I ONLY NEED TWO THINGS MORE: I NEED $250,000 IN GOLD. ACTUALLY, WHAT I NEED IS A CABLE TRANSFER OF THAT MUCH MONEY TO THE BANK OF AUSTRALIA, WHO WILL GIVE MB THE GOLD. THE SOONER THE BETTER.
THE SECOND THING I NEED IS FOR YOU TO GOOSE THE MARINE CORPS PERSONNEL PEOPLE. THEY STILL HAVEN'T TRANSFERRED LT COL STECKER TO ME. COLONEL RICKABEE REPORTS THAT HE'S BEEN GETTING A VERY COLD SHOULDER ABOUT THIS, ALTHOUGH NO EXPLANATION HAS BEEN GIVEN, AND YOUR NORMALLY INCREDIBLY ABLE CAPTAIN HAUGHTON HASN'T BEEN ABLE TO GET THEM OFF THEIR UPHOLSTERED CHAIRS, EITHER. I NEED STECKER FOR THIS. HE'S AN EXPERT IN GUERRILLA OPERATIONS, AND THIS IS CERTAINLY MORE IMPORTANT THAN WHAT THE CORPS WANTS HIM TO DO VIS-A-VIS SETTING UP PROPHYLACTIC FACILITIES AND AMATEUR THEATRICALS. MCCOY GOING ASHORE ALONE WOULD NOT BE NEARLY AS EFFECTIVE AS THE TWO OF THEM GOING TOGETHER.
I EARNESTLY SOLICIT YOUR IMMEDIATE ACTION IN THIS REGARD.
BEST REGARDS,
FLEMING PICKERING, BRIGADIER GENERAL, USMCR
T O P S E C R E T
[ONE]
Supreme Headquarters
South West Pacific Ocean Area
Brisbane, Australia
1715 Hours 16 November 1942
The two Army Military Policemen on duty at the entrance of General MacArthur's headquarters saluted crisply as Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, USMCR, strode briskly through the door.
Pickering returned their salute with a smile. He walked quickly to the Studebaker President with the letters usmc on each side of the hood and the Marine Corps insignia on its front doors, slid into the driver's seat, and started the engine.
Second Lieutenant George F. Hart, USMCR, the aiguillette of his aide-de-camp status flapping up and down as he ran, slowed as he passed through the door long enough to exchange salutes with the MPs and then broke into a trot to the car, as if afraid he would be left behind.
As soon as Hart was in the car, the Studebaker, with a chirp of its tires, backed out of the RESERVED FOR GENERAL OFFICERS parking space, stopped abruptly, and then, with another squeal of tires, drove away.
The two MPs exchanged glances and small smiles. With the exception of the Marine general, every other general and admiral at Supreme Headquarters, Southwest Pacific Ocean Area, had an enlisted driver for his official vehicle. The driver would jump out of the car when he spotted his general or admiral, open the rear door, stand at attention until the general or admiral had climbed in, close the door, and then, after making sure the aide-de-camp was in the backseat, get behind the wheel and chauffeur his august passenger in the ritual dignity to which he was entitled by virtue of his rank.
Not so General Pickering. Not only did he normally drive himself, but more often than not he wasn't accompanied by his aide-de-camp.
There was more. It was reliably rumored that General Douglas MacArthur called General Pickering by his Christian name. Every other officer was ad-dressed by his rank, except for a very few whom El Supremo honored by ad-dressing them by their last names.
This, and a number of other personal idiosyncrasies-General Pickering did not live, for example, in the quarters provided for the very senior officers, but in a rambling frame house he rented near the racetrack-had not, most of the enlisted men knew, endeared General Pickering to his peers, the other gen-eral and flag officers of Supreme Headquarters, SWPOA.
It was therefore perhaps natural for the enlisted men, and many of the jun-ior officers, to look fondly upon General Pickering. Anybody who had most of the big brass pissed off at him couldn't be all bad.
"Goddamn the way these people think," General Pickering said, as he wheeled, entirely too fast, around a corner and headed toward the Closed For The Duration racetrack.
George Hart did not reply. He wasn't sure if he was being spoken to, or whether General Pickering was thinking aloud. But a smile flickered across his lips.
There was a silence of perhaps thirty seconds.
"Fertig was a light colonel when Bataan fell," Pickering said. "Not a goddamned captain."
Lieutenant Hart now deduced that whatever had put General Pickering in his current very pissed-off frame of mind concerned Wendell Fertig. Again, he elected not to reply.
Pickering glanced over at Hart. "That sonofabitch must have known that, George," he said reasonably, "and he should have told me."
"That sonofabitch," Lieutenant Hart correctly suspected, was Brigadier General Charles Willoughby, USA, MacArthur's G-2 (General Staff Officer, Intelligence).
"Yes, Sir," Hart said. "How did you find out?"
"I ran into Phil DePress," Pickering said. "He told me."
Lieutenant Colonel Philip J. "Phil" DePress, who still wore the lapel insignia of the proud, now-vanquished 26th Cavalry-it had been forced to eat its horses before the Philippines fell-had somehow escaped and was now one of MacArthur's staff officers.
Hart met DePress in Washington, three months before, shortly after he went to work for General Pickering. Private George F. Hart, formerly Detec-tive Hart of the St. Louis, Missouri, Police Department, had been recruited from the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, to serve ostensibly as an orderly, but in fact as a bodyguard, to General Pickering, then recuperating from wounds and malaria in the Army's Walter Reed Hospital in Washing-ton.
Colonel DePress, who had been sent to Washington as an officer courier from MacArthur's SWPOA headquarters, showed up in Pickering's hospital room bearing a personal letter from MacArthur congratulating Pickering on his promotion to brigadier general.
At the time, Hart was having more than a little trouble adjusting to the sudden changes in his life. One day he was just one more boot in a basic train-ing platoon. Then he was summoned, late at night, to the Bachelor Officers' Quarters, where a cold-eyed Marine first lieutenant (whom Hart correctly sus-pected was younger than he was) asked him rapid-fire, but pertinent, questions about his law-enforcement background. Apparently satisfied with his answers and with Hart personally, he offered him an assignment as bodyguard to a Gen-eral Pickering, adding that General Pickering didn't want a bodyguard.
Two days later, he was in Washington, still wearing his boot's shaven-head haircut, promoted sergeant, and living not in the Marine barracks, but in General Pickering's apartment in the Foster Lafayette Hotel, whose windows looked out across Pennsylvania Avenue onto the White House.
Information was thrown rapidly at him. For instance, he learned that Gen-eral Pickering was a reservist who had earned the nation's second-highest award for gallantry, the Distinguished Service Cross, as a teenaged enlisted man in France in the First World War, and that, in civilian life, he had been Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of the Pacific and Far East Shipping Corporation.
Hart had also learned that Pickering was not in the ordinary chain of com-mand in the Marine Corps. He reported directly to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. And on a mission to the Pacific for Secretary Knox (not further de-scribed to Hart then), he had been on Guadalcanal, where he contracted ma-laria. Later, aboard a destroyer taking him from the island, he was wounded when the warship was strafed by a Japanese bomber. After her captain was killed, he earned the Silver Star for assuming command of the vessel, despite his wounds.
Hart had heard, of course, of the Marine Raider attack on Makin Island (in which President Roosevelt's son participated); and after what he knew about General Pickering, he was not really surprised to find out that the cold-eyed lieutenant who had "interviewed" him at Parris Island had made the raid. Nor even to find out that the lieutenant-who was in fact three years younger than he was (he was twenty-five)-was the near-legendary "Killer" McCoy.