Call to Arms Read online

  Commander MacGregor once again reminded himself that there was good reason for what the U.S. Navy had ordered him to do. And that he was a professional Naval officer. And that when he was given an order, he was obliged to carry it out, not to question it, or to entertain doubts about the ability of senior Naval officers. They had to bear the responsibility for getting the Navy into the kind of goddamned mess where a submarine was stripped of its torpedos and turned into a merchantman because control of the seas was in the hands of the enemy.

  He did not take his eyes from the chart of Manila Bay again until the second whaleboat had tied up alongside again. Then he looked down from the conning tower.

  “Christ!” he muttered. “Now what?”

  “Sir?” his exec asked politely.

  Commander MacGregor gestured impatiently downward.

  Two ladders, lashed edge to edge, had been put over the side. The wooden crates carrying the gold reserves of the Philippine Commonwealth were heavy, too heavy to be carried aboard by one man. They had been taken from sailors in the whaleboat by two husky sailors, each grasping one rope handle, who had then together climbed the slanting ladders, carefully, grunting with the effort, one rung at a time.

  What was coming aboard now was not a crateful of gold bars but a man in khaki uniform. He was being helped up the side-by-side ladders by another man in khaki uniform. He needed the help. His left shirt sleeve was empty. Commander MacGregor could not see whether the man had lost his arm or whether it was in a sling under his shirt. He could see that the man had bandages on his head, bandages covering his eyes.

  When the one-armed man with the bandaged head reached the deck, he was helped to his feet. After having received the necessary permission to come aboard, he tried to observe the Naval custom of saluting the officer of the deck and then the national colors.

  A Naval officer, Commander MacGregor decided.

  The attempt to adhere to Naval tradition failed. The blinded man’s salute of the officer of the deck and the colors was directed into the bay.

  Commander MacGregor went quickly down from the conning tower to the deck. He could now see that the officer with the blinded man wore the silver eagle of a Navy captain. The blinded officer (MacGregor could not see that his arm was strapped against his chest, under his khaki shirt) was also a captain, but a captain of the United States Marine Corps, the equivalent of a U.S. Navy full lieutenant.

  MacGregor saluted the Navy captain.

  “Commander MacGregor, sir,” he said. “I’m the skipper.”

  The Navy captain returned the salute. “Captain,” he replied, acknowledging Commander MacGregor’s role as captain of his vessel, “this is Captain Banning. He will be sailing with you. Captain Banning, this is Captain MacGregor.”

  The blinded Marine officer put out his hand.

  “How do you do, sir?” he said. “Sorry to inflict myself on you.”

  “Happy to have you aboard, Captain,” MacGregor said, aware that it was both inane and a lie. He certainly felt sorry for the poor bastard, but the Pickerel was not a hospital ship, it was a crowded submarine, with only a pharmacist’s mate aboard. No place for a man who was not only wounded but incapable of feeding himself—or of seeing.

  “Captain Banning,” the Navy captain said, “will sail with you. I now ask you how many other men in his condition you are prepared to take aboard.”

  “Sir, I have only a pharmacist’s mate aboard,” MacGregor replied.

  The Navy captain said, “There are nine others suffering from temporary or permanent loss of sight. They will require no special medical attention beyond the changing of their bandages.”

  “I’ll have to bed them down on the deck,” Commander MacGregor said.

  “You can, without jeopardizing your mission, take all of them?” the Navy captain asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “They will come out with the next whaleboat,” the Navy captain said. “Thank you, Captain. Have a good voyage.”

  “Thank you, sir,” MacGregor said.

  “Permission to leave the ship, sir?” the Navy captain asked.

  “Granted,” MacGregor said.

  The Navy captain saluted MacGregor, then the colors, and then backed down the ladder into the whaleboat.

  “Chief!” Commander MacGregor called.

  “Yes, sir?” the chief of the boat, the senior noncommissioned officer aboard, said. He had been standing only a few feet away, invisible in the darkness.

  “Take this officer to the wardroom,” MacGregor said. “See that he’s comfortable, and then tell Doc to prepare to take aboard nine other wounded. Tell him they are…in the same condition as Captain Banning.”

  “The ‘same condition’ is blind, Chief,” Captain Banning said matter-of-factly. “Once you face it, you get used to it in a hurry.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the chief of the boat said to MacGregor, then put his hand on Captain Banning’s good arm. “Will you come this way, please, sir?”

  MacGregor noticed for the first time that Captain Banning was wearing a web belt, and that a holstered Colt .45 automatic pistol was hanging from the belt.

  A blind man doesn’t need a pistol, MacGregor thought. He shouldn’t have one. But that guy’s a Marine officer, blind or not, and I’m not going to kick him when he’s down by taking it away from him.

  The chief torpedoman, who had been supervising the storage of the gold crates in the fore and aft torpedo rooms, came onto the deck.

  “All the crates are aboard and secure, sir,” he said.

  “Let’s have a look, Chief,” MacGregor said, and walked toward the hatch in the conning tower.

  The substitution of gold for torpedos had been on the basis of weight rather than volume. The equivalent weight of gold in the forward torpedo rooms was a small line of wooden boxes chained in place down the center line. The torpedo room looked empty with the torpedoes gone.

  “We’re taking nine blinded men with us, Chief,” Commander MacGregor said. “Ten, counting that Marine captain. I said they would have to bed down on the deck. But we can do better than that, with all this room, can’t we?”

  “I’ll do what I can, Skipper,” the chief torpedoman said.

  “Let’s have a look aft,” MacGregor said.

  Ten minutes later, the Pickerel got underway, her diesels throbbing powerfully.

  Launched at the Electric Boat Works in Connecticut in 1936, the Pickerel had been designed for Pacific Service; that is, for long patrols. Since she was headed directly for the Hawaiian Islands, fuel consumption was not a problem. With at least freedom from the concern, Commander MacGregor ordered turns made for seventeen knots. Although this greatly increased fuel consumption, he believed it was justified under the circumstances. The farther he moved away from the island of Luzon into the South China Sea, the less were the chances he would be spotted by the Japanese.

  There was time, until dawn—too much time—for Commander MacGregor to consider that he was now what he trained all his adult life to be, master of a United States warship at sea, in a war; but that, instead of going in harm’s way, searching out the enemy, to close with them, to send them to the bottom, what he was doing was sailing through enemy-controlled waters, doing his very best to make sure the enemy didn’t see him.

  The one thing he could not do was fight.

  He hated to see night begin to turn into day. He had been running at seventeen knots for seven hours. And he had thus made—a rough calculation, not taking into consideration the current—about 120 nautical miles. But as he had been on a north-northwest course, heading into the South China Sea as well as up the western shore of Luzon, he wasn’t nearly as far north as he would have liked to be.

  He was, in fact, very near the route the Japanese were using to bring supplies and reinforcements to the Lingayen Gulf, where they had made their first amphibious landing in the Phillipines three days after they had taken out almost all of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.

  There woul
d be Japanese ships in the area, accompanied by destroyers, and there would be at least reconnaissance aircraft, if not bombers. This meant he would have to spend the next sixteen hours or so submerged. Since full speed submerged on batteries was eight knots, he would not get far enough on available battery power to make it worthwhile; for it would not get him out of the Japanese shipping lane to the Lingayen Gulf. But he had to hide.

  “Dive,” Commander MacGregor ordered.

  “Dive! Dive! Dive!” the talker repeated.

  The lookouts, then the officer of the deck, then the chief of the boat, dropped quickly through the hatch.

  The captain took one last look through his binoculars as water began to break over the bow, and then dropped through the hatch himself.

  The roar of the diesels had died; now there was the whine of the electric motors.

  MacGregor issued the necessary orders. They were to maintain headway, that was all; as little battery energy as possible was to be expended. They might need the batteries to run if they were spotted by a Japanese destroyer. He was to be called immediately if Sonar heard anything at all, and in any event fifteen minutes before daylight. Then he made his way to his cabin.

  Captain Banning was sitting on a Navy-gray metal chair before the fold-down desk. MacGregor was a little surprised that the Marine officer was not in a bunk.

  “Good morning,” MacGregor said. “You heard? We’re submerged.”

  “And you want to hit the sack,” Banning said. “If you’ll point me in the direction of where you want me, I’ll get out of your way.”

  “Coffee keeps most people awake,” MacGregor said. “Perverse bastard that I am, I always have a cup before I go to bed. You’re not keeping me up.”

  “I’m not sleepy,” Banning said. “I’ve been cat-napping. I did that all the time ashore, but I thought that was because it was quiet. I thought the noises on here would keep me awake, but they haven’t.”

  “I think it would be easier for both of us if you used my bunk,” MacGregor said. “Whenever you’re ready…”

  “I could use a cup of coffee,” Banning said. “Yours is first rate. And it’s in short supply ashore.”

  “I’ll get us a pitcher,” MacGregor said. “Cream and sugar?”

  “Black, please,” Banning said.

  When he returned with the stainless steel pitcher of coffee, MacGregor filled Banning’s cup three-quarters full.

  “There’s your coffee, Captain,” he said.

  “I heard,” Banning said. “Thank you.”

  He moved his hand across the table until his hand touched the mug.

  “I issued, earlier on tonight, an interesting order for a Marine officer,” Banning said. “‘Piss like a woman.’”

  “Excuse me?” MacGregor said.

  “I went to the head,” Banning said. “Ashore, you learn to piss by locating the target with your knees, then direct fire by sound. I learned that won’t work with your toilet, and, to keep your head from being awash with blind men’s piss, went and passed the word to the others.”

  He’s bitter, MacGregor thought. Then, Why the hell not?

  “How did it happen?” MacGregor blurted.

  “The U.S. Army done it to me,” Banning said, bitterly. “The one thing they did right over here was lay in adequate stocks of artillery ammunition.”

  “I don’t quite follow you, Captain Banning,” Commander MacGregor said.

  Banning very carefully raised his coffee mug to his lips and took a swallow before replying.

  “I was at Lingayen Gulf, when the Japs landed,” he said. “I got the arm there”—he raised his arm-in-a-sling—“and took some shrapnel in the legs. Naval artillery from their destroyers. The kid with me…I shouldn’t call him a kid, I suppose, a mustang second lieutenant, and one hell of a Marine…” (A mustang is an officer commissioned from the ranks.) “Anyway, he got me to a school, where a Filipino nurse took care of me and hid me from the Japanese until I was mobile. Then she arranged to get me through the Japanese lines. We’d almost made it when the U.S. Army artillery let fly.”

  “Shrapnel again?” MacGregor asked gently.

  “No. Concussion,” Banning said. “‘There is no detectable damage to the optic nerves,’” he went on, obviously quoting a doctor. “‘There is no reason to believe the loss of sight is permanent.’”

  “Well, that’s good news,” MacGregor said.

  “On the other hand,” Banning said bitterly, “there’s no reason to believe it isn’t. Permanent, I mean.” His hand was tight around the cup, like a vise.

  “When will you find out?” MacGregor asked.

  Banning shrugged. “If they really thought it was temporary, I would not have been sent home with you,” Banning said. “The official reason seemed a little flimsy.”

  “What was the official reason?”

  “I was the Intelligence Officer for the Fourth Marines,” Banning said. “They said they were under orders to do whatever they could to keep intelligence officers from falling into Japanese hands.”

  “That makes sense,” MacGregor said.

  “Not if most of my knowledge is about China, and the Japanese have already taken Shanghai. And not if your regiment has been just about wiped out, as mine was. I think they wanted us out of the Philippines because we were just too much trouble to care for. The real pain in the ass about being blind is that people are very gentle with you, as if a harsh word, or the truth, will make you break into tears.”

  He raised his coffee cup and took another careful sip.

  “You piss on the deck in my head, Banning,” Commander MacGregor said, “and I’ll have your ass.”

  Banning smiled.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” he said, lightly, and then seriously: “Thank you, Captain.”

  (Two)

  The Foster Peachtree Hotel

  Atlanta, Georgia

  1630 Hours, 6 January 1942

  Flagship Dallas, a twenty-one-passenger Douglas DC-3 of Eastern Airlines’ Great Silver Fleet, touched down at Atlanta on time, after a 775-mile, four-hour-and-twenty-five-minute flight from New York’s LaGuardia Field.

  Second Lieutenant Malcolm Pickering, USMCR, was no stranger to aerial transportation. He could not remember—even after some thought—when he had made his first flight, only that he had been a little boy. He could also recall several odd details about that airplane: The seats had been wicker, like lawn furniture, and the skin of the fuselage had been corrugated like a cardboard box.

  There had been God only knew how many flights since then.

  His grandfather, Andrew Foster, had leapt happily into the aviation age, for it permitted him to move between his hotels far faster than traveling by rail. He crisscrossed the country in commercial airliners, and there was even a company aircraft, a six-passenger, stagger-wing single-engine Beechcraft, which the Old Man had christened Room Service.

  Once the Old Man had led the way, Fleming Pickering, Pick’s father, had been an easy convert to aerial travel. Pacific & Far East Shipping, Inc., used ports all up and down the West Coast, from Vancouver, British Columbia, to San Diego. It made a lot more sense to hop aboard a Northwest DC-3 in San Francisco and fly the eight hundred—odd miles to Vancouver at three miles a minute than it did to take the train, which traveled at a third of that speed. Very often his father and grandfather had taken him with them.

  And Pick and his parents had been aboard one of the very first Pan American flights from San Francisco to Honolulu, an enormous, four-engined Sikorsky seaplane, the China Clipper.

  But airplanes had just been there, part of the scenery, like the yellow locomotives of the Southern Pacific Railroad and the white steamships of Pacific & Far East Shipping, Inc. It had never entered his mind that he would personally fly an airplane, any more than he would have thought about climbing into the cab of a locomotive, or marching onto the bridge of the Pacific Conqueror and giving orders.

  There were people who did that sort of thing, highly respected,
well-paid professionals. But he wasn’t going to be one of them. He had known from the time he had first thought of things like that that he was going to follow in the Old Man’s footsteps into the hotel business, rather than in his father’s into the shipping business.

  By the time he was in his third year at Harvard, he got around to wondering if he hadn’t hurt his father’s feelings, perhaps deeply, by avoiding the shipping business. But then it had been too late. He’d gone to work for Foster Hotels at twelve, in a starched white jacket stripping tables for thirty-five cents an hour and whatever the waiter had chosen to pay him (usually a nickel a table for a party of four) out of his tips.

  Before he was a junior at Harvard, Pickering had been a salad chef, a fry cook, a bellman, an elevator operator, a bartender, a broiler chef, a storekeeper, a night bookkeeper, a waiter, and an assistant manager. He had spent the summer between his junior and senior years in six different Foster Hotels, filling in for vacationing bell captains.

  His motive for that had been pure and simple avarice. A bell captain took home a hell of a lot more money than everybody in a hotel hierarchy but the top executives. It was not corporate benevolence; bell captains earned every nickel they made. And it was a position of prestige within the hierarchy, especially within Foster Hotels Corporation, where the Old Man devoutly believed that bell captains made more of an impression on guests than any other individual on the staff, impressions that would either draw them back again or send them to Hilton or Sheraton.

  He had been proud that the Old Man had okayed his working as a bell captain…and he had driven to Cambridge that fall in an all-paid-for black 1941 Cadillac convertible.

  That had been the last of the easy money. From the day of his graduation until he’d gone off to the Marine Corps, Pick Pickering had been carried on the payroll of the Andrew Foster Hotel, San Francisco, as a supernumerary assistant manager. And he’d been paid accordingly, which came out to a hell of a lot less than he’d made as a bell captain. What he’d really been doing was learning what it was like to run a chain of luxury hotels from the executive suite.