In Danger's Path Page 15

  “Thank you for finding time for me, Admiral,” Pickering said.

  “I’m a little embarrassed about inviting myself out here, Fleming,” Nimitz said, “but I’ve learned that the only way to keep people from interrupting a conversation is not to let them know where I am.”

  “You’re always welcome here, sir,” Pickering said.

  “I don’t think you know Groscher, do you, Fleming?” Nimitz said, indicating the captain.

  I know that name from somewhere, Pickering thought, but I have never seen this fellow before.

  “How do you do, General?” Captain Groscher said.

  By then Admiral Wagam and Lieutenant Lewis were out of their car.

  “Good to see you again, Admiral,” Pickering said, offering his hand, and smiled at Lewis. “Back on the gossip-and-canapé circuit, I see, Chambers.”

  “No thanks to you, Fleming,” Wagam said, smiling. “He quickly let me know he’d rather have stayed on Mindanao.”

  “Come on in the house, and we’ll see if Denny can’t find us something to drink,” Pickering said.

  “I was hoping you might have something like that in mind,” Nimitz said.

  They walked through the house to the patio in the rear, where Denny had set up a bar.

  Nimitz accepted a Famous Grouse with a little water and no ice, stirred it, and took a sip. Then he looked at Pickering and smiled. “How is Mrs. Pickering?” he asked politely. “Well, I trust?”

  “She’s doing such a hell of a job running Pacific and Far East, I may not be able to get my job back when the war’s over. I tried to call her when I got here.”

  Patricia Pickering had taken over the management of the Pacific & Far East Shipping Corporation when her husband entered the service. In her husband’s judgment—quickly proven—she was the best-qualified person to do so.

  “And couldn’t get through? I know what the commercial phone service is these days. I think we could bend the rules a little and give you a couple of minutes on one of my lines.”

  “That’s very kind of you, sir,” Pickering said. “But P & FE has a dedicated line from the Honolulu office to San Francisco. The switchboard patched me through on it from here.”

  “And she was delighted to hear you’re coming home?”

  “They weren’t sure whether she’s in Boston or Savannah, but they promised to do their best to get the word to her.”

  Nimitz chuckled. “Remember that song from the First War, Fleming? ‘How are you going to keep them down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree’?”

  “Sure.”

  “How are we going to get our ladies back in the kitchen after they’ve proved they can do anything we do at least as well as we can?”

  “It may take whips and chains,” Pickering said.

  “You’ve heard there are now lady Marines?” Nimitz asked.

  Pickering nodded.

  “And how do you feel about that?”

  “I decline to answer the question on the grounds that it may incriminate me,” Pickering replied.

  Nimitz chuckled, and then something in his manner told Pickering the small-talk period was over. “Following the hoary tradition that the best way to know what a junior officer is really thinking is to make him speak first, Fleming, what’s on your mind?” Nimitz asked.

  “Sir, I wanted to pay my respects,” Pickering said. “And to thank you for providing the Sunfish.”

  The submarine Sunfish had carried McCoy and his team into Mindanao, and then it had brought him and the others out.

  “Thank you for understanding why I didn’t want to give you the Narwhal,” Nimitz said. “I was under orders to give you anything you thought you needed.”

  “The Sunfish worked out well, Admiral,” Pickering said.

  “I had the idea you might have wanted to talk about your new appointment,” Nimitz said.

  “I’d hoped we could talk about that, too, sir,” Pickering said.

  “Good, because that’s the reason I wanted to see you. I have an ax to grind, Fleming.”

  “Sir?”

  “What time’s your flight to San Diego?”

  “Nineteen forty-five, sir,” Pickering said.

  “Chambers,” Nimitz ordered, “get on the horn to Flight Operations at Pearl, and tell them…No. Just get me the duty officer at Flight Operations.”

  Lieutenant Lewis walked to the telephone, dialed a number from memory, then carried the telephone to Nimitz.

  “Commander, this is Admiral Nimitz,” CINCPAC announced. “General Pickering and his aide may be a little late arriving at Pearl Harbor. Make sure the Coronado flight scheduled for nineteen forty-five doesn’t leave without them.”

  He handed the telephone back to Lieutenant Lewis.

  “Doing that is probably spinning wheels; but I like to err on the side of caution,” Nimitz said. He turned to the portly captain. “Okay, Groscher, here’s your chance to make your pitch to the OSS’s Director of Pacific Operations.”

  “Yes, sir,” Captain Groscher said. “General, I’m sure that you’re aware that timely weather information is of great value to the Navy.”

  “You can skip that, Groscher. General Pickering has spent as much time on the bridge of a ship as I have,” Nimitz interrupted. “He knows how important weather forecasting is.”

  “Yes, sir,” Groscher said, flushing. It took him a moment to collect his thoughts, and then he decided his duty required him to disagree with the Commander in Chief, Pacific. “Admiral, with respect, I’d be more comfortable if I took General Pickering through this step by step.”

  Nimitz looked at him coldly for a moment.

  “Fleming, intelligence officers are like lawyers,” he said finally. “You either take their advice or you get yourself another one. Go ahead, Groscher.”

  Intelligence officer? Pickering wondered. I thought he was Nimitz’s aide.

  “General,” Groscher began again, “the movement of arctic air masses across Russia through Mongolia and China into the Pacific…”

  My God, he’s talking about that Gobi Desert weather station operation. I thought I was through with that!

  That quick suspicion proved correct. For nearly ten minutes, Captain Groscher, speaking entirely from memory, explained in great detail why the Navy was now handicapped, and would be even more handicapped in the future, by a lack of accurate and timely weather information from the area around the Russia-Mongolia border. Throughout the briefing, Pickering was impressed with Admiral Nimitz’s detailed knowledge of the situation. The pertinent questions CINCPAC asked indicated how important Nimitz considered the establishment of a weather-transmitting radio station.

  Groscher introduced a number of factors Pickering had previously either not known or not given much thought to. The strength and direction of winds aloft was enormously important to Naval Aviation operations at sea now, and would become more important when—as seemed very likely—the time came for the Navy to strike the enemy home islands from carriers. And even more important when the Army Air Corps began strategic bombing of the Japanese home islands with heavy bombers, including the new B-29.

  It had never occurred to Pickering, either, that weather information was a critical factor in the direction of fire from the enormous naval cannon on battleships and cruisers.

  Groscher also spoke of geopolitical considerations. Pickering remembered hearing—but not particularly caring—that the Japanese had taken the last emperor of China from his palace in Tientsin (where, stripped of power, he had been in something like house arrest) to Manchuria. There they had installed him as Emperor of Manchuko. Manchuko (formerly Manchuria) was the first nation to join with the Japanese in their Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Emperor of Manchuko, Captain Groscher related, had invited his new Japanese allies to station troops in his domain, and they had done so, which meant that the United States could not use Manchuko/Manchuria—which would have been ideal for the purpose—as a base for a weather station.

  That
left either the Soviet Union or the Gobi Desert within Mongolia as the only place where such a weather station could be—had to be—established. So far as Captain Groscher was concerned, the chances were nonexistent that the Soviet Union would permit the establishment of a weather station/radio station on their territory.

  Pickering learned for the first time that the Soviet Union was holding close to one hundred American airmen (and no one knew how many British or other allied airmen) who for one reason or another had landed on Soviet territory. Predictably, the Soviets denied this, even when presented with names, ranks, serial numbers, aircraft tail numbers, and in some cases photographs of the downed airmen in Russia.

  “By a process of elimination,” Captain Groscher said, “that leaves the Gobi Desert.”

  Pickering next learned that the Gobi Desert was not, as he had previously pictured in his mind’s eye, a vast area of shifting sands. Actually it had very little sand. The terrain was rock, most of it flat. It was possible, he learned, to drive an ordinary automobile for hundreds of miles in any direction without difficulty. Presuming, of course, one had fuel.

  As it had been for a thousand years, the area was regularly traversed east to west, and north to south, by camel caravans. The first contact with the handful of Americans who were wandering around in the vast rocky Gobi Desert had been messages sent out on several camel caravans that had reached India.

  There had been three messages, Groscher reported. Each had said about the same thing: There were retired U.S. military personnel in the desert. They were trying to reach Allied lines. They had a shortwave receiver and would monitor a frequency in the twenty-meter band at 1200 Greenwich time whenever possible.

  Each message was signed differently, Groscher went on. With the rank and initials (not the full name) of individuals who had retired from the Yangtze River patrol, the 15th U.S. Army Infantry Regiment, and the 4th Marines.

  “From the available records,” Groscher said, “we determined that indeed there was a Chief Motor Machinist’s Mate Frederick C. Brewer—corresponding with the initials FCB on one message—who retired from the Yangtze River patrol. And a Staff Sergeant Willis T. Cawber, Jr.—corresponding with the initials WTCJr on another—who retired from the 17th Infantry. And there was a Sergeant James R. Sweatley—corresponding with the initials on the third message—who was assigned to the Marine detachment in Peking, and was presumed to have become a Japanese POW.”

  “When contact was first established with Fertig in the Philippines,” Pickering observed, “there was some question whether it might be a Japanese trick.”

  “Our gut feeling has been that’s not the case here,” Groscher replied. “Meanwhile, we were investigating ways to get radio transmitters in to these people, when they suddenly came on the air themselves. Their radio equipment is almost certainly cobbled together from whatever they could lay their hands on, is not very good when it works, and doesn’t work very often. But it does give us a communications link with them.”

  “The transmitter Fertig used to first establish contact with the outside was built by a Filipino sergeant with parts from the sound apparatus of a movie projector,” Pickering said.

  “The one in the Gobi was probably built by some retired electrician’s mate,” Groscher said. “Most of these people are probably Yangtze River patrol sailors.”

  “Why do you say that?” Nimitz asked, as Pickering opened his mouth to ask the same thing.

  “Sir, the records indicate that there are far more retired Yangtze sailors in China than Marines, by a factor of five; and by a factor of seven, more river patrol retirees than soldiers.”

  “Is that somehow significant?” Pickering asked.

  “Sailors rarely have—what shall I say?—‘the live off the land skills,’ or the ability to function as infantry that Marines and soldiers may be presumed to have,” Groscher said. “Consequently, when we have to ask the question ‘what shape are these people in?’ we are forced to operate on the least pleasant likelihood. That is to say, these people are probably more on the order of a group of nomads than anything resembling a military force of any description, especially considering that they are accompanied by women and children.”

  “A point which the Army Air Corps has made, time and again, to the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Nimitz said. “And, I’m afraid, with justification.”

  “I’ve been around the fringes of this, Admiral,” Pickering said. “But until now I didn’t know what it was really all about.”

  “Politics are at play, of course,” Nimitz interrupted him. “The State Department doesn’t want to do or say anything that might annoy our Russian allies, which means we can forget about sending anyone into Mongolia through the Soviet Union. The Army Air Corps are convinced that they should be in charge of this, but they don’t really have any sense of urgency. B-29s are not going to bomb the Japanese home islands this year, and probably not until late in 1944. The Navy needs a weather station now.”

  Nimitz, Pickering thought, probably figures that I will now have Donovan’s ear, and will be able to plead his case to him. That’s why he brought Groscher here.

  The problem is that my support of a project like this—my advocacy of any project, for that matter—would be the kiss of death for it in Donovan’s eyes.

  “Sir,” Pickering said. “I’m probably missing something here. But what has this got to do with me?”

  “I had a Special Channel from Admiral Leahy two days ago,” Nimitz said. “It was the decision of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the responsibility for determining whether or not the Americans in the Gobi Desert can be used to set up a weather station and get it running will be given to the OSS.”

  “Admiral, I’m sure that the OSS will do whatever it can.”

  “Yesterday I sent Admiral Leahy a special channel message expressing my belief that you were the obvious choice within the OSS to assume this responsibility, and asked him to exert his influence to see that you are so assigned.”

  “I wish I shared your confidence in me,” Pickering said. “And I am sure Mr. Donovan doesn’t.”

  “I ask very few favors of Admiral Leahy,” Nimitz said. “He generally gives me what I ask for. And so far as Mr. Donovan is concerned, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Admiral Leahy brought the matter up with the President before he discussed your participation in it with Mr. Donovan. And the President, to my knowledge, has never refused Admiral Leahy anything he’s asked for.”

  “I’m back to repeating I wish I shared your confidence in me,” Pickering said.

  “It should go without saying that CINCPAC will support you in any way we can,” Nimitz said. “Groscher has a MAGIC clearance, so you can communicate with him using the Special Channel. And Admiral Wagam will coordinate things, and advise me of any problems.”

  “Yes, sir,” Pickering said. “Sir, may I ask a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “For the sake of argument, suppose that I can—the OSS can—establish contact with these people. Then what? According to Captain Groscher, the odds are that they’re nothing more than—what did you say, Groscher?—nomads.”

  Nimitz acted as if the question—or perhaps Pickering’s naïveté—surprised him.

  “Fleming, the situation is very much like what you just did with this Fertig fellow on Mindanao. Once you have sent people in to meet with these people and established reliable two-way radio communication with them, we will have a force—a Naval force—in position. Then the Navy can reinforce that force. I’m sure that I will be able to convince Admiral Leahy that reinforcing a force in being is a far more sound proposition than waiting for our Russian allies to permit the Air Corps to establish a weather station on their territory.”

  “Yes, sir,” Pickering said.

  VII

  [ONE]

  Carlucci’s Bar & Grill

  South Fourth Street

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  1615 18 February 1943

  “Why are we
stopping here?” Janice asked dubiously.

  Carlucci’s Bar & Grill did not look like the sort of place one took young ladies for a romantic cocktail and supper.

  “I have to go in here for a minute,” Weston said. “Would you like to wait in the car?”

  Just over two hours previously, when Captain James B. Weston, USMCR, had taken possession of it, the interior of the 1941 dark green Buick Roadmaster convertible had reeked of tanned leather. It now smelled of whatever perfume Lieutenant (j.g.) Janice Hardison, NNC, had dabbed behind her ears—or in more intimate places—just before meeting him outside the gate of the Philadelphia U.S. Navy Hospital.

  It was a significant improvement, although, pre-Janice, Weston had always had a soft place in his heart for the smell of leather in a convertible.

  “You’re going in there?” Janice asked. “Why?”

  “It affects our future life together,” he said. “Beyond that, I’d rather not say. And I don’t think you would want to know.”

  “Jim, what are you up to?” she asked, half annoyed, half plaintive.

  “It won’t take me long,” he said, and stepped out of the car.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “You’re not leaving me here alone.”

  Carlucci’s Bar & Grill smelled primarily of beer and cigarette and cigar smoke, although there was a more subtle odor both Janice and Jim associated with Italian restaurants. Most of the seats at the long bar were occupied by large males, who looked as if they worked in the Naval shipyard, Janice thought, or possibly as stevedores on the Philadelphia waterfront. They found seats near the far end of the bar.

  A very large, swarthy bartender who needed a shave put both hands on the bar and leaned toward them to inquire, “What’ll it be?”

  “Scotch, twice,” Weston said. “One light, one heavy.”

  The drinks were served. Weston laid currency on the bar.

  “Anything else I can do for you, pal?”

  “I was hoping I could talk to Mario,” Weston said.

  “You’re a friend of Dominic’s, right?”