Banning said. "They said they were under orders to do whatever they could to keep intelligence officers from falling into Japanese hands."
"That makes sense," MacGregor said.
"Not if most of my knowledge is about China, and the Japanese have already taken Shanghai. And not if your regiment has been just about wiped out, as mine was. I think they wanted us out of the Philippines because we were just too much trouble to care for. The real pain in the ass about being blind is that people are very gentle with you, as if a harsh word, or the truth, will make you break into tears."
He raised his coffee cup and took another careful sip.
"You piss on the deck in my head, Banning," Commander MacGregor said, "and I'll have your ass."
Banning smiled.
"Aye, aye, sir," he said, lightly, and then seriously: "Thank you, Captain."
(Two)
The Foster Peachtree Hotel
Atlanta, Georgia
1630 Hours. 6 January 1942
Flagship Dallas, a twenty-one-passenger Douglas DC-3 of Eastern Airlines' Great Silver Fleet, touched down at Atlanta on time, after a 775-mile, four-hour-and-twenty-five-minute flight from New York's LaGuardia Field.
Second Lieutenant Malcolm Pickering, USMCR, was no stranger to aerial transportation. He could not remember- even after some thought-when he had made his first flight, only that he had been a little boy. He could also recall several odd details about that airplane: The seats had been wicker, like lawn furniture, and the skin of the fuselage had been corrugated like a cardboard box.
There had been God only knew how many flights since then.
His grandfather, Andrew Foster, had leapt happily into the aviation age, for it permitted him to move between his hotels far faster than traveling by rail. He crisscrossed the country in commercial airliners, and there was even a company aircraft, a six-passenger, stagger-wing single-engine Beechcraft, which the Old Man had christened Room Service.
Once the Old Man had led the way, Fleming Pickering, Pick's father, had been an easy convert to aerial travel. Pacific Far East Shipping, Inc., used ports all up and down the West Coast, from Vancouver, British Columbia, to San Diego. It made a lot more sense to hop aboard a Northwest DC-3 in San Francisco and fly the eight hundred-odd miles to Vancouver at three mile's a minute than it did to take the train, which traveled at a third of that speed. Very often his father and grandfather had taken him with them.
And Pick and his parents had been aboard one of the very first Pan American flights from San Francisco to Honolulu, an enormous, four-engined Sikorsky seaplane, the China Clipper. But airplanes had just been there, part of the scenery, like the yellow locomotives of the Southern Pacific Railroad and the white steamships of Pacific Far East Shipping, Inc. It had never entered his mind that he would personally fly an airplane, any more than he would have thought about climbing into the cab of a locomotive, or marching onto the bridge of the Pacific Conqueror and giving orders.
There were people who did that sort of thing, highly respected, well-paid professionals. But he wasn't going to be one of them. He had known from the time he had first thought of things like that that he was going to follow in the Old Man's footsteps into the hotel business, rather than in his father's into the shipping business.
By the time he was in his third year at Harvard, he got around to wondering if he hadn't hurt his father's feelings, perhaps deeply, by avoiding the shipping business. But then it had been too late. He'd gone to work for Foster Hotels at twelve, in a starched white jacket stripping tables for thirty-five cents an hour and whatever the waiter had chosen to pay him (usually a nickel a table for a party of four) out of his tips. Before he was a junior at Harvard, Pickering had been a salad chef, a fry cook, a bellman, an elevator operator, a bartender, a broiler chef, a storekeeper, a night bookkeeper, a waiter, and an assistant manager. He had spent the summer between his junior and senior years in six different Foster Hotels, filling in for vacationing bell captains.
His motive for that had been pure and simple avarice. A bell captain took home a hell of a lot more money than everybody in a hotel hierarchy but the top executives. It was not corporate benevolence; bell captains earned every nickel they made. And it was a position of prestige within the hierarchy, especially within Foster Hotels Corporation, where the Old Man devoutly believed that bell captains made more of an impression on guests than any other individual on the staff, impressions that would either draw them back again or send them to Hilton or Sheraton.
He had been proud that the Old Man had okayed his working as a bell captain… and he had driven to Cambridge that fall in an all-paid-for black 1941 Cadillac convertible.
That had been the last of the easy money. From the day of his graduation until he'd gone off to the Marine Corps, Pick Pickering had been carried on the payroll of the Andrew Foster Hotel, San Francisco, as a supernumerary assistant manager. And he'd been paid accordingly, which came out to a hell of a lot less than he'd made as a bell captain. What he'd really been doing was learning what it was like to run a chain of luxury hotels from the executive suite.
He's spent a lot of time traveling with the Old Man, and a lot of that in airliners or the Room Service, but he had paid no more attention to the way those airplanes had worked than he had to what made the wheels go around on a locomotive.
That was now all changed. A Marine brigadier general, a pilot, who had been in the trenches in France as an enlisted man with Corporal Fleming Pickering, USMC, had saved his old buddy's son from a Marine Corps career as a club officer by arranging to have him sent to flight school.
As the passengers were escorted from the terminal at LaGuardia Field to board Flagship Dallas, Second Lieutenant Malcolm Pickering, USMCR, stepped out of the line and took a good close look upward at the engine mounted on the wing, then studied the wing itself. For the first time he noticed that the front of the wing was made out of rubber (and he wondered what that was for), and that the thin back part of the wing was movable, and that on the back part of the part that moved there was another part that moved. And that there were little lengths of what looked like clothesline attached to the wing.
A stewardess finally went to him, took his arm, and loaded him aboard, eyeing him suspiciously.
He did not have his usual scotch and soda when they were airborne. The stewardess seemed relieved. He sat in his single aisle seat and watched the movable parts of the wing move, and tried to reason what function they performed.
They flew above the clouds. His previous reaction to a cloud cover, viewed from above, had been "How pretty! It looks like cotton wool."
He now wondered for the first time how the pilot knew when it was time to fly back down through the cloud cover; how he knew, specifically, when Atlanta was going to be down there, since obviously he couldn't see it.
Before today, before he was en route to Florida to learn how to fly airplanes himself, he would have superficially reasoned that pilots flew airplanes the way masters of ships navigated across the seas. They used a compass to give them the direction, and clocks (chronometers) to let them know how long they had been moving. If they knew how fast they were going, how much time they were taking, and in what direction, they could compute where they were.
Now he saw the differences, and they were enormous and baffling. The most significant of these was that a ship moved only across the surface of the water, whereas an airplane moved up and down in the air as well as horizontally. And if things were going well, a ship moved at about fifteen miles an hour; but an airplane-the airplane he was now on-moved something like twelve times that fast. And if it was lost, an airplane could not simply stop where it was, drop its anchor, sound its foghorn, and wait for the fog to clear.