The Corps IV - Battleground Read online

  "That's very decent of you."

  "Don't be silly."

  "But where would I sleep? There's only one bed in this place."

  "I know you don't think I'm very smart, Howard, but I really can count," Barbara said.

  (Five)

  THE ANDREW FOSTER HOTEL

  SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  22 JUNE 1942

  The tall, long-legged blonde shifted on the seat of the station wagon so that she was facing the driver. Her fingers gently touched the beard just showing on his upper jaw, and then moved to trace his ear. When he jumped involuntarily, she laughed softly.

  "I learned that from my husband," Mrs. Caroline Ward McNamara, of Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, said to Captain Charles M. Galloway, USMCR, whose home of record was c/o Headquarters, USMC, Washington, D.C.

  Mrs. McNamara was wearing a pleated plaid skirt, a sweater, a string of pearls, and little makeup, all of which tended to make her look younger than her thirty-three years. Captain Galloway, who was wearing a fur-collared horsehair leather jacket, known to the Supply Department of the U.S. Navy as "Jacket, Fliers, Intermediate Type Gl," over a tie-less khaki shirt, was twenty-five. He was a tanned, well-built, pleasant-looking young man who wore his light brown hair just long enough to part.

  The jacket was not new. It was comfortably worn in; the knit cuff on the left sleeve was starting to fray; and here and there were small dark spots where oil or A VGAS had dripped on it. Sewn to the breast of the jacket was a leather badge bearing the gold-stamped impression of Naval Aviator's Wings and the words CAPT C M GALLOWAY, USMCR. The leather patch was new, almost brand-new. The patch had replaced one that had identical wings but had designated the wearer as T/SGT C M GALLOWAY, USMC.

  Captain Galloway had been an officer and a gentleman for just over a month. Before that, since shortly after his twenty-first birthday, in fact, he had been an Enlisted Naval Aviation Pilot (all Marine fliers are Naval Aviators), commonly called a "Flying Sergeant." He had been a Marine since he was seventeen.

  "You learned that from your husband?" Charley Galloway asked, turning to Caroline McNamara. "How to play with his ear, or how to bullshit your way into a hotel?" The hotel they had in mind was the Andrew Foster, one of San Francisco's finest, and therefore also probably already stuffed to the brim with people who had thought to make reservations.

  Her fingers stopped tracing his ear.

  "Well, fuck you," Caroline said, very deliberately.

  "Oh, Christ," he said, sounding genuinely contrite. "Sorry."

  In Caroline's mind, Charley's language was too loaded with vulgarisms. A dirty mouth was certainly understandable, she knew, considering his background. But for his own good, now that he was an officer, he should clean it up. Since he did not like to hear her use bad language (except in bed, which was something else), she had settled on doing that as the means to shame him into polishing his own manners.

  Every time he said something like "bullshit," she came back with "fuck." He really hated that; and so words like bullshit and asshole were coming out far less often now than they did not quite four months before, when they first met.

  At that time Caroline had been divorced for not quite five months. It was far from a glorious marriage, of course; but it ended more or less satisfactorily, as far as she was concerned.... In other words, she came out of it, as she put it, "with all four feet and the tail," meaning that she got the house in Jenkintown, the cars, and almost all of the bastard's money. Her prosperous stockbroker husband had an understandable reluctance to reveal in court that the person he'd been having an affair with also wore pants and shaved.

  During the divorce process, she had scrupulously followed her lawyer's advice to do nothing "indiscreet," correctly interpreting that to mean she should keep her legs crossed.

  When she met Charley Galloway, then Technical Sergeant Galloway, she had been chaste for more than eighteen months.

  He had flown into Willow Grove Naval Air Station, outside Philadelphia, in a Marine version of the Douglas DC-3 transport, acting as both pilot-in-command and instructor pilot to two young Marine aviator lieutenants, one of whom, Lieutenant Jim Ward, was her nephew.

  Jim had called from the airport, and Caroline had driven out to Willow Grove to fetch him and the others home. The moment she saw Charley Galloway, she knew he might be just the man to break her long period of celibacy. After all, she would probably never see him again.

  Until she met him, she had come to believe-after all manner of sobering, painful experience-that the real love of her life was a delightful, wholly improbable fantasy. But what happened between them, the very first time, told her that that very delightful and improbable fantasy had landed six hours before at Jenkintown.

  It wasn't long after that before she started worshiping him.

  Jimmy Ward worshiped him, too, which had been at first rather difficult to understand. Enlisted men are supposed to worship officers, not the other way around. But when she asked him about it, Jimmy explained that Charley probably would have been an officer-he had all the qualifications- if it hadn't been for what he'd done a few days after Pearl Harbor.

  He and another sergeant had put together a fighter plane from parts of others destroyed by the Japanese. Charley had then flown it out to the aircraft carrier Saratoga, then en route to reinforce Wake Island. Half of Charley's squadron was on Wake Island. Charley was riding, so to speak, to the sound of the guns.

  The reinforcement convoy was ordered back to Pearl Harbor. And so an act that was to Jimmy's mind heroic-dedication worthy of portrayal on the silver screen by Alan Ladd and Ronald Reagan-became quite the opposite. An enlisted man had made flyable an airplane commissioned officers, in their wisdom, had concluded was beyond repair. He had then had the unbridled gall, against regulations and policy, to decide all by himself to take the airplane off to war.

  The only reason that they hadn't court-martialed him, Jimmy Ward told her, was that the witnesses were either dead or scattered all over the Pacific and could not be assembled.

  So what they had done was take him off flight status and return him to the States for duty as an aircraft mechanic. It was only a critical shortage of pilots that had found him- the very morning of the day Caroline met him-back in a cockpit. The Marines were demonstrating parachute troops to the press and couldn't run the risk of having a less than fully qualified pilot fly the plane.

  After their first night together, Caroline couldn't have cared if Charley was a PFC. Or what anyone thought about her taking up with an enlisted man eight years younger than she was.

  On the twelfth of June, ten days before Caroline and Charley were driving into San Francisco, she went to Quantico to be with him. But he wasn't there.

  And then two days later he showed up as Captain Galloway, USMCR, having been pardoned and commissioned by the Commandant of the Marine Corps himself. There was a price, however. He had five days leave, plus travel time, to report to San Francisco, there to board a plane for Hawaii, and there to assume command of a newly activated Marine fighter squadron.

  Caroline decided she didn't give much of a damn what anyone-God included-thought about her traveling across the country with a man to whom she was not joined in holy matrimony. She was going with him.

  And given a little more time, she thought, she would have been able to clean up his vocabulary so that even the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Philadelphia could have found no fault with it.

  Unfortunately, there was hardly any time left at all. And then there was the matter of finding a room to make time in.

  " 'Conspire' is the word you were looking for," Caroline said. "We are going to 'conspire' our way into the Andrew Foster Hotel."

  "You think it would really work?" Charley asked.

  "They make mistakes," Caroline said. "Everybody does.

  All we have to do is make them think they made one with us, and we get a room."

  "Sound like bull-aloney to me," Charley said.

  "Bette
r," she chuckled, "better."

  "This hotel is important to you, isn't it?" Charley asked. "What did you do, stay there with your husband?"

  "No," Caroline lied, easily. "With my parents."

  My conscience, she thought, is clear. I don't want him in there thinking of me being there with Jack. All I want him to remember about the Andrew Foster Hotel is the luxury, and the food, and the two of us together in one of those lovely beds. Or together in one of those marvelous marble-walled showers with all the shower heads. I don't think Charley has ever seen anything like that. I want him to remember us there.

  "And you think that would work?"

  "Yes, I do," Caroline said, trying to put more conviction into her voice than she felt.

  "OK, Baby," Charley said. "If that's what you want, we'll give it a shot."

  "Good," she said.

  "We'll have to pull over somewhere and get a tunic and a tie out of my bag," Charley said. "I can't walk in a fancy hotel wearing a flight jacket. I wish I could shave. I feel as cruddy as the car."

  The light oak bodywork of the 1941 Mercury station wagon was covered with five days and several thousand miles of road grime. They had driven practically nonstop from Quantico, Virginia. There had been a light rain during the night, and the half-moon sweep of the wipers showed by contrast just how dirty the rest of the vehicle was.

  "Well, when we get to our room, Mommy will wash your ears," Caroline said. "Or anything else you think needs it."

  "I told you to knock off that 'Mommy' shit," Charley said, coldly. "I don't think it's funny."

  Caroline did not respond with a dirty word of her own. She was wrong, and she knew it.

  Why did I say that? I know it angers him. There's probably something Freudian in that Mommy shit. Obviously. We both know I'm thirty-three and he's twenty-five. There is probably a hint somewhere in there of perversion, too. Charley can't understand why I stayed married to Jack for so long after I learned that he was homosexual. First she was married to a fairy, he thinks, and now she's shacked up with a Marine eight years younger than she is and doesn't give a damn who knows it. Obviously, there is something strange about that dame. Strange is not all that far from perverse.

  Charley pulled off the highway and stopped.

  "I won't say that again, Baby," Caroline said.

  And now he will take affront at 'Baby'! Why did I say that? What the hell is the matter with me?

  "Forget it," Charley said, and smiled at her. "My bag will be the one on the bottom, right?"

  "Probably," she smiled. "Would you like me to drive? I know where the Andrew Foster is."

  "Go ahead," he said.

  He got in the back and she slid behind the wheel.

  There were four men behind the marble reception desk of the Andrew Foster Hotel, flagship of the forty-one-hotel Foster chain, atop San Francisco's Nob Hill. Three wore formal morning clothes, wing collars and tailed coats. The fourth man, older than the others, wore a double-breasted gray coat and striped trousers and had a rose-bud pinned to his lapel.

  "Madam, I'm terribly sorry," one of the men in formal clothing said to Caroline McNamara. "I just don't seem to be able to find any record of your reservation."

  "Well, as long as you can put us up, I suppose no harm is done," Caroline said.

  "That, Madam, I'm afraid, is going to pose a problem," the desk clerk said. "The house, I'm afraid, is absolutely full. I'll call around and see if we can't find something for you..."

  "Excuse me," the older man said to the desk clerk. "There has been a cancellation." He handed the clerk a key. "Why don't you put this officer and his lady in 901?"

  "Yes, of course," the desk clerk said and snapped his fingers for a bellman.

  "Thank you," Caroline said.

  "I'm sorry about the mix-up with your reservation," the older man said. He nodded at her, and then at Charley, and disappeared through a door in the paneled wall behind the counter.

  Nine oh one turned out to be a corner suite consisting of a sitting room, a bedroom, and a butler's pantry.

  As soon as Caroline tipped the bellman and he was gone, Charley said, "Jesus, what do you suppose this is going to cost us?"

  "What you are supposed to say, Darling, is 'I was wrong and you were right, and I'm sorry I doubted you.'"

  "Consider it said," Charley said. "And what do you think it's going to cost?"

  "Do you really care?" Caroline asked. "And anyway, I've got a bunch of traveler's checks."

  "No. What the hell," Charley said. "Why not?"

  "Why not, indeed?"

  "I'm going to take a shower," Charley said, and headed for the bathroom. In a moment, he was back. "Hey, look at this, they even give you a bathrobe!"

  He held a thick, terry cloth robe in his hands, embroidered with the logotype, "ANDREW FOSTER HOTEL San Francisco."

  "Between the hotel and me, Darling, you'll have everything your heart desires," Caroline said.

  As soon as I hear the shower running, I'm going to get in there with him. Surprise, surprise!

  She looked around the room, hoping that there would be something to drink-preferably something romantic or erotic, like cognac. She was disappointed, but not surprised, to find a liquor cabinet full of glasses, but no booze. She considered calling room service, but decided that getting in the shower with him was the highest priority. She could call room service later.

  She found the bottle of scotch they'd bought in Nevada and set it on the bar. Then she changed her mind and took it and two glasses to the bedside table. And then, after taking Charley's clothes from where he had tossed them on the bed and throwing them onto the floor, she took off her clothes, added them to the pile, and went into the bathroom.

  When she opened the glass door, she found him shaving. He told her he'd learned how to do that in boot camp at Parris Island when he had first joined the Corps. She found it delightfully masculine.

  She wrapped her arms around him from the back.

  "I'll wash yours if you wash mine," she said.

  "Mine's already clean," he said.

  "Bastard!"

  He turned and put his arms around her.

  "Christ," he said. "This is like a dream."

  "If it is, I don't want to ever wake up."

  "We have fifty-six hours," Charley said, "before I have to report to Mare Island."

  "Say, 'Caroline, you were right about driving straight through so that we would have some time in San Francisco.' "

  "You were right, Baby," he said.

  "Fifty-six hours?" Caroline said. "However are we going to pass all that time?"

  "Well, for openers, I'm clean enough," he said, and turned the shower off. "How about a quick game of Hide the Salami?"

  "And then what?" she said, dropping her hand to his mid-section.

  "And then another game of Hide the Salami," Charley said. "The second time we'll start keeping score."

  "You're on," she said.

  There came the sound of chimes.

  "What the hell is that?" Charley asked.

  "I think it's the doorbell."

  "One of the characters in the fancy costumes is out there, and he's about to tell us they've made a mistake and we'll have to get our asses out of here."

  "We're going to have to see what it is," Caroline said.

  "Yeah," Charley said.

  He turned her loose and stepped out of the shower, put one of the terry cloth robes on, and went out of the bathroom.

  Caroline got out of the shower, quickly toweled herself, and pulled on a robe. She wiped the steam from the mirror and looked at herself.

  I can't go out there looking like this!

  But, of course, she had to. Charley was ill-equipped to deal with people who managed a world-class hotel like the Andrew Foster.

  She went out of the bathroom.

  There were three people in the sitting room. Two bellmen, one of whom was stocking the liquor cabinet with liquor, and the other in the act of taking the cellophane
from a large basket of fruit. Caroline also saw a bottle of champagne in a cooler.

  "I'm so sorry to disturb you, Madam," the third man announced; he was the older man who had announced the reservation cancellation downstairs. "But when I checked, I found that the bar wasn't stocked, and I thought I'd better remedy that."

  "Thank you," Caroline said.

  "And I wanted to make sure you understood that because of our mix-up about your reservation, your bill will be for the room you reserved; I mean to say there will be no increase in price."