"I presume your 'confidential verbal orders' forbid you to go to Yenchi'eng?" Macklin asked, when he had finished.
"No, sir, except that Captain Banning said I was to use my own judgment if you wanted me to do something like that."
"Then you have not been forbidden to go to Yenchi'eng? You've taken that decision yourself?" Sessions asked.
"That's about the size of it, sir," McCoy said.
A very self-confident young man, Sessions thought. Highly intelligent. He almost certainly believes in what he's doing. So where does that leave us?
"I presume you have considered, Corporal," Macklin said, icily, "that Lieutenant Sessions's interest in the cannon of the 11th Division is not idle curiosity? That he has been sent here by Headquarters, USMC?"
"Yes, sir," McCoy said. "Captain Banning told me all about that."
"And you are apparently unimpressed by my decision that knowing that for sure is worth whatever risk is entailed in going to Yenchi'eng?" Macklin asked, coldly furious.
"I'm convinced there's no way you could go there without getting caught," McCoy said. "You have to go by road. The first checkpoint you pass, they'll phone ahead to the Kempei-Tai, and that will be it."
"There are ways of getting around checkposts and the Kempei-Tai," Macklin said. "You have done so."
"That was different," McCoy said.
"That was different, sir," Macklin corrected him.
"That was different, sir," McCoy parroted.
"Well, then, perhaps you'd be good enough to tell Mr. Sessions and myself how you would go to Yenchi'eng."
"If I told you that, it would look like I thought you could get away with it, Lieutenant," McCoy said. * "So you refuse even to help us?" Macklin said, incredulously.
McCoy pretended he hadn't heard the question.
"And I don't see any point in taking the risk of going myself," he said. "If they had any German cannon, I'd know about it."
"Corporal," Lieutenant Macklin said, icily sarcastic, "I stand in awe of your self-confidence."
"Yes, sir," McCoy said.
"You will, I hope, tell us what you can about the location of the artillery park?" Lieutenant Sessions asked conversationally. "How we can find it?"
"Aye, aye, sir," McCoy said. "I hope you'll make it clear to Captain Banning, sir, that I told you you're going to get caught?"
"Oh, yes, Corporal McCoy," Lieutenant Macklin said. "You can count on our relating this incident to Captain Banning in detail."
(Two)
Chiehshom, Shantung Province, China
15 May 1941
The three classes of accommodation at the Hotel am See at Chiehshom had (in descending order) been originally intended for Europeans, European servants, and Chinese servants. On McCoy's first couple of trips to and from Peking, all the enlisted Marines had been put up in the rooms set aside for European servants. But on the last couple of trips, like this one, the management had made quite a show of giving the noncoms "European" rooms-small ones, to be sure-in the main wing of the hotel.
McCoy realized that the proprietor had figured out that the sergeant, rather than the officer-in-charge, was the man who really decided (by speeding up or slowing down) where the convoy and its ten-man detail would stop for the night. That meant the sale of ten beds and twenty meals, plus whatever they all had to drink. There wasn't all that much business anyway.
McCoy really liked to stay at the Hotel am See. The food was good and the place was spotless. And even the small rooms they gave the noncoms had enormous bathtubs with apparently limitless clean hot water. He would take a bath at night, a long soak, and then a shower in the morning. It was the only shower he'd had in China that made his skin sting with the pressure. All the others were like being rained on.
After settling into his room, McCoy had hoped to have dinner with Ernie Zimmerman and be gone from the dining room before the officers and the Fellers came down for dinner. That would give him a chance both to avoid Lieutenants Macklin and Sessions and to steel himself for another meeting with them that was scheduled for after dinner. They wanted him to go over their route to and from Yenchi'eng. As pissed as the both of them were with him, that was going to be bad enough without having dinner in the same room (where they didn't think enlisted Marines had any right to be anyway) with them.
But Ernie Zimmerman got hung up somehow getting the other Marines bedded down and was ten minutes late. Zimmerman and McCoy had no sooner sat down in the dining room when the officers and the Fellers showed up. Mrs. Feller said something to the Reverend, and he came over and insisted that they all have dinner together.
McCoy thought the officers would be pissed. Eating in the same room with enlisted Marines was bad enough, but not as bad as having to share a table with them. But they weren't. They were playing spy again, McCoy saw, and the dinner table gave them a stage for the playacting they thought was necessary.
"Mr." Sessions announced that he had asked Lieutenant Macklin if it would be all right if they spent two nights in Chiehshom. instead of the one originally planned. The Christian Missionary Alliance was considering opening another mission in Yenchi'eng, and they wanted to take advantage of being close to it to have a good look at it.
He's a goddamned fool, McCoy thought. They're all goddamned fools. They think they will look more innocent brazening it out, two missionaries and a Marine officer in full uniform simply out for a ride looking for a new place to save souls. It will take the Japs about ten minutes to learn they've left here, and there will be a greeting party waiting for them long before they get anywhere near Yenchi'eng.
The only thing more dangerous than an officer convinced he's doing what duty requires is two officers doing the same thing, two officers and a missionary.
They would be back in Chiehshom by nightfall, Sessions said, and spending the extra day would give Sergeant Zimmerman and his men the chance to go over the vehicles and make sure everything was shipshape.
"You're not going with them, Corporal McCoy," Mrs. Feller asked, "to drive the car?"
"No, ma'am," McCoy said. "I'm not going along."
Ernie Zimmerman, uncomfortable in the presence of the officers, and fully aware there was some friction between them and McCoy, bolted down his food and pushed himself wordlessly away from the table.
McCoy went after him.
"Ernie, jack up one of the trucks and drop the drive shaft," McCoy said.
"What the hell for?" Zimmerman demanded.
"Just do it, Ernie, please," McCoy said.
"What are they up to?" Zimmerman asked.
"You heard it," McCoy said.
"What was that bullshit anyway?"
"Just get somebody to drop a drive shaft, Ernie. And make sure one of the cars is gassed and ready to go," McCoy said. Then he went to his room to mark the route the damned fools should take to Yenchi'eng.
When McCoy met with the three of them in Sessions's room, they made no further attempt to get him to take them to Yenchi'eng. This surprised him until he realized they'd concluded that their brilliant inspiration of brazening it out was going to work, and they didn't need him.
After they came back from successfully spying on the Japs, they'd be in a position to rack his ass with Banning for refusing to go with them. They would have been right all along, and he would have been nothing but an insolent enlisted man with the gall to challenge the wise judgment of his betters.
There was nothing he could do to stop them, of course, and (except for having one of the missionary trucks jacked up and the drive shaft dropped so that it might fool the Kempei-Tai watching the hotel) there was nothing he could do to help them either.
But he set his portable alarm clock for half-past four and went down to the courtyard to see them off. Mrs. Feller was there too, the nipples of her teats sticking up under her bathrobe and her blond hair, now unbraided, hanging down her back.