Call to Arms Page 9

  Captain Sessions was different. For one thing, he said it as a joke. For another, he had proved himself on several occasions to be McCoy’s friend when that had been difficult. Perhaps most importantly, McCoy believed that if it had not been for Captain Sessions, he would still be a corporal somewhere—in a machine-gun section or a motor transport platoon. McCoy looked on Sessions as a friend. He didn’t have many friends.

  “Major Almond,” Captain Sessions said as they went back down the stairs, referring to the Administrative Officer, “is looking forward to jumping your ass for reporting back in late. If he sees you before I see him, or Colonel Rickabee does, you tell him to see one of us.”

  “Yes, sir,” McCoy said.

  “With a little bit of luck, you’ll be out of here before you run into him, and he won’t learn that I made a fool of myself again. I really thought you were due back at oh-eight-hundred this morning.”

  “Yes, sir,” McCoy repeated. He didn’t understand the “you’ll be out of here” business, but there was no time to ask. Captain Sessions was already at the foot of the stairs, reaching for the sergeant’s clipboard to sign them out.

  “The car’s outside?” Sessions asked.

  “No, sir,” the sergeant said. “Major Almond took it, sir. He went over to the Lafayette Hotel, looking for Lieutenant McCoy.”

  “My car’s in the parking lot, sir,” McCoy said.

  “Why not?” Sessions said, smiling. He turned to the sergeant. “When Major Almond returns, Sergeant, tell him that Lieutenant McCoy was not AWOL after all, and that I have him.”

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeant said, then pushed the hidden switch that operated the door lock.

  McCoy’s car, a 1939 LaSalle convertible coupe, was covered with snow, and the windows were filmed with ice.

  “I hope you can get this thing started,” Captain Sessions said as he helped McCoy chip the ice loose with a key.

  “It should start,” McCoy said. “I just put a new battery in it.”

  “You didn’t take it on leave?” Sessions asked.

  “I went to New York City, sir,” McCoy said. “You’re better off without a car in New York.”

  “You didn’t go home?” Sessions asked. He knew more about Second Lieutenant McCoy than anyone else in the Marine Corps, including the fact that he had a father and a sister in Norristown, Pennsylvania.

  “No, sir,” McCoy said.

  Sessions found that interesting, but didn’t pursue it.

  The car cranked, but with difficulty.

  “I hate Washington winters,” McCoy said as he waited for the engine to warm up. “Freeze and thaw, freeze and thaw. Everything winds up frozen.”

  “You may shortly look back on Washington winters with fond remembrance,” Captain Sessions said.

  “Am I going somewhere, sir?”

  “Right now you’re going to the Bethesda Naval Hospital,” Sessions said. “You know where that is?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The outpatient clinic at the hospital was crowded, but as soon as Sessions gave his name, the Navy yeoman at the desk summoned a chief corpsman, who took them to an X-ray room, supervised chest and torso and leg X rays, and then led them to an examining room where he ordered McCoy to remove his clothing. He weighed him, took his blood pressure, drew blood into three different vials; and then, startling McCoy, pulled off the bandage that covered his lower back with one quick and violent jerking motion.

  “Jesus,” McCoy said. “Next time, tell me, Chief!”

  “You lost less hair the way I done it,” the chief said, unrepentant, and then examined the wound.

  “That’s healing nicely,” he said. “But there’s still a little suppuration. Shrapnel?”

  McCoy nodded.

  “That’s the first wound like that I seen since World War I,” the chief said.

  A younger man in a white medical smock came in the room. The silver railroad tracks of a Navy full lieutenant were on his collar points.

  “I’m sure there’s a good reason for doing this examination this way,” he said to Sessions.

  “Yes, Lieutenant, there is,” Sessions replied.

  The Naval surgeon examined McCoy’s medical records, and while he was listening to his chest, the chief corpsman fetched the X rays. The surgeon examined them, and then pushed and prodded the line of stitches on McCoy’s lower back.

  “Any pain? Any loss of movement?”

  “I’m a little stiff sometimes, sir,” McCoy said.

  “You’re lucky you’re alive, Lieutenant,” the surgeon said, matter-of-factly. Then he grunted and prodded McCoy’s upper right thigh with his finger. “Where’d you get that? That’s a small-arm puncture, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Not suffered at the same time as the damage to your back? It looks older.”

  “No, sir,” McCoy said.

  “Not very talkative, is he, Captain?” the surgeon said to Sessions. “I asked him where he got it.”

  “In Shanghai, sir,” McCoy said.

  “That’s a Japanese twenty-five caliber wound?” the surgeon asked doubtfully.

  “No, sir,” McCoy said. “One of those little tiny Spanish automatics…either a twenty-five or maybe a twenty-two rimfire.”

  “A twenty-five?” the surgeon asked curiously, and then saw the look of impatience in Session’s eyes. He backed down before it.

  “That seems to have healed nicely,” he said, cheerfully. “You don’t have a history of malaria, do you, Lieutenant?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Nor, according to this, of social disease,” the surgon said. “Have you been exposed to that, lately?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, presuming they don’t find anything when they do his blood, Captain, he should be fit for full duty in say, thirty days. I think he should build up to any really strenuous exercise, however. There’s some muscle damage, and—”

  “I understand,” Sessions said. “Thank you, Doctor, for squeezing him in this way.”

  “My pleasure,” the surgeon said. “You can get dressed, Lieutenant. It’ll be a couple of minutes before the form can be typed up. I presume you want to take it with you?”

  “If we can,” Sessions said.

  When they were alone in the treatment room, McCoy put his blouse back on and fastened his Sam Browne belt in place. Then he looked at Sessions.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” he asked.

  “Well, from here we go to my place,” Captain Sessions said. “Where my bride at this very moment is preparing a sumptuous feast to honor the returned warrior, and where there is a bottle of very good scotch she has been saving for a suitable occasion.”

  “In other words, you’re not going to tell me?”

  “Not here, Ken,” Sessions said. “At my place.”

  McCoy nodded.

  “Colonel and Mrs. Rickabee will be there,” Sessions said.

  McCoy’s eyebrows rose at that, but he didn’t say anything.

  (Two)

  Chevy Chase, Maryland

  “The second house from the end, Ken,” Captain Sessions said. “Pull into the driveway.”

  McCoy was surprised at the size of the house, and at the quality of the neighborhood. The houses were large, and the lots were spacious; it was not where he would have expected a Marine captain to live.

  “Well, thank God that’s home,” Sessions said when McCoy had turned into the driveway. “Jeannie’s getting a little large to have to drive me to work.”

  McCoy had no idea what he was talking about, but the mystery was quickly cleared up when Jean Sessions, a dark-haired, pleasant-looking young woman, came out of the kitchen door and walked over to the car. She was pregnant.

  She kissed her husband, and then pointed at a 1942 Mercury convertible coupe.

  “Guess what the Good Fairy finally fixed,” she said. “He brought it back five minutes ago.”

  “I saw,” Sessions said, dryly. “‘All
things come to him who waits,’ I suppose.”

  Jean Sessions went around to the driver’s side as McCoy got out. She put her hands on McCoy’s arms, and kissed his cheek, and then looked intently at him.

  “How are you, Ken?” she asked.

  It was more than a ritual remark, McCoy sensed. She was really interested.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” Ken said.

  “You look fine,” she said. “I’m so glad to see you.”

  She took his arm and led him to the kitchen. There was the smell of roasting beef, and a large, fat black woman in a maid’s uniform was bent over a wide table wrapping small pieces of bacon around oysters.

  “This is Jewel, Ken,” Jean said, “whose hors d’oeuvres are legendary. And this is Lieutenant McCoy.”

  “You must be somebody special, Lieutenant,” Jewel said, with a smile. “I heard all about you.”

  McCoy smiled, slightly uncomfortably, back at her.

  “Colonel Rickabee called and said you were to call him when you got here,” Jean Sessions said to her husband. “So you do that, and I’ll fix Ken a drink.”

  She led him into the house to a tile-floored room, whose wall of French doors opened on a white expanse that after a moment he recognized to be a golf course.

  “This is a nice house,” Ken said.

  “I think it is,” Jean said. “It was our wedding present.”

  She handed him a glass dark with scotch.

  “How was the leave?” she asked.

  “As long as it lasted, it was fine,” he said.

  “I heard about that,” Jean said. “You were cheated out of most of it, weren’t you?”

  “I made the mistake of telling them where they could find me,” he said.

  “How’d the physical go?” she asked. “You going to be all right?”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “The only time it hurts is when they change the bandage. Most of the time it itches.”

  “Curiosity overwhelms me,” Jean said. “Ed says you’ve got a girl. Tell me all about her.”

  The answer didn’t come easily to McCoy’s lips.

  “She’s nice,” he said finally. “She writes advertising.”

  He thought: Ernie would like Mrs. Sessions, and probably vice versa.

  Jean Sessions cocked her head and waited for amplification.

  “For toothpaste and stuff like that,” McCoy went on. “I met her through a guy I went through Quantico with.”

  “What does she look like?” Jean asked.

  McCoy produced a picture. The picture surprised Jean Sessions. Not that McCoy had found a pretty girl like the one hanging on to his arm in the picture, but that he’d found one who wore an expensive full-length Persian lamb coat, and who had posed with McCoy in front of the Foster Park Hotel on Central Park South.

  “She’s very pretty, Ken,” Jean said.

  “Yeah,” McCoy said. “She is.”

  “The colonel will be here in half an hour,” Captain Ed Sessions announced from the doorway.

  “So soon?” Jean asked.

  “He wants to talk to Ken before his wife gets here,” Sessions said. “And he asked if we could set a place for Colonel Wesley.”

  McCoy saw that surprised Jean Sessions.

  “Certainly,” she said. “It’s a big roast.”

  “I told him we could,” Sessions said.

  “Ken was just showing me a picture of his girl,” Jean said, changing the subject. “Show her to Ed, Ken.”

  Sessions said that he thought Ernestine Sage was a lovely young woman.

  Lieutenant Colonel Rickabee arrived almost exactly thirty minutes later. He was followed into the room by Jewel, who carried a silver tray of bacon-wrapped oysters. Jean Sessions left after making him a drink. She explained that she had to check the roast, and she closed the door after her.

  “I was sorry to have to cheat you out of the rest of your recuperative leave, McCoy,” Rickabee said. “I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t necessary.”

  “I understand, sir,” McCoy said.

  “The decision had just about been made to send you over to COI, after you’d had your leave,” Rickabee said.

  “Sir?”

  “You’ve never heard of it?” Rickabee asked, but it was a statement rather than a question. “You ever hear of Colonel Wild Bill Donovan?”

  “No, sir.”

  “He won the Medal of Honor in the First World War,” Rickabee explained. “He was in the Army. More important, he’s a friend of the President. COI stands for ‘Coordinator of Information.’ It’s sort of a clearinghouse for intelligence information. A filter, in other words. They get everything the Office of Naval Intelligence comes up with, and the Army’s G-2 comes up with, and the State Department, us, everybody…and they put it all together before giving it to the President. Get the idea?”

  “Yes, sir,” McCoy said.

  “Donovan has authority to have service personnel assigned to him,” Rickabee said, “and General Forrest got a call from the Commandant himself, who told him that when he got a levy against us to furnish officers to the COI, he was not to regard it as an opportunity to get rid of the deadwood. The Commandant feels that what Donovan is doing is worthwhile, and that it is in the best interest of the Corps to send him good people. Despite your somewhat childish behavior in the Philippines, you fell into that category.”

  McCoy did not reply. And Rickabee waited a long moment, staring at him hard in order to make him uncomfortable—without noticeable effect.

  “Let me get that out of the way,” Rickabee said finally, with steel in his voice. “You were sent there as a courier. Couriers do not grab BARs and go AWOL to the infantry. In a way, you were lucky you got hit. It’s difficult to rack the ass of a wounded hero, McCoy, even when you know he’s done something really dumb.”

  “Yes, sir,” McCoy said, after a moment.

  “Okay, that’s the last word on that subject. You get the Purple Heart for getting hit. But no Silver Star, despite the recommendation.”

  He reached into his briefcase and handed McCoy an oblong box. McCoy opened it and saw inside the Purple Medal.

  “Thank you, sir,” McCoy said. He closed the box and looked at Rickabee.

  Rickabee was unfolding a sheet of paper. Then he started reading from it: “…ignoring his wounds, and with complete disregard for his own personal safety, carried a grievously wounded officer to safety through an intensive enemy artillery barrage, and subsequently, gathered together eighteen Marines separated from their units by enemy action, and led them safely through enemy-occupied territory to American lines. His courage, devotion to duty, and…et cetera, et cetera…”

  He folded the piece of paper and then dipped into his briefcase again, and came up with another oblong box.

  “Bronze Star,” Rickabee said, handing it to him. “If the Corps had told you to go play Errol Flynn, you would have got the Silver. And if you hadn’t forgotten to duck, you probably wouldn’t have got the Bronze. But, to reiterate, it’s hard to rack the ass of a wounded hero, even when he deserves it.”

  McCoy opened the Bronze Star box, glanced inside, and then closed it.

  “For the time being, McCoy, you are not to wear either of those medals,” Rickabee said.

  “Sir?”

  “Something has come up which may keep you from going to COI,” Rickabee said. “Which is why I was forced to cancel your recuperative leave.”

  McCoy looked at him curiously, but said nothing.

  “You’re up, Ed.” Rickabee said to Captain Sessions.

  “When you were in China, McCoy,” Sessions began, “did you ever run into Major Evans Carlson?”

  “No, sir,” McCoy said. “But I’ve seen his name.” And then memory returned. “And I read his books.”

  “You have?” Rickabee asked, surprised.

  “Yes, sir,” McCoy said. “Captain Banning had them. And a lot of other stuff that Carlson wrote. Letters, too.”

  “And Captain
Banning suggested you read the books?” Sessions asked.

  “Yes, sir, and the other stuff.”

  “What did you think?” Rickabee asked, innocently.

  McCoy considered the question, and then decided to avoid it. “About what, sir?”

  “Well, for example, what Major Carlson had to say about the Communist Chinese Army?” Rickabee asked.

  McCoy didn’t immediately reply. He was, Sessions sensed, trying to fathom why he was being asked.

  “Just off the top of your head, Ken,” Sessions said.

  McCoy looked at him, and shrugged. “Out of school,” McCoy said. “I think he went Chink.”

  “Excuse me?” Rickabee said.

  “It happens,” McCoy explained. “People spend a lot of time over there, China gets to them. That ‘thousands of years of culture’ crap. They start to think that we don’t know what we’re doing, and that the Chinks have everything figured out. Have had it figured out for a thousand years.”

  “How does that apply to what Carlson thinks of the Chinese Communists?” Rickabee asked.

  “That’s a big question,” McCoy said.

  “Have a shot at it,” Rickabee ordered.

  “There’s two kinds of Chinese,” McCoy said. “Ninety-eight percent of them don’t give a damn for anything but staying alive and getting their rice bowl filled for that day. And the other two percent try to push the ninety-eight percent around for what they can get out of it.”

  “Isn’t that pretty cynical?” Rickabee asked. “You don’t think that, say, Sun Yat-sen or Chiang Kai-shek—or Mao Tse-tung—have the best interests of the Chinese at heart?”

  “I didn’t mean that all they’re interested in is beating them out of their rice bowls,” McCoy said. “I think most of them want the power. They like the power.”

  That’s simplistic, of course, Sessions thought. But at the same time, it’s a rather astute observation for a twenty-one-year-old with only a high school education.

  “Then you don’t see much difference between the Nationalists and the Communists?” Rickabee asked.

  “Not much. Hell, Chiang Kai-shek was a Communist. He even went to military school in Russia.”

  I wonder how many of his brother officers in the Marine Corps know that? Rickabee thought. How many of the colonels, much less the second lieutenants?