They drove first to Peking and then to Tientsin, another seaport, where there was a detachment of the 4th Marines, usually stopping over there for two days, and then back to Peking, and then back to Shanghai. Some of the drivers hated getting the duty, because it took them away from the good life in Shang-hai. But some liked it, because it was a change of scenery, or women, or both.
Usually Everly was pleased when his name came up on the roster, because it meant a change of scenery. Not women. If something came up, he wasn't going to kick it out of bed, but he thought there was not much point in chasing strange females; you never knew what you might catch, and it was expensive. He was by nature, or perhaps by training, frugal. He had no money in his pock-ets from the time he became a Ward Of The State until he got his first pay as a Marine; and that left a painful memory.
There was always an officer in charge of the convoys, changing from con-voy to convoy, because that was the way things were in The Corps; when there were supplies involved, you had to have an officer in charge. But the officers were ordinarily wise enough to just ride along, leaving the actual running of the convoy to Sergeant Zimmerman.
Zimmerman, who was short, stocky, and phlegmatic, had been in China for six years. He had a Chinese woman, who had borne him three children, and he fully intended to spend the rest of his time in The Corps in China, then retire there and open a bar or something.
Zimmerman was competent and he was fair, and Everly figured him out- and how to deal with him-pretty quick: Zimmerman did what he was told without question and to the best of his ability, and he expected people who worked for him to do the same thing. When Sergeant Zimmerman told PFC Everly to do something, Everly did it, promptly, and to the best of his ability. They got along. On the convoys, they came to spend time together, since nei-ther was interested in chasing women, gambling, or getting shitfaced.
In the spring of 1941, things changed.
A new face appeared when the drivers and assistant drivers were gathered together for a convoy to Peking and Tientsin. Corporal Kenneth R. McCoy Everly knew him only by sight and reputation. McCoy had quite a reputation. PFC McCoy had become notorious, and in circumstances not unlike Ev-erly 's trouble with the mean drunk sonofabitch off the Pennsylvania. In McCoy's case, it was Italian Marines, four of them, who ganged up on him one night when he was on his way back to the barracks.
Killing a couple of Italian Marines was a bigger deal than cutting and stomping on the hand of a Marine sergeant. And when Everly heard they were going to court-martial McCoy, he thought McCoy was almost surely going where he had almost gone, to the Portsmouth Naval Prison.
It wasn't a question of guilt or innocence, Everly reasoned, but rather what was more important: China Marine PFCs were expendable. When one caused trouble-and creating a diplomatic incident was far worse than getting in a knife fight with a sergeant-they got rid of him as quickly as possible.
But that didn't happen. McCoy beat the court-martial. And the next thing you knew, he was promoted to corporal and transferred out of "D" Company to work in Regimental Headquarters. McCoy had just completed his first hitch in The Corps, and people just didn't get themselves promoted to corporal after just completing their first hitch.
The scuttlebutt went around that McCoy was really working for Captain Edward Banning, the 4th Marines' S-2 Officer, in Intelligence. The scuttlebutt was that McCoy had been in Intelligence all along.
Making sure that it didn't look like he was putting his nose in where it didn't belong, Everly watched McCoy pretty carefully on that first run to Pe-king. He noticed a couple of things. For one thing, McCoy not only spoke Chi-nese like a Chinaman, but had a couple of Japanese military manuals in his rucksack that he obviously could read.
By the time they made three convoy trips to Peking, it was pretty clear to Everly that the officers in charge had gotten the word to do what Sergeant Zim-merman said to do, and that Zimmerman was getting that word from Corporal McCoy.
It was also pretty clear that what McCoy was doing on the convoys was running around spying on the Japanese, identifying units, getting their strength, seeing what kind of weapons they had, and, by spending a lot of time in whorehouses, picking up from the Chinese whores what they had heard from their Japanese customers.
And then, after one trip to Peking, right after they got back to Shanghai, Sergeant Zimmerman and Corporal McCoy disappeared. The scuttlebutt was that they got shipped home, but nobody knew for sure what had happened.
And then, the week after they disappeared, Captain Banning sent for Ev-erly and told him McCoy and Zimmerman had been ordered home. He also told him what McCoy had been doing for him, and that both McCoy and Zim-merman had spoken highly of him. Then he asked him if he would be inter-ested in volunteering to do the same thing.
So Everly volunteered, guessing correctly that Banning was going to give him a lot more expense money than he was going to have to spend, and that it was a good way to make corporal ahead of time. And for a couple of months, he did just that; he made corporal, and managed to put aside nearly a thousand dollars in expense money.
That business had ended when the decision was made to get the 4th Ma-rines and the Navy's Yangtze River Patrol out of China. Captain Banning was assigned to the Advance Party and flown out of Shanghai to the Philippines; and Everly was sent back to the motor pool.
Just before he left, Captain Banning married his Russian girlfriend, which raised him even higher in Everly's opinion. When things got a little tough, a lot of Americans, officers and enlisted and civilians, had just cut their girl-friends-Chinese and Russian-loose to make out as best they could by them-selves. Everly couldn't leave Soo Ling to fend for herself, so he gave her all the money he had saved up since he was in China, and the money he'd made work-ing for Banning. Then he told her to check on Mrs. Banning when the Japs came, and if she needed help, to do what she could for her and then go home.
He didn't know what happened to Soo Ling or Captain Banning's wife, either; but he did know what happened to Captain Banning, once he got to the Philippines. Just about as soon as the Marines came under fire, he was too close to an incoming round, and the concussion blinded him, and he wasn't even able to fight.
For a while he was in the hospital, first on Luzon, then here in the Corregidor Hospital tunnel; and then they sent him and some other blind guys out on a submarine.
And Percy Lewis Everly was promoted to sergeant and given the two-gun.30 caliber water-cooled Browning machine-gun section at Kindley Field.
Where, he was convinced, one of several things was going to happen: Once Bataan fell, and the Japanese could bring their artillery to bear on the island, he was going to get killed by Japanese artillery. Or, in the unlikely event that didn't happen, he was going to get killed when the Japanese landed on Corregidor. Or, if he didn't get killed by Japanese artillery, or by Japanese Ma-rine infantry when they landed on Corregidor, he was going to wind up a Japa-nese prisoner.
He had seen enough of the Japanese in China to know how they treated prisoners. You were almost better off dead than to be a prisoner of the Japs. Everly had seen with his own eyes the Japs using Chinese prisoners for bayo-net practice.
The one thing Everly really couldn't figure out was why people-especially senior noncoms and officers-kept talking about "The Aid." "The Aid" could be any number of things-for example, a fleet of B-17 bombers suddenly appearing to bomb the Japs off Bataan and out of the Philippines. Or a fleet of Navy ships, carrying divisions of fully equipped soldiers from the States, to run the Japanese off Bataan and out of the Philippines. Or even a small convoy of transports, bringing food and medicine.