The Corps V - Line of Fire Read online

  "Ian and Koffler have become friends. We'll leave Patience behind too. The two of them might just get Koffler off safe in case the Nips do come. Do you disagree?" Though Miss Patience Witherspoon was also educated by the nuns in the mission school, she immediately forgot all they taught her about the Christian virtue of chastity the moment she laid eyes upon Sergeant Steven M. Koffler, USMC. Not only were Patience and Koffler both eighteen years old, she found him startlingly attractive.

  Her unabashed interest in Sergeant Koffler had not been reciprocated, possibly because Patience's teeth were stained dark and filed to a point, and her not-at-all-unattractive bosom and stomach, which she did not conceal, were decorated with scar tissue.

  Lieutenant Howard did not know, and did not want to know, whether time had changed Koffler's views about Patience. And if his views had changed, whether she crawled into his bed at night.

  But, he realized, Reeves was right again. If the requisitioning mission went bad, or if the Japanese should luck upon this place while they were gone, Ian and Patience were Koffler's best chance of survival. Perhaps his only chance.

  "No, you're right, of course," Howard said.

  "And of course, with you along with us, we will have the benefit of your warrior skills."

  "Bullshit."

  "I wouldn't want this to go to your head, old boy, but the chaps are beginning to admire you. Very possibly it's your beard. Theirs don't grow as long as ours. But in any event, if we both go, and if something unpleasant should happen to me, I think-I said think-that the chaps would probably come back here with you." Howard met his eyes.

  "I was thinking we should leave at first light tomorrow."

  "No. I think we should leave now. That way we can move the rest of the day and through the night, and then sleep all day tomorrow. " Reeves stood up.

  "I'll have a word with Ian," he said. "And you can have a word with Koffler."

  [Three]

  HENDERSON FIELD

  GUADALCANAL, SOLOMON

  ISLANDS 28 AUGUST 1942

  The twin-engine, twenty-one-passenger Douglas aircraft known commercially as the DC-3 and affectionately as the Gooneybird was given various other designations by the military services that used it: To the U.S. Army, for instance, it was the C-47; to British Empire forces it was the Dakota; and the U.S. Navy-and so The Marines called it the R4D.

  An hour out of Espiritu Santo for Guadalcanal the crew chief of the MAG-25 (Marine Air Groups consisted of two or usually more Marine aircraft squadrons) R4D came out of the cockpit and made his way past the row of high-priority cargo lashed down the center of the fuselage. At the rear of the cabin, a good-looking, brown-haired, slim, and deeply tanned young man in his middle twenties had made himself a bed on a stack of mailbags.

  The other two passengers, a Marine Lieutenant Colonel and an Army Air Corps Captain, both of whom carried with them the equipment, clothing, and weapons specified by regulation for officers assigned to Guadalcanal, were more than a little curious about the young man dozing on the mailbags, For one thing, he had boarded the aircraft at the very last moment; the pilot had actually shut down one of the engines so the door could be reopened. For another, his only luggage was a bag made out of a pillowcase, the open end tied in a knot. He was wearing khaki trousers and a shirt, the collar points of which were adorned with the silver railroad tracks of a captain, and Marine utility boots, called "boondockers." All items of uniform were brand new. In fact, the young Captain had even failed to remove the little inspection and other stickers with which military clothing comes from stock.

  The crew chief, a staff sergeant, started to reach for the Captain's shoulders to wake him, but stopped when the Captain opened his eyes.

  "Sir," the crew chief said, "Major Finch wants you to come forward."

  "OK," the young Captain said, stretching and then getting to his feet.

  He followed the crew chief back up the cabin to the cockpit door. The crew chief opened the door, held it for the Captain, and then motioned him to go first.

  The Captain went as far forward as he could go, then squatted down, placing his face level with the Major's in the pilot's seat.

  "You wanted to see me, Sir?"

  "Oh, I got curious. I sort of expected you would come here on your own to say thank you."

  "I am surprised the Major has forgotten what he learned in Gooneybird transition: `Unauthorized visitors to the cockpit are to be discouraged." The Major laughed.

  "Speaking of unauthorized, Charley, how much trouble can I expect to get in for giving you this ride?"

  "None, Sir. I'm still assigned to the squadron. I'm just going home."

  "Why does that sound too simple?" the Major asked. He looked at the copilot, a young first lieutenant. "Mr. Geller, say hello to Captain Charley Galloway, of fame and legend."

  "How do you do, Sir?" Lieutenant Geller said, smiling and offering his hand.

  "You may have noticed, Mr. Geller, what a superb R4D pilot I am..."

  "Yes, Sir, Major Finch, Sir, I have noticed that, Sir," Lieutenant Geller said.

  "The reason is that my IP was Charley here."

  "At Fort Benning," Galloway said, smiling, remembering.

  "We drove the Air Corps nuts," Finch said. "Here I was, a brand-new major, and Sergeant Galloway was teaching me and ten other Marine officers-how to fly one of these. The Army doesn't have any flying sergeants." Lieutenant Geller dutifully laughed.

  "I think maybe I should have busted my check ride," Finch said. "Then maybe I would be flying fighters instead of this."

  "But tonight you will be back on Espiritu Santo," Galloway said, "drinking whiskey with nurses and going to bed in a cot with real sheets."

  "I understand creature comforts are a little short at Henderson," Finch said.

  "You haven't been there?" Galloway asked, surprised.

  "This is my first trip."

  "Creature comforts are a little short at Henderson," Galloway said. "Let me give you a little protocol: Nice transient copilots, Mr. Geller, pump their own fuel out of the barrels into the tanks."

  "No ground crews?" Finch asked.

  "And no fuel trucks. What gas there is comes in on High Speed Transports..."

  "What's a High Speed Transport?" Geller asked.

  "A World War One destroyer with half its boilers removed and converted to troop space," Galloway explained. "High Speed only in the sense that they're faster than troop transports.

  "Anyway, gas comes in fifty-five-gallon barrels lashed to the decks. The Navy either loads them into landing barges, or, it' time is short, throws them over the side-they float, You know-and then the Marines take over-getting it to shore, off the barges and to the field. The heat and humidity are really nasty. You don't have to move many fifty-five-gallon barrels of, Av-Gas very far before your ass is dragging. So please, Mr. Geller, don't stand around with your finger up your ass watching somebody else fuel this thing up."

  "No, Sir," Geller said.

  "How come there's no Navy shore parties to handle supplies?" Finch asked.

  "You've been in The Corps more than three weeks, Jack," Galloway said. "You should know that the Navy doesn't give The Corps one goddamn thing it doesn't have to."

  "That sounds a little bitter, Charley," Finch said. There was just a hint of disapproval in his voice.

  "Sailors I get along with pretty well," Galloway said. "It's the Navy I have problems with." Finch chuckled, then asked, "Are you going to tell me why you needed this off-the-manifest ride to Henderson?"

  "Because some Navy two-striper on Espiritu decided that I should get back to Guadalcanal on one of those High Speed Transports."

  "What's wrong with that?"

  "I get seasick," Galloway said.

  "Bullshit."

  "My executive officer is a brand-new first lieutenant with maybe 350 hours' total time. And he's one of my more experienced pilots."

  "Now that we're telling the truth, are you all right to fly? Or did you just w
alk out of the hospital?"

  "I'm all right. I didn't get hurt when I went in. I got sunburned and dehydrated, that's all."

  "Is that straight, Charley?"

  "Yeah, I'm all right."

  "What happened, Charley?"

  "I really don't know. I never saw the guy who got me. A Zero, I'm sure. But I didn't see him. The engine nacelle started to come off, and then the engine froze. And caught fire. So I remembered what my IP had taught me about how to get out of an F4F and got out."

  "How long were you in the water?"

  "Overnight. A PT boat picked me up at first light the next morning."

  "Jesus!"

  "God takes care of fools and drunks," Galloway said. "I qualify on both counts." Geller, Finch noticed, is looking at Galloway as if he was Lazarus just risen from the dead.

  "Tell me about Henderson," Major Finch asked, sensing that Galloway would welcome a change of subject.

  "It's not Pensacola," Galloway replied. "The Japs started it, and had it pretty well along when we took it away from them which is obviously why we went in half-assed the way we did.

  If they'd gotten it up and running, Jesus Christ! Using captured construction equipment, our guys made it more or less usable."

  "Why captured construction equipment?" Geller asked.

  "Because the construction equipment the First Marines took with them never got to the beach. It, and their heavy artillery, and even a bunch of Marines, sailed off into the sunset the day after they landed because the Navy didn't want to risk their precious ships. Right now, at least half of the ration is captured Jap stuff."

  "My God!" Finch said.

  "Actually, some of it's not bad," Galloway went on. "I mean it's not just rice. There's orange and tangerine slices, crab and lobster and shrimp, stuff like that."

  "What's the field like?" Finch pursued.

  "Twenty-six hundred feet," Galloway answered. "They're working to lengthen it. It gets muddy when it rains, and it rains every day. We have a lot of accidents on the ground because of the mud."

  "Dirt? Not pierced-steel planking?"

  "Dirt. And there's talk-maybe they even started on it-of making another strip for fighters, a couple of hundred yards away." Galloway suddenly stood up. His legs were getting cramped "Would you like to sit in here, Sir?" Geller asked politely.

  "No. No, thank you," Galloway said, and then smiled. "Tell me, Mr. Geller, have you ever seen a P-400?"

  "What the hell is a P-400?" Finch asked.

  "No, Sir," Geller said.

  "It used to be the P-39," Galloway said. "The story is they renamed it the P-400 because everybody knew the P-39 was no goddamned good. They were supposed to be sent to Russia"

  "That's the low-wing Bell with the engine behind the pilot, and with a 20mm cannon firing through the propeller nose"" Geller interrupted.

  "Right. The cannon was supposed to be used against German tanks. But then somebody told them a 20mm bounced off German tanks, so the Russians said, `No, thank you." So then the British were supposed to get them. They flew just enough of them-one, probably-to learn they were no good.

  So they said, `No, thank you,' too. So they sent them to Guadalcanal."

  "To the Marines?" Geller asked.

  "No. There's an Army Air Corps squadron. They have a high-pressure oxygen system, said to be very effective to twenty-five thousand feet, which would be very helpful; the Japanese often come down from Rabaul at high altitude. Except we don't have the gear to charge the oxygen system, so they can't fly above twelve, fourteen thousand feet. And aside from that, it's not a very good airplane in the first place."

  "Then why the hell are you so anxious to get back to this paradise?"

  Finch asked, without thinking, and was immediately sorry.

  The Marine Corps finally did something right and made Galloway a captain and gave him a squadron, Finch thought. He wants to get back because good Marine captains-and Galloway is probably a better captain than he was a tech sergeant-want to be with their squadrons.

  Not surprising Finch at all, Galloway ignored the question.

  "We have pretty good Intelligence," Galloway went on.

  "The Australians left people behind when the Japs started taking all these islands."

  "I don't follow you, Charley," Finch said.

  "They left behind missionaries, government employees, plantation owners, people like that. They commissioned them into the Australian Navy and gave them shortwave radios. Just as soon as the Japs take off, we know about it. And we get enroute reports, too. Which gives us enough time to get the Wildcats into the air and at altitude before they get there. The P-400s and the dive bombers-we had thirty Douglas SBD-3s; there were eighteen left the last time I was there-take off and get the hell out of the Japs' way."

  "You mean the P-400s are useless?"

  "No. Not at all. They're useful as hell supporting the First Marine Division. But they can't get up high enough to attack the Japanese bombers, and they're no match for the Japs' Zeroes. So they get out of the way when the Japs have planes in the area. I really feel sorry for those Air Corps guys. The P-400 is the Air Corps version of the Buffalo." Finch knew all about the Buffalo. It was a shitty airplane.

  VMF-211 flew them in the Battle of Midway (VMF is the designation for Marine Fighter squadrons). For all practical purposes the squadron had been wiped out. The only survivors were the pilots lucky enough to have been assigned Wildcats.

  Galloway lost a lot of buddies with VMF-211 at Midway, he thought. We all did. In the old days, you knew just about every other Marine Aviator.

  "You want to drive this awhile, Charley?" Finch asked as he started to unfasten his seat and shoulder harness. "I need to take a leak and stretch my legs." He got out of his seat and Galloway slid into it. Finch paused to take down a Thermos bottle of coffee from its rack and pour an inch of it into a cup. He drank that. Then he poured more into the cup and leaned over to hand it to Galloway.

  Galloway's hand was on the throttle quadrant. Apparently the synchronization of the engines was not to his satisfaction.

  Ordinarily, Finch thought, my ego would be hurt and I would be pissed. But in this case, in the interest of all-around honesty, I will concede that Captain-formerly Tech Sergeant-Charley, Galloway has forgotten more about flying the R4D than I know.

  "Coffee, Charley?" he asked, touching Galloway's shoulder.

  Finch brought the R4D in low over the ocean, making a straight-in approach toward Henderson Field, which was more or less at right angles to the beach. He called for wheels down as he crossed the beach, and maintained his shallow angle of' descent until he reached the runway itself.

  There was no chirp as the wheels touched down, just a sudden rumbling to tell him that he was on the ground.

  He chopped the throttles, put the tail on the ground, and applied the brakes, stopping before he reached the control tower, which was to the right of the runway. To his left he saw parts of three hangars, but couldn't tell if they were damaged or simply under construction.

  He saw other signs of damage around. There was an aircraft graveyard to the left. People were cannibalizing parts from wrecks, including the P-400s Galloway talked about.

  A FOLLOW ME jeep appeared on the runway, and he followed it toward the control tower. A Marine in the jeep jumped out and showed him where he was to park the airplane.

  He spotted a familiar face, or more accurately a familiar hairless head, thick neck, and massive chest belonging to Technical Sergeant Big Steve Oblensky. He was glad to see him.

  Tech Sergeant Oblensky had been very kind to a very young Lieutenant Finch when he reported to his first squadron.

  Oblensky's uniform consisted of utility trousers, boondockers, and a Thompson submachine gun slung from his bare shoulder.

  Oblensky, who had more than enough time in The Corps to retire, had been a Flying Sergeant when Major Finch was in junior high school. Long ago he'd busted his flight physical, but had stayed in The Corps as a mainte
nance sergeant. He had been Maintenance Sergeant of VMF-211, Finch recalled, until Charley Galloway stole him when he formed his VMF-229.

  He was not surprised to see Oblensky. Half the crates lashed down the center of the fuselage were emergency shipments of aircraft parts, and Big Steve was not the sort of man to order emergency shipments only to see them diverted by some other maintenance sergeant. Or for that matter, by the MAW Commanding General.