"Arguably, the most important station," Feldt agreed. "Certainly one of the most important."
"Staffed by one man who apparently knows very little or nothing about radios."
"That’s why we’re going to jump Koffler in to join him."
"Koffler doesn’t know a Zero from a Packard," Howard said. "If something happens to your man Reeves, Commander, what you’re going to have is a perfectly functioning radio station from which we’ll get no intelligence because Koffler won’t know what to send."
"Granted," Feldt said. "So what?"
"So what you need is a team. Send two people in. The other one should be someone who can identify Japanese aircraft and ships as well as your man Reeves. If something should happen to Reeves, that man could possibly keep the station operating. At least better than someone who was in high school this time last year."
"I don’t have anybody to spare at the moment," Feldt said.
"I grant your point. Reeves should have a replacement. I’ll work on it."
"The time to send him in is now," Howard argued. "You said that getting planes is difficult. You might not be able to get another; and even if you could, it seems to me the Japanese would sense that something important was going on in that area."
"Commander Feldt says he doesn’t have anyone to send," Banning said curtly.
"I was in the First Defense Battalion at Pearl," Howard said. "In addition to my other duties, I taught Japanese aircraft and vessel recognition."
"Fascinating," Commander Feldt said, softly.
"You’re not a parachutist," Banning said.
"Neither was Steve Koffler, this time last year," Howard argued.
"Ed," Feldt said softly, "I was given a briefing on agent infiltration by an insufferably smug British Special Operations Executive officer. He told me, among other things, that their experience parachuting people into France has been that they lost more people training them to use parachutes than they did jumping virtually untrained people on actual operations. Consequently, as a rule of thumb, they no longer subject agents going in to the risks of injury parachute training raises."
Banning looked between the two of them, but said nothing.
"What worries me about this is why Joe wants to go," Feldt said. He looked directly at Howard. "Why do you want to do this?"
"I don’t want to do it," Howard said after a moment. "I think somebody has to do it. Of the people available to us, I seem to have the best qualifications."
"Are you married? Children?" Feldt asked.
"I have a ... fianc?e," Joe said. It was, he realized, the first time he had ever used the word.
"The decision, of course, is Major Banning’s," Commander Feldt said formally.
Banning met Howard’s eyes for a moment.
"I think it might be better if Joe and I went to Melbourne," Banning said finally, evenly. "I don’t know, but maybe Joe and Koffler will need some equipment I don’t know about. If there is, it would more likely be available in Melbourne to a major than to a lieutenant."
"Your other ranks seem to do remarkably well getting things from depots," Feldt said. "But of course you’re right. I’ll arrange with Deane to have you two flown down there in the morning."
He reached for the Scotch bottle and topped off everyone’s glass.
"And of course, Melbourne’s the best place to get the shots."
"Shots?"
"Immunizations."
"The Marine Corps has given me shots against every disease known to Western man," Howard said.
"I don’t really think, Joe, that your medical people have a hell of a lot of experience with the sort of thing you’re going to find on Buka," Feldt said. "And since Major Banning and I have decided to indulge you in this little escapade, it behooves you to take your shots like a good little boy."
"Aye, aye, Sir," Howard said.
"Cheers," Feldt said, raising his glass.
(Six)
Two Creeks Station
Wagga Wagga, New South Wales
6 June 1942
It had been called a memorial service, but what it really had been, Daphne Farnsworth realized, was a regular funeral missing only the body. There had even been an empty, flag-covered casket in the aisle of St. Paul’s Church. The Reverend Mr. Bartholomew Frederick, his World War I Australian-New Zealand Army Corps ribbons pinned to his vestments, had delivered a eulogy that had been at least as much a recitation of the virtues of Australian military prowess and courage generally as it had been a recounting of the virtues of the late Sergeant John Andrew Farnsworth.
And before and after, before even she had gotten home, the neighbors had gone through the ritual of visiting the bereaved. In the event, Daphne Farnsworth only barely counted as one of the bereaved. The visitors had "called on" John’s parents at the big house, instead of at John’s and her house. Their house had been more or less closed up, of course, and his parents’ house was larger; but she suspected that the roasts and the casseroles and the clove-studded hams and potato salad would have been delivered to the big house even if she hadn’t joined the Navy.
She was both shamed and confused by her reaction to the offerings of sympathy. They annoyed her. And she resented all the people, too. She was either being a genuine bitch, she decided, or-as she had heard at least a half-dozen people whisper softly to her in-laws-she was still in shock and had not really accepted her loss. That would come later.
She had been annoyed at that, too. They didn’t know what the hell they were talking: about. She had accepted her loss. She knew that John was never coming back, even, for Christ’s sake, in a casket when the war was over. She knew, with a horrible empty feeling in her heart and belly, that she would never again feel John’s muscular arms around her, or have him inside her.
She was angry with him, too-the decisive proof that she was a cold-hearted bitch. He didn’t have to go. He had gotten himself killed over there for the sole reason that he had wanted to go over there, answering some obscene and ludicrous male hunger to go off and kill something . . . without considering at all the price she was going to have to pay.
And their childlessness-a question John had decided for all time by enlisting and getting himself killed-had been a subject of some conversation by those who had come to call to express their sympathy. The males, gathered in the sitting room, drinking, and the women in the kitchen, fussing with all the food, seemed to be divided more or less equally into two groups: those who thought it a pity there wasn’t a baby, preferably a male baby, to carry on the name; and those who considered it a manifestation of God’s wise compassion that he had not left poor Daphne with a fatherless child to add to her burden.
Daphne had started drinking early in the morning, when she awoke in their bed and cried with the knowledge that John would never again share it with her. She had tossed down a shot of straight gin before she’d left their bed for her bath.
And she’d had another little taste just before they’d gotten in the cars to go to St. Paul’s for the service. And she had had three since they had returned from church, timing them carefully. John had once told her that if you took only one drink an hour, you could never get drunk; the body burned off spirits at the rate of a drink an hour. She believed that.
As if she needed another one! There was one more proof that she was a bitch, because she knew that what she really wanted to do was get really drunk. She had been really drunk only three times in her life, the last time the day after she had returned here after watching John’s ship move away from the pier in Melbourne.