And then Martha had started to hang around with him and his friends. The polite fiction was that Martha took comfort from the company of the other officers' wives. That wasn't true. Martha took comfort from the officers, and from Captain James L. Carstairs, USMC, in particular.
This had not escaped the attention of Admiral Sayre, who had spoken to Carstairs about it: "Mrs. Sayre and I appreciate the time and consideration you're giving Martha. She needs a friend right now. someone she can trust when she is so vulnerable, emotionally."
Carstairs was aware then that the admiral might well mean exactly what he said. But he also thought that the admiral might well be saying, "It would not especially displease Mrs. Sayre and myself if something developed between the two of you," or the reverse of that: "I'm sure that a bright young man like you, having received a word to the wise, knows what somebody like me could and would do to you if I ever found out you had taken advantage of my widowed daughter's emotional vulnerability to get into her pants."
Carstairs had not laid a hand on Martha Sayre Culhane. At first it had been unthinkable. He was, after all, a Marine officer, and she was the widow of a brother officer. But lately he had become very much aware of the significant difference between the words wife and widow, and he had been equally aware of her beauty. It was too soon, of course, for him to make any kind of a move. But eventually, inevitably, he had concluded (wondering if it made him some kind of a sonofabitch), time would put a scar on her wound, and nature would take over again, and there would be room in her life for a man.
Martha's behavior toward Lieutenant Pickering-that handsome, rich sonofabitch-made him now realize that even if she didn't know it, there was already a thick layer of scar tissue covering her wound.
Pickering slid off his bar stool. For a moment Martha held his hand, and then, as if she realized what she was doing, quickly let go of it.
Captain Carstairs stepped out of the way, and then followed the two of them into the dining room.
Chapter Eleven
(One)
Machine Gun Range #2 Camp Elliott, California 1030 Hours, 19 January 1942
The pickup truck was a prewar Chevrolet. It had a glossy paint job, and on each door a representation of the Marine Corps insignia was painted above the neatly painted letters "USMC" It even had chrome hubcaps.
The pickup trucks issued currently (and for several months before the war started) were painted with a flat Marine-green paint; and none of these had chrome hubcaps or the Marine emblem on the door. They did have USMC on the door, but that had been applied with a stencil, using black paint.
The driver of the pickup, seen up close, was even more unusual than the truck. He was a thin-even gaunt-man not quite forty-two years old. He was dressed in dungarees; and the letters USMC and a crude representation of the Marine Corps insignia had been stenciled in black paint on the dungaree jacket. The jacket was unpressed, and the silver oak leaves of a lieutenant colonel were half-hidden in the folds of the collar.
The lieutenant colonel parked the Chevrolet in line with the other vehicles-an ambulance, two other pickups, and two of the recently issued and still not yet common trucks, 1/4-ton, 4 x 4, General Purpose, called "Jeeps"-and got out. There were a captain, several lieutenants, and four noncoms standing in the shade of a small frame building, an obviously newly erected range house.
It was two story. The second story was an observation platform, only half framed-in. A primitive flagpole of two-by-fours rose above the observation platform. Flying from this was a red "firing in progress" pennant.
There were what the lieutenant colonel judged to be two companies of infantry (somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred men) sitting on the ground twenty-five yards away from the firing line. It was already getting hot, and the sun was shining brightly. Shortly, the lieutenant colonel decided, they would grow uncomfortable.
The captain glanced at the newcomer and looked away. He had seen the man's face, and guessed his age, and concluded that he was probably a gunnery sergeant. It did not enter the captain's mind that the newcomer might be an officer, much less a lieutenant colonel. Officers were provided with drivers, and field-grade officers were customarily provided with Ford or Chevrolet staff cars.
The captain's ignorance was not surprising. This was the first time the lieutenant colonel had come to Machine Gun Range #2. He walked to the front of the pickup, leaned casually against the hood, studied the setup carefully.
He saw that there were twelve machine-gun positions, each constructed more or less as a machine-gun position would be set up in a tactical situation. That is to say, a low semicircle of sandbags had been erected at each position, in the center of which sat a Browning machine gun, placed so that it would fire over the sandbags.
Three different types of machine gun had been set up. Each of the four sandbag positions on the right of the firing line held a Browning Model 1919A4.30-caliber weapon. This version of the Browning was "air cooled," with a perforated jacket on me outside of its barrel intended to dissipate the heat generated by bullets passing through the barrel. The gun was mounted on a low tripod, a single, short leg forward, and two longer legs, forming a V, to the rear. There was a steel rod between the two rearward legs. Elevation of the weapon was controlled by a threaded rod connected to and rising upward from the steel rod to the rear action of the weapon. Traverse of the weapon was limited by the length of the steel rod connecting the two rear legs of the tripod.
Four M1917A1.30-caliber "water-cooled" Brownings had been set up in the center four firing positions. A jacket through which water was passed encased the barrel of the ' 17Als. And the mounting, otherwise identical to that of the '19A4s, was different in one important respect: Traverse of the weapon was restricted only by the length of the hose connecting the water jacket to the water reservoir. In theory, the ' 17A1 could be fired through 360 degrees. Elevation was controlled by curved steel plates connected to the machine gun itself and the top of the tripod.
The four firing positions on the left of the firing line each held an M2 Browning. This was the.50-caliber (Caliber is expressed in decimal portions of an inch. For example, the 50-caliber machine gun projectile has a diameter of one-half inch) version of the Browning. And it was essentially an enlargement of the.30-caliber '19A4. The perforated steel cooling device on the barrel, however, ran only a short distance out from the receiver. The quick-replaceable barrel was fitted with a handle, for ease in handling; the cocking lever was enlarged and fitted with a wooden handle; and the "pistol grip" behind the trigger of the ' 19A4 was replaced with a dual wooden-handled trigger mechanism.
The lieutenant colonel found nothing wrong with the placement of the machine guns. And he saw why the weapons were silent; there was some sort of trouble with one of the 1917Als. He saw an armorer on his knees with the '17A1 in pieces before him. He was being watched by its fascinated two-man crew.
The range was new, and consequently primitive. There was neither a target pit (a below-ground trench at the targets) or a berm (a mound of earth used as a bullet trap) behind the targets. The targets were constructed of two-by-fours, with target cloth stretched between them. The targets themselves were approximately life-size silhouettes of the human torso, rather than the expected bull's-eye targets.
The bullets fired from the machine guns impacted on low, sandy hills the lieutenant colonel judged to be a mile and a half from the firing line. He presumed that whoever had laid out the range was perfectly familiar with the ballistics of.30- and.50-caliber machine-gun projectiles and that a large area behind the hills had been declared an impact area and thus Off Limits.