Call to Arms Read online

  A tall, florid-faced doorman in a heavy overcoat festooned with gold braid scurried quickly across the sidewalk and opened the door.

  “Oh, good morning, Mr. Pickering,” he said, as Pickering got out. “Nice to see you again, sir.”

  “Nice to see you, too, Charley,” Pickering said, shaking his hand, “but it’s ‘Lieutenant Pickering.’ We second lieutenants are very fussy about that.”

  “I was glad to hear your folks are all right,” the doorman said. “And you’re Miss Sage, right?”

  “Hello,” Ernie Sage said.

  Pickering opened the front door of the Bentley.

  “No sense you hanging around, Tony,” he said. “I’ll catch a cab to the airlines terminal.”

  “I don’t mind, Mr. Pick,” the chauffeur said.

  “You go ahead,” Pickering insisted.

  The chauffeur leaned across the seat and offered his hand.

  “You take care of yourself, young fella,” he said. “We want you back in one piece.”

  “Thank you, Tony,” Pickering said. “And keep your eye on Whatsername for me, will you?”

  The chauffeur chuckled, and then Pickering closed the door.

  When the bellman spun the revolving glass door, passing first Ernie Sage and then Pickering into the lobby of the Foster Park Hotel, an assistant manager was waiting for them.

  “Mr. Pickering, I’m Cannell, the assistant manager. How can I be of service?”

  “I’ve got to be at the airlines terminal at half-past ten,” Pickering said. “Will you make sure there’s a cab outside at quarter-past?”

  “Why don’t we just run you out to the airport in the limousine, Mr. Pickering?”

  “Because the limousine is for paying guests,” Pickering said. “A cab will do fine.”

  Pickering took Ernie Sage’s arm and steered her across the lobby of the luxury-class hotel to the coffee shop, and then to a red leather banquette in the rear.

  “Just coffee, please,” Pickering ordered when a waitress appeared.

  His order was ignored. With the coffee came toast and biscuits and slices of melon and an array of preserves.

  The Foster Park Hotel was one of forty-one hotels in the Foster chain. Mr. Andrew Foster, the Chairman of the Board of the closely held Foster Hotels Corporation, who made his home in the penthouse atop the Andrew Foster Hotel in San Francisco, had one child, a daughter; and his daughter had one child, a son; and his name was Malcolm Pickering.

  “Oh, nice!” Ernie Sage said, pulling a slice of melon before her and picking up a spoon.

  “Amazing, isn’t it,” Pickering said, “what romance does for the appetite?”

  “Meaning what?” Sage asked.

  “Meaning that your mother went to your room last night to have a little between-us-girls tête-à-tête,” Pickering said.

  “Oh, my God!” Ernie Sage said, and then challenged: “You’re sure? How do you know?”

  “She told me,” Pickering said. “As we watched you and Ken billing and cooing down by the duck pond.”

  “Okay,” Ernie Sage said. “So she knows. I don’t care.”

  “And if she tells Daddy?” Pickering asked.

  Ernie Sage thought that over.

  “She won’t tell him,” she announced. “She knows how he would react.”

  “You being his precious little girl and such?”

  “She knows it would change nothing,” Ernie Sage said. She spread strawberry preserve on a slice of toast and handed it to him. “My mother is a very level-headed woman.”

  “Her tactic for the moment is to praise your boyfriend to the skies,” Pickering said. “If that fails, she’s considering poison.”

  “Your goddamned Marine Corps may solve the problem for her,” Ernie Sage said.

  “For the third time, Ernie, he’s only going to Washington.”

  “Yeah, and for the third time, where’s your damned Marine Corps going to send him from Washington?”

  “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, Ernie,” Pickering said. “But I don’t think there’s much chance that the Corps is going to hand Ken a rifle and send him off to lead a platoon onto some exotic South Pacific beach.”

  “Tell me more about that,” she said sarcastically.

  “It’s true. He’s an intelligence officer,” Pickering said. “He speaks and reads Chinese and Japanese. That’s why they sent him to Quantico to officer candidate school. And that’s why they’re not going to hand him a rifle and tell him to go forth and do heroic things. There are very few Marines who speak Chinese or Japanese, much less both, and they are far too valuable to send off to get shot up.”

  “That’s how come he got wounded in the Philippines, right?” she challenged.

  “He wasn’t supposed to be where he was when he was hit,” Pickering said.

  “You know that wound is still…what’s the word? He’s still bleeding.”

  “Suppurating,” Pickering furnished. “They’ll take care of him, Ernie. Really.”

  “I got that speech, too,” she said. “They give you a thirty-day convalescent leave, not chargeable against your regular leave. And then ten days later, they call you up, and say, ‘Come back, otherwise we lose the war.’”

  “On the other hand, there is an adequate supply of people like myself,” Pickering said, “who are—in the hoary Naval Service phraseology—available to be ‘put in harm’s way.’”

  She looked at him for a moment, her face serious.

  “You’re afraid, aren’t you, Pick?” she asked. When he didn’t reply, she went on. “Did I make you mad by asking?”

  “Shitless, Ernie,” Pickering said. “In the quaint cant of the Marine Corps, I am scared shitless. Not only do I have a very active imagination, but I have been associated with your boyfriend long enough to understand from him that there is very little similarity between war movies and the real thing.”

  She reached across the table and took his hand.

  “Oh, Pick!” she said sympathetically.

  “I have volunteered for flight training,” he went on, “not with any noble motive of sweeping the dirty Jap from the sky, but because, cold-bloodedly, I have decided it will be a shade safer than being a platoon leader. And because, presuming no one will see that I have been wetting my pants in the airplane, it will keep me out of the war, with any luck, for six months, maybe longer. Just about all the guys in our class in Quantico are getting ready to go overseas. Some of them have already gone.”

  “Then why the hell did you enlist?” she asked.

  “Daddy was a Marine,” he said, dryly. “Could I disappoint Daddy?”

  She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek.

  “You’re a nice guy, Pick,” she said.

  “I can’t imagine why I told you this,” he said.

  “I’m glad…proud…you did,” Ernie Sage said.

  “Wasted effort,” he said. “I should have saved it for some female who would be moved to inspire the coward in the time-honored way.”

  “You sonofabitch,” Ernie Sage said, chuckling. And she freed her hand. But only after she had kissed his knuckles tenderly.

  (Four)

  When the Congressional Limited stopped at Newark, Second Lieutenant Kenneth J. McCoy, USMCR, got off and walked up to the platform to the two cars immediately behind the locomotive.

  The doors to the cars had not been opened, and he had some trouble figuring out how to open them himself before he could get on.

  The moment he stepped into the car itself, one of the corporals saw him, jumped to his feet, and bellowed, “Attention on deck!”

  “As you were,” McCoy said quickly. Fifty-odd curious faces were looking at him.

  “Who’s in charge?” McCoy asked.

  “Staff Sergeant Koznowski, sir,” the corporal said. “He’s up in front.”

  It had been Lieutenant McCoy’s intention to find the man in charge and “borrow” Ernie Zimmerman, to take him back to the dining car and buy him br
eakfast, or at least a cup of coffee. His motive was primarily personal; Ernie Zimmerman was an old buddy whom he had last seen in Peking. But there was, he realized, something official about it. He knew where the Corps could put Zimmerman to work, doing something more important than he was now, escorting boots to Parris Island: Zimmerman spoke Chinese.

  But before he had made his way down the aisle of the first car, the Congressional Limited began to roll out of the station, and McCoy knew he would be stuck in these coaches until the train stopped again.

  Zimmerman saw him passing between the cars, and by the time McCoy had entered the second car, the boots were standing up. Or most of them. There were half a dozen, McCoy saw, who were confused by the order, “Attention on deck!” and were looking around in some confusion.

  “As you were!” McCoy said loudly, and smiled when he saw that that command, too, was not yet imbedded in the minds of the boots.

  A fleeting thought ran through his mind: He, too, had taken this train on his way to boot camp at Parris Island, but by himself, not with a hundred others to keep him company.

  And then the staff sergeant he had seen with Zimmerman walked up to him.

  “Staff Sergeant Koznowski, sir,” he said.

  “I wanted a word with Sergeant Zimmerman, Sergeant,” McCoy said. “If that would be all right with you.”

  “Yes, sir,” Koznowski said.

  “Zimmerman and I were in the Fourth Marines,” McCoy said, as Zimmerman walked up to them.

  “Yes, sir,” Koznowski said. “Zimmerman told me.”

  And then Staff Sergeant Koznowski took a good look at Second Lieutenant McCoy and decided that Zimmerman had been bullshitting him. There was a Killer McCoy in the Corps, a tough China Marine who had killed two Eye-talian Marines when they had gone after him during the riots and who had left dead slopeheads all over the Peking Highway when they had been foolish enough to try to rob a Marine truck convoy Killer McCoy had been put in charge of.

  Stories like that moved quickly through the Corps. Koznowski had heard it several times. And Koznowski now recalled another detail. It had been Corporal Killer McCoy. And nobody got to make corporal with the 4th Marines in China on the first hitch. This pleasant-faced, boyish-looking second lieutenant wasn’t old enough to have been a corporal in the China Marines, and he sure as hell didn’t look tough enough to have taken on three Eye-talian marines by himself with a knife.

  “Zimmerman was telling me, sir,” Staff Sergeant Koznowski said, with a broad, I’m-now-in-on-the-joke smile, “that you was Killer McCoy.”

  Second Lieutenant McCoy’s face tightened, and his eyes turned icy. “You never used to let your mouth run away with you, Zimmerman,” he said, coldly furious.

  Zimmerman’s face flushed. “Sorry,” he said. Then he raised his eyes to McCoy’s. “I didn’t expect to see you in an officer’s uniform.”

  Very slowly, the ice melted in McCoy’s eyes. “I didn’t expect to see you on a train in New Jersey,” he said. “How’d you get out of the Philippines?”

  “Never got there,” Zimmerman said. “I come down with malaria and was in sick bay, and they never put me off the ship. It went on to Diego after Manila, and I was in the hospital there for a while. Then they shipped me here.”

  “You all right now?” McCoy asked.

  “Yeah, I’m on limited duty. They’re shipping me to the motor transport company at Parris Island.”

  “The story I heard,” Koznowski said, “was that Killer McCoy was a corporal.”

  The ice returned to McCoy’s eyes. He met Koznowski’s eyes for a long moment until Koznowski, cowed, came to a position of attention.

  Then he turned to Zimmerman and said something to him in Chinese. Zimmerman chuckled and then replied in Chinese. Koznowski sensed they were talking about him.

  McCoy looked at Koznowski again. “I was a corporal in the Fourth Marines, Sergeant,” he said. “Any other questions?”

  “No, sir.”

  “In that case, why don’t you go check on your men?” McCoy said.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Staff Sergeant Koznowski said. Fuck you! he thought. He walked down the aisle. Then he thought, I’ll be a sonofabitch. He really is Killer McCoy. I’ll be goddamned!

  “What about your family, Ernie?” McCoy asked, still speaking Chinese.

  “Had to leave them in Shanghai,” Zimmerman said. “I gave her money. She said she was going home.”

  “I’m sorry,” McCoy said.

  “I wasn’t the only one,” Zimmerman said. “Christ, even Captain Banning couldn’t get his wife out. You heard he married that White Russian?”

  McCoy nodded.

  Captain Edward J. Banning had been the Intelligence Officer of the 4th Marines in Shanghai. Corporal Kenneth J. McCoy had worked for him. McCoy thought that Banning was everything a good Marine officer should be.

  And he had heard from Captain Banning himself that Banning had married his longtime mistress just before the 4th Marines had sailed from Shanghai to reinforce the Philippines, and that she hadn’t gotten out before the war started. He had heard that from Banning as they lay on a bluff overlooking the Lingayen Gulf watching the Japanese put landing barges over the sides of transports. But this was not the time to tell Ernie Zimmerman about that.

  “How’d you get to be an officer?” Zimmerman asked.

  “They got what they call a platoon leader’s course at Quantico,” McCoy said. “It’s like boot camp all over again. You go through it, and you come out the other end a second lieutenant.”

  “You look like an officer,” Zimmerman said. It was more of an observation than a compliment, and there was also a suggestion of surprise.

  “With what I had to pay for these uniforms,” McCoy said, “I damned well better.”

  Zimmerman chuckled. “It got you a good-looking woman, at least,” he said.

  McCoy smiled and nodded. But he did not wish to discuss Miss Ernestine Sage with Sergeant Ernie Zimmerman.

  “Ernie,” he said. “If you like, I think I can get you a billet as a translator.”

  “What I want to do is figure out some way to get back to China,” Zimmerman said.

  “It’ll be a long time before there are any Marines in China again,” McCoy said.

  “I have to try,” Zimmerman said. “That what they got you doing, McCoy? Working as a translator?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “I’m a motor transport sergeant, McCoy,” Zimmerman said.

  “The Corps got a lot of those,” McCoy said. “But not many people speak two kinds of Chinese.”

  Zimmerman paused thoughtfully.

  “What the hell,” he said finally. “If you can fix it, why not? I’d be working for you?”

  “I don’t know about that,” McCoy said. “But it would be a better billet than fixing carburetors at Parris Island would be.”

  III

  (One)

  Corregidor Island

  Manila Bay, Island of Luzon

  Commonwealth of the Philippines

  2115 Hours, 5 January 1942

  The United States submarine Pickerel, a 298-foot, fifteen-hundred-ton submersible of the Porpoise class, lay two hundred yards off the fortress island of Corregidor. There was a whaleboat tied alongside, from which small and heavy wooden crates were being unloaded and then taken aboard through the fore and aft torpedo-loading hatches. A second whaleboat could just be made out alongside a narrow pier on the island itself, where it was being loaded with more of the small, heavy wooden crates.

  Lieutenant Commander Edgar F. “Red” MacGregor, USN, commander of the Pickerel, was on the sea bridge of her conning tower. MacGregor was a stocky, plump-faced, red-headed thirty-five-year-old graduate of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, and he was wearing khaki shirt and trousers, a khaki fore-and-aft cap bearing the shield-and-fouled-anchor insignia of the U.S. Navy, and a small golden oak leaf indicating his rank.

  When the last of the crates had been remov
ed from the whaleboat alongside, and it had headed for the pier again, Commander MacGregor bent over a small table on which he had laid out two charts. One of them was a chart of Manila Bay itself, with the minefields marked, and the other was a chart of the South China Sea, which included portions of the islands of Luzon and Mindoro. On the “Luzon” chart was marked with grease pencil the current positions of the Japanese forces that had landed on the beaches of Lingayen Gulf on the morning of December 10, 1941, and were now advancing down the Bataan Peninsula.

  To prevent its destruction, Manila had been declared an open city on December 26, 1941. Japanese troops had entered the city, unopposed, on January 2, 1942.

  Meanwhile, General Douglas MacArthur had moved his troops, Philippine and American, to Bataan, where it was his announced intention to fight a delaying action until help reached the Philippines from the United States.

  As Commander MacGregor observed the loading of his vessel, it was necessary again and again to force from his mind the thoughts that inevitably came to him. As a professional Naval officer, of course, he was obliged to view the situation with dispassionate eyes.

  The Japanese had, almost a month before, destroyed the United States’ battleship fleet. The only reason the Japs hadn’t sent the aircraft carriers to the bottom of Pearl Harbor as well was that the aircraft carriers had been at sea when they had attacked.

  The professional conclusion he was forced in honesty to draw was that the U.S. Pacific Fleet had taken a hell of a blow, one that very easily could prove fatal, and that the “help” MacArthur expected—the reinforcement of the Philippine garrison—was wishful thinking. The United States was very close to losing the Philippines, including the “impregnable, unsinkable ‘Battleship’ Corregidor.”

  The proof was that if anyone in a senior position of authority really believed that Corregidor could hold out indefinitely until “help” arrived, the Pickerel would at this moment be out in the South China Sea trying to put her torpedos into Japanese bottoms.

  Instead, she was sitting here, for all intents and purposes an unarmed submersible merchantman, taking aboard as much of the gold reserves of the Philippine Commonwealth as she could carry, to keep them from falling into Japanese hands when Corregidor fell.