,” he said, meaning it.

  “My father would say, ‘Never be sorry for doing something you want to do.’ And you do want to go, Flem, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I suppose I do.”

  “Don’t come home now. I’d say things I would later regret.”

  “OK.”

  “Give me an hour. Make it an hour and a half. Then come.”

  He heard the click as she hung up.

  (Three)

  Building “F”

  Anacostia Naval Air Station

  Washington, D.C.

  30 January 1942

  First Lieutenant Charles E. Orfutt, aide-de-camp to Brigadier General D. G. McInerney, stepped inside McInerney’s office, closed the door quietly behind him, and waited until the General raised his eyes from the paperwork on his desk.

  “Sergeant Galloway is outside, Sir.”

  That the news did not please General McInerney was evident on his face. He shrugged, exhaled audibly, and said, “Give me two minutes, Charlie, and t
hen send him in.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir,” Orfutt said, and quietly left the office.

  Precisely two minutes later, there was a polite knock at McInerney’s door.

  “Come!”

  Technical Sergeant Charles M. Galloway, USMC, in greens, marched into the office, stopped precisely eighteen inches from McInerney’s desk, and came to attention. Then, gazing twelve inches over McInerney’s head, he said, “Technical Sergeant Galloway reporting to the General as ordered, Sir.”

  General McInerney pushed himself backward in his chair, locked his fingers together, and stared at Galloway for a full thirty seconds before he spoke.

  “Look at me,” he said.

  Oh, shit. Here it comes, Charley Galloway thought. He dropped his eyes to meet McInerney’s.

  “Do you have any idea how much goddamned trouble you’ve caused?”

  “Yes, Sir. I think so.”

  “You don’t look especially penitent, Sergeant.”

  “Sir, I’m sorry about the trouble I caused.”

  “But you think it was really caused by a bunch of chickenshit swabbies, and in your heart of hearts you don’t think you did anything wrong, do you?”

  The old bastard can read my mind.

  Galloway’s face went pale, but he didn’t reply.

  “You’re thinking that you were almost a Marine Corps legend, is that it? That you’d be remembered as the guy who fixed up a shot-up fighter with his own hands, flew it without orders onto the Saratoga, and then on to Wake, and died gloriously in a battle that will live forever in the memory of man?”

  Again, Galloway’s face paled momentarily, but he didn’t say anything.

  That’s not true. I wasn’t trying to be a fucking hero. All I was trying to do was get that Wildcat to Wake, where it was needed.

  “What the hell were you thinking, Galloway? Can you at least tell me that?”

  “I was thinking they needed that Wildcat on Wake, Sir.”

  “Did it occur to you that in the shape that Wildcat was, you could have done some real damage, crashing it onto the deck of the Saratoga?”

  “Sir, the aircraft was in good shape,” Galloway said.

  “It had been surveyed, for Christ’s sake, by skilled BUAIR engineering personnel and declared a total loss.” He was referring to the U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics.

  “Sir, the aircraft was OK,” Galloway insisted doggedly. “Sir, I made the landing.”

  General McInerney believed everything Galloway was telling him. He also believed that if he were a younger man, given the same circumstances, he would—he hoped—have done precisely what Galloway had done. That meant doing what you could to help your squadron mates, even if that meant putting your ass in a potentially lethal crack. It had taken a large set of balls to take off the way Galloway had. If he hadn’t found Sara, he would have been shark food.

  The general also found it hard to fault a young man who, fully aware of what he was going to find when he got there, had ridden—OK, flown—toward the sound of the guns. Purposely sailed, to put it poetically, into harm’s way.

  And he also believed that Galloway had actually come very close to becoming a Marine Corps legend. Professionally—as opposed to parochially, as a Marine—General McInerney believed that it had been a mistake to recall Task Force 14 before, at the very least, it had flown its aircraft off to reinforce the Wake Island garrison.

  That move came as the result of a change of command. Things almost always got fucked up during a change of command, at least initially. How much Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, the former Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, was responsible for the disaster at Pearl Harbor was open to debate. But since he was CINCPAC, he was responsible for whatever happened to the ships of his command. And after the Japanese had wiped out Battleship Row, he had to go.

  McInerney privately believed—from his admittedly parochial viewpoint as an aviator—that the loss of most of the battleship fleet was probably a blessing in disguise. There were two schools in the upper echelons of the Navy, the Battleship Admirals and the Carrier Admirals. There was no way that the Battleship Admirals could any longer maintain that their dreadnoughts were impregnable to airplanes; most of their battleships were on the bottom at Pearl.

  Conversely, the Carrier Admirals could now argue that battleships were vulnerable to carrier-borne aircraft, using the same carnage on Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor as proof of their argument. That just might give command of the naval war in the Pacific to the Carrier Admirals.

  McInerney knew that it wouldn’t be an all-out victory for the Carrier Admirals over the Battleship Admirals. The battleships that could be repaired would be repaired and sent into action; those still under construction would be completed. But if it came to choosing between a new battleship and a new carrier, the Navy would get a new carrier. And the really senior Navy brass would no longer be able to push Carrier Admirals subtly aside in favor of Battleship Admirals.

  No aircraft carriers had been sunk at Pearl. It might have been just dumb luck that they were all at sea, but the point was that none of them had been sunk. And since there were no longer sufficient battleships to do it, it would be the aircraft carriers that would have to carry the battle to the enemy. And when the discussions were held about how to take the battle to the enemy, the opinions of the Carrier Admirals would carry much more weight than they had on December 6, 1941.

  Admiral Husband E. Kimmel had to go, and he knew it, and so did everybody else in CINCPAC Headquarters. From 1100 on December 7, Kimmel had had to consider himself only the caretaker of the Pacific Fleet, holding the authority of CINCPAC only until his replacement could get to Hawaii. As it actually turned out, he wasn’t even given that. He was relieved, and an interim commander appointed, while Admiral King and the rest of the brass in Washington made up their minds who would replace him.

  They had settled on Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. McInerney personally knew Nimitz slightly, and liked him. Professionally, he knew him better and admired him. But Nimitz hadn’t even been chosen to be CINCPAC when the decision had been made to send three carrier groups to sea, two to make diversionary strikes, and the third, Task Force 14, to reinforce Wake.

  The decision to recall it had come after the humiliated Kimmel had been relieved, and before Nimitz could get to Hawaii and raise his flag as CINCPAC.

  McInerney believed the recall order did not take into consideration what a bloody nose the Americans on Wake had given the Japanese with the pitifully few men, weapons, and aircraft at their disposal. Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham, the overall commander on Wake, and the Marines under Majors Devereux and Putnam, had practically worked miracles with what they had.

  The decision to recall Task Force 14 had obviously been made because it was not wise to risk Sara and the three cruisers. McInerney was willing to admit that probably made sense, given the overall strength of the battered Pacific Fleet; but there was no reason for not making a greater effort to reinforce Wake.

  Another twelve hours’ steaming would have put them within easy range to fly VFM-221’s F2A-3 Buffalo fighters (and Galloway’s lone F4F-4 Wildcat) off Sara onto Wake. It seemed likely to McInerney that risking the Tangier, with her Marine Defense Battalion and all that ammunition aboard, by sending her onto Wake would have been justified. Tangier could probably have been given air cover by VFM-221 and, for a while at least, as Sara steamed in the opposite direction, by Navy fighters aboard Sara.

  Instead, Tangier had turned around with the others and gone back to Pearl Harbor…and at the moment she turned, she was almost at the point where the carriers could have launched aircraft to protect her.

  McInerney was not willing to go so far as to assert that the presence of the additional aircraft (he was painfully aware of the inadequacies of the Buffalo) and the reinforcement Defense Battalion would have kept the Japanese from taking Wake, but there was no doubt in his mind that the planes and the men—and, more important, the five-inch shells—would have made it a ve
ry costly operation for them.

  If that had happened, and if T/Sgt. Charley Galloway had managed to get his Wildcat onto Wake and into the battle, he would have become a Marine Corps legend.

  But it hadn’t happened. Sara and the rest of Task Force 14 had returned to Pearl with Galloway and his F4F-4 aboard.

  There was a good deal of frustration aboard Sara when that happened. McInerney had learned that a number of senior officers had actually recommended to the Task Force Commander that he ignore the recall order from Pearl and go on with the original mission. In the end, of course, they had obeyed their orders.

  Meanwhile, McInerney guessed—very sure he was close to the truth—that some chickenshit sonofabitch, probably a swabbie, had pointed out that what that damned Marine flying sergeant had done was in clear violation of any number of regulations.

  Since that sort of thing couldn’t be tolerated, charges were drawn up. And since people were looking for something, or someone, on whom to vent their frustration, Galloway had wound up being charged with everything but unlawful carnal knowledge.

  General court-martial charges had actually been drawn up against him. But when it came to convening the court, they had found out that general court-martial authority was not vested in CINCPAC, but in the Commanding General of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, back in San Diego, because VFM-211 was under its command.

  So they had put T/Sgt. Galloway under arrest, on a transport bound for San Diego. And they’d air-mailed all the charges and specifications to the Commanding General, 2nd Marine Air Wing, “for appropriate action.”

  The Commanding General of the 2nd Marine Air Wing, realizing a hot potato had dropped in his lap, had quickly tossed it upstairs and into the lap of Major General D. G. McInerney, at Headquarters, USMC.

  A court-martial was now out of the question, as a practical matter. It would be impossible to gather the witnesses necessary for a successful prosecution in Washington. They were all over the Pacific. And some of them were dead. There was, besides, the question of the press. It would look to the press—as it looked to McInerney—as though the Marine Corps was about to try to punish somebody for trying to fight for his country.