Pickering glanced at him.
“Lieutenant, would you present my compliments to Major Hong Son Do, and ask him to join us, please?”
“Excuse me, Sir?” Hart said, confused.
“Go get Pluto, George,” Moore said.
Hart went back into the cottage. Pickering turned his attention to the other documents. By the time he finished reading them, Pluto and Hart had come onto the porch. Pickering waved them into rattan chairs.
“Moore brought the midnight After-Action Reports,” Pickering said. “And the latest MAGICs…”
Pluto Hon looked at Pickering and then at Hart. The very code word, MAGIC, was not supposed to be used in the presence of anyone not holding that specific security clearance. Curiosity was on Hart’s face.
“… There has been no action to speak of on Guadalcanal,” Pickering continued. “Some small patrol actions, another bombing attack, but no major attack. And nothing in the MAGIC intercepts…”
Christ, there he goes again! Hon thought.
“… that suggests there have been any changes in IJGS orders to General Hyakutake changing the plan.” (IJGS: The Imperial Japanese General Staff.) “Does anybody have any idea what’s going on?”
“Sir,” Hon began carefully.
“Go on, Major,” Pickering said cordially.
Hon now looked really confused, which was Pickering’s intention.
“Really, Major,” Pickering said, handing him Haughton’s radio message, “when the phone rings in the wee hours saying something has come into the dungeon for us, you really should make an effort to get out of bed and go see what it is. All sorts of interesting things do come in.”
Hon read the radio message.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “I thought Hart had a screw loose….”
“Lieutenant Hart, you mean?” Pickering asked.
“Yes, Sir. General, I’m grateful.”
“Sir, I don’t have any idea what’s going on,” Hart said.
“That’s par for the course, for second lieutenants, isn’t it, Moore?”
“Yes, Sir. You ought to think about writing that on the palm of your hand, Hart. So you won’t forget it.”
“General,” Pluto said, looking at Moore. “Sir, if I had heard the phone, I’d have gone down there.”
“We were just talking about that, weren’t we, Johnny? From now on, until you can get Hart up to speed, Pluto, I want you to make all the middle-of-the-night runs to the dungeon. Understand?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Sir, I’m all right,” Moore protested.
“Your second order of business, Major, is to take Lieutenant Gimpy here to the dispensary and get an accurate report on his condition.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Your first order of business is to answer my first question: What’s going on with the Japanese at Guadalcanal? I want to know what to tell El Supremo when he asks me. And I’m sure he’ll ask.”
“Just before I quit last night, Sir, I checked with Hawaii to make sure I had all the MAGIC intercepts they had.”
“Sir, can I ask what a MAGIC intercept is?” Hart asked.
“OK,” Pickering said. “Let’s do that right now. Give him Haughton’s radio, Pluto.”
Pluto handed it over, and Hart read it, and then looked at Pickering for an explanation.
“Paragraph e, I think it was e,” Pickering began, “where Mr. Knox authorized me to grant you access to certain classified information, is the important one.”
“Yes, Sir?”
“If I don’t explain this correctly, Pluto,” Pickering went on, “please correct me.”
Pluto nodded.
“There is no way the Japanese can stop anyone with the right kind of radio from listening to their radio messages,” Pickering began. “Just as there’s no way we can stop the Japanese from listening to ours. As a consequence, even relatively unimportant messages, on both sides, are coded. The word Pluto and Moore use is ‘encrypted.’
“However, probably the most important secret of this war, George, and I’m not exaggerating in the least, is that Navy cryptographers at Pearl Harbor have broken many-by no means all, but many-of the important Japanese codes.”
“Jesus!” Hart said.
“The program is called MAGIC,” Pickering went on. “A MAGIC intercept is a Japanese message we have intercepted and decoded. Such messages have the highest possible security classification. If the Japanese even suspect that we have broken their codes, they will of course change them. I really don’t understand why they hold to the notion that their encryption is so perfect that it cannot be broken….”
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