The Corps II - CALL TO ARMS Page 7

  "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 mile's 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 payro
ll 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.

  He's spent a lot of time traveling with the Old Man, and a lot of that in airliners or the Room Service, but he had paid no more attention to the way those airplanes had worked than he had to what made the wheels go around on a locomotive.

  That was now all changed. A Marine brigadier general, a pilot, who had been in the trenches in France as an enlisted man with Corporal Fleming Pickering, USMC, had saved his old buddy's son from a Marine Corps career as a club officer by arranging to have him sent to flight school.

  As the passengers were escorted from the terminal at LaGuardia Field to board Flagship Dallas, Second Lieutenant Malcolm Pickering, USMCR, stepped out of the line and took a good close look upward at the engine mounted on the wing, then studied the wing itself. For the first time he noticed that the front of the wing was made out of rubber (and he wondered what that was for), and that the thin back part of the wing was movable, and that on the back part of the part that moved there was another part that moved. And that there were little lengths of what looked like clothesline attached to the wing.

  A stewardess finally went to him, took his arm, and loaded him aboard, eyeing him suspiciously.

  He did not have his usual scotch and soda when they were airborne. The stewardess seemed relieved. He sat in his single aisle seat and watched the movable parts of the wing move, and tried to reason what function they performed.

  They flew above the clouds. His previous reaction to a cloud cover, viewed from above, had been "How pretty! It looks like cotton wool."

  He now wondered for the first time how the pilot knew when it was time to fly back down through the cloud cover; how he knew, specifically, when Atlanta was going to be down there, since obviously he couldn't see it.

  Before today, before he was en route to Florida to learn how to fly airplanes himself, he would have superficially reasoned that pilots flew airplanes the way masters of ships navigated across the seas. They used a compass to give them the direction, and clocks (chronometers) to let them know how long they had been moving. If they knew how fast they were going, how much time they were taking, and in what direction, they could compute where they were.

  Now he saw the differences, and they were enormous and baffling. The most significant of these was that a ship moved only across the surface of the water, whereas an airplane moved up and down in the air as well as horizontally. And if things were going well, a ship moved at about fifteen miles an hour; but an airplane-the airplane he was now on-moved something like twelve times that fast. And if it was lost, an airplane could not simply stop where it was, drop its anchor, sound its foghorn, and wait for the fog to clear.

  When the Flagship Dallas touched down at Atlanta, Pick Pickering waited until all the other passengers had made their way down the steeply slanting cabin floor and debarked, and then he went forward to the cockpit.

  The door was open, and the pilot and copilot were still in their seats, filling out forms before a baffling array of instruments and controls-what looked like ten times as many instruments and controls as there were on the Room Service. "Excuse me," Pickering said, and the pilot turned around, a look of mild annoyance on his face. The annoyance vanished when he saw that Pickering was in uniform. "What can I do for you, Lieutenant?" "You can tell me how you knew Atlanta was going to be down here when you started down through the clouds."

  The pilot chuckled and looked at his watch. The watch caught Pickering's attention. It was stainless steel and had all sorts of dials and buttons. A pilot's watch! Pickering thought.

  "We just took a chance," the pilot said. "We knew it had to be down here somewhere."

  "So could a mountain have been," Pickering replied.

  The pilot saw that he was serious.

  "We fly a radio beam," he said, pointing to one of the dials on the control panel. "There's a radio transmitter on the field. The needle on the dial points to it. When you pass it, the needle points in the other direction, and you know you've gone too far."

  "Fascinating!" Pickering said. "And the altimeter tells you when you're getting close to the ground, right?"

  The pilot suppressed a smile.

  "Right," he said. "What the altimeter actually does is tell you how far you are above sea level. We have charts-maps- that give the altitude above sea level of the airports."

  "Uh- huh," Pickering grunted his comprehension.

  "There is a small problem," the pilot said. "The altimeter tells you how high you were seven seconds ago. Seven seconds is sometimes a long time when you're letting down."

  "Uh- huh," Pickering grunted again.

  "Let me ask you a question," the pilot said. "This isn't just idle curiosity on your part, is it."

  "I'm on my way to Pensacola," Pickering said. "To become a Marine aviator."

  "Are you really?" the pilot said. "Watch out for Pensacola, Lieutenant. Dangerous place."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "They call it the mother-in-law of Naval aviation," the pilot said. "Blink your eyes, and you'll find yourself standing before an altar with some Southern belle on your arm."

  "You sound as if you speak from experience," Pickering said.

  "I do," the pilot said. "I went to Pensacola in 'thirty-five, a happy bachelor. I left with wings of gold and a mother-in-law."

  "I suppose I sound pretty stupid," Pickering said.

  "Not at all," the pilot said. "You seem to have already learned the most important lesson."

  "Excuse me?"

  "If you don't know something, don't be embarrassed to ask questions."

  He smiled at Pickering and offered his hand.

  "Happy landings, Lieutenant," he said. "And give my regards to the bar in the San Carlos hotel."

  Pickering walked down the cabin aisle and got off the plane. The stewardess was standing on the tarmac, again looking at him with concern and suspicion in her eyes.

  "I noticed that the Jensen Dynamometer was leaking oil," Pickering said, very seriously, to explain his visit to the cockpit. "I thought the pilot should know before he took off again."

  He saw in her eyes that she believed him. With a little bit of luck, he thought, she would ask the pilot about the Jensen Dynamometer, and the pilot would conclude his stewardess had a screw loose.

  The airlines limousine, a Checker cab that had been cut in half and extended nine feet, was loaded and about to drive away without him when he got to the terminal.

  Thirty minutes later, it deposited him before the Foster Peachtree Hotel in downtown Atlanta. It was one of the smaller Foster hotels, an eight-story brick building shaped like an "E" lying on its side. The Old Man had bought it from the original owners when Pickering was in prep school, retired the general manager, built a new kitchen, installed a new air-conditioning system, and replaced the carpets and mattresses. Aside from that, he'd left it virtually untouched.

  "People don't like change, Pick," the Old Man had explained to him seven or eight months ago, when they had been here on one of the Old Man's unannounced visits. "The trick to get repeat customers is to make them think, subconsciously, of the inn as another home. You start throwing things they're used to away, they start feeling like intruders."

  A very large, elderly black man, in the starched white jacket of Peachtree bellmen, recognized him as he got out of the Checker limousine.

  "Well, nice to see you again, Mr. Pickering," he said. "We been expecting you. You just go on inside, I'll take care of your bags."

  The Old Man is right, Pickering thought as he walked up to a door being opened by another white-jacketed black man, if we dressed the bellmen in red uniforms with brass buttons, people would wonder what else was changed in the hotel, and start looking for things to complain about.

  The
resident manager spotted him as he walked down the aisle of shops toward the lobby, and moved to greet him. He was a plump, middle-aged man, who wore what hair he had left parted in the middle and slicked down against his scalp. Pickering knew him. L. Edward Locke had been resident manager of the Foster Biscayne in Miami when Pick had worked a spring vacation waiting tables around the pool during the day and tending bar in the golf course clubhouse at night.

  "Hello, Mr. Pickering," Locke said. "It's good to see you."

  "When did I become 'Mr. Pickering'?" Pick said, as he shook his hand.

  "Maybe when you became a Marine?" Locke said, smiling.

  "I'd rather, in deference to my exalted status as a Marine officer, prefer that you stop calling me 'Hey, you!'" Pick said. "But aside from that, 'Pick' will do fine."

  "You look like you were born in that uniform," Locke said. "Very spiffy."

  "It's supposed to attract females like moths to a flame," Pick said. "I haven't been an officer long enough to find out for sure."

  "I don't think you'll have any worries about that at all," the resident manager said. "Would you like a drink? Either here"-he gestured toward the bar off the lobby-"or in your room? I've put you in the Jefferson Davis Suite." And then Locke misinterpreted the look in Pickering's eyes. "Which we cannot fill, anyway."

  "I wasn't planning to stay," Pick said. "Unless my car hasn't shown up?"

  "Came in two days ago," Locke said. "I had it taken to the Cadillac dealer. They serviced it and did whatever they thought it needed."

  "Thank you," Pick said. "Then all I'll need is that drink and a road map."

  They started toward the bar, but Pickering stopped when he glanced casually into a jewelry store. There was a display of watches laid out on velvet. One of them, in gleaming gold, band and all, had just about as many fascinating buttons and dials and sweeping bands as had the watch on the wrist of the Eastern Airlines pilot.

  "Just a second," Pick said. "I have just decided that I am such a nice fellow that I am going to buy myself a present."

  The price of the watch was staggering, nearly four hundred dollars. But that judgment, he decided, was a reflection of the way he had come by money-earning it himself or doing, by and large, without-until his twenty-first birthday. On his majority, he had come into the first part of the Malcolm Pickering Trust (there would be more when he turned twenty-five, and the balance when he turned thirty) established by Captain Richard Pickering, founder of Pacific Far East Shipping, Inc., for his only grandson.