“You better find one more seat, Jake,” Veronica said. “Or there will be two empty seats on your bus.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Jake said, but it was a surrender.
I can’t believe this! Macklin thought. He’s actually going to permit this woman to come on the tour-this, to use her own words, camp follower. There will be questions about her, questions that cannot avoid bringing embarrassment to The Corps.
“Jake, if it would pose prob-” Carolyn said, and was interrupted by Veronica.
“No problems, right, Jake?”
“No problems, Carolyn,” Jake said. “But I don’t know what the hell we’re going to do about hotel rooms….”
“No problem,” Veronica said. “I will stay in your room, and Charley and Carolyn will stay in mine.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “That’d work.”
She is absolutely shameless! Macklin thought. The both of them are absolutely shameless! If any of this comes out, how am I going to look? If there is a scandal, and that seems entirely possible, my promotion will go down the toilet.
“Major, Sir,” Pick said. “Are there any more logistical problems to be solved? Or can we start thinking about how to enjoy our last night of freedom?”
“Just as long as you understand, Pick, that this is your last night of freedom, and that from now on you behave, that’s all I have.”
“In that case, I think the condemned man will start drinking his last meal,” Pick said.
“Lieutenant,” Lieutenant Easterbrook asked, “would it be all right if I used the phone? I’d sort of like to call somebody.”
“Somebody named Dawn, no doubt,” Veronica said. “Well, we now know how Bobby plans to spend the night, don’t we?”
Lieutenant Easterbrook blushed, but no one seemed to notice.
Chapter Fifteen
[ONE]
Cryptographic Section
Supreme Headquarters, South West Pacific Ocean Area
Brisbane, Australia
1145 Hours 8 November 1942
Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, USMCR, was in a particularly sour mood. He was just about finished decrypting a MAGIC intercept from Pearl Harbor. The bitch of it was that he was not very good at operating the cryptographic machine, and this meant that it took him a long, painstaking hour and a half to decode an intercept in which a verbose Japanese admiral was exhorting his underlings to do good-at great length… and this obviously had about as much bearing on the conduct of the war as the price of shoe polish in Peoria, Illinois.
General Pickering was aware that he had no one to blame for his present unhappiness but himself: To begin with, General Pickering of the Horse Marines had grandly ordered the people in Pearl Harbor to send him “anything and everything.” General Pickering of the Horse Marines would decide what was and what was not important. Next, even though such training had been regularly offered by Major Hong Song Do, General Pickering the prevaricator had successfully escaped on-the-job practice training in the efficient use of the cryptographic machine. If General Pickering the prevaricator had accepted such training, he would an hour ago have been been finished with decrypting the current MAGIC, analyzing the current MAGIC, and shredding the ten pages of verbose Japanese bullshit and putting it in the burn bag. And finally, General Pickering the idiot had learned as a corporal that the one thing you don’t do in The Marine Corps is volunteer for anything. Even so, he had volunteered to come to the dungeon. The fact that it still seemed the decent thing to do did not alter the fact that he was in fact spending this lovely Sunday morning in a goddamned steel cell, three floors underground, with water running down the goddamned walls.
The telephone rang.
“Yes?” he snarled into the receiver.
“General Pickering?”
“Speaking,” he snapped.
“Sir, this is Sergeant Widakovich.”
Who the hell is Sergeant Widakovich? Oh, yeah, that enormous Polish Military Policeman. He looks like he could pull a plow. His hands are so big they make that tommy gun I’ve never seen him without look like something you ‘d buy for a kid in Woolworth ‘s.
“What can I do for you, Sergeant?”
“General, I’m sorry to bother you…”
Perfectly all right, Sergeant. The sound of the human voice has a certain appeal. I was beginning to think I’d be here alone for the rest of my life.