And there weren’t very many people in the whole wide world who could do that even once.
As the white hats rushed up to disengage the cable, he quickly went through the "Stopping the Engine" checklist, again from memory.
By the time the propeller stopped turning and he had shut off the ignition, battery, and fuel selector switches, a plane captain was there to help him get out of the cockpit. And he saw Major Verne J. McCaul, USMC, Commanding Officer of VMF-221, standing on the deck, smiling at him. VMF-221, equipped with fourteen F2A-3 Brewster Buffalos, was stationed aboard the Saratoga. Galloway had known him for some time, liked him, and was glad to see him.
Charley jumped off the wing root and walked to him. "I am delighted," said Major McCaul, who was thirty-five and looked younger, "nay, overjoyed to see you."
Galloway looked at him suspiciously.
"The odds were four to one you’d never make it out here," McCaul said. "I took a hundred bucks’ worth at those odds, twenty-five of them for you."
"You knew I was coming?"
"There was a radio from Pearl about an hour ago," McCaul said.
Apparently it didn’t say "arrest on sight," or there would be a Marine with irons waiting for me.
"Well, that certainly was very nice of you, Sir," Galloway said, not absolutely sure that McCaul wasn’t pulling his leg.
Proof that he was not came when McCaul handed him five twenty-dollar bills.
It then occurred to him that he had, literally, jumped from the frying pan into the fire. He had made it this far. But the next stop was Wake Island. The odds, bullshit aside, that Wake could be held against the Japanese seemed pretty remote. He had no good reason to presume that he would be any better a pilot, or any luckier, than the pilots of VFM-211 on Wake who had already been shot down.
Then he remembered what Big Steve Oblensky had once told him. The function of Marines was to stop bullets for civilians; that’s what they were really paying you for.
"The Captain wants to see you after you’re cleaned up," Major McCaul said. "In the meantime, I’m sorry to have to tell you, you’re to consider yourself under arrest."
"Am I in trouble that deep, Major?"
"I’m afraid so, Charley. The Navy’s really pissed," Major McCaul said. "I’ll do what I can for you, but ... they’re really pissed."
"Oh, hell," Charley said. And then, not too convincingly, he smiled. "Well, what the hell, Major. What can they do to me? Send me to Wake Island?"
Chapter Two
(One)
Washington, D.C.
19 December 1941
As his taxi drove past the White House, Fleming Pickering, a tall, handsome, superbly tailored man in his early forties, noticed steel-helmeted soldiers, armed with rifles, bayonets fixed, guarding the gates.
He wondered if they were really necessary. Was there a real threat to the security of either the President or the building itself? Or were these guards being used for a little domestic propaganda, a symbol that the nation had been at war for not quite two weeks, and that the White House was now the headquarters of the Commander in Chief?
Certainly, he reasoned, even before what the President had so eloquently dubbed "a day that will live in infamy," the Secret Service and the White House police must have had contingency plans to protect the President in case of war. These would have called for more sophisticated measures than the posting of a corporal’s guard of riflemen at the White House gates.
Fleming Pickering, Chairman of the Board of the Pacific and Far Eastern Shipping Corporation, was not an admirer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States. This was not to say that he did not respect him. Roosevelt was, he acknowledged, both a brilliant man and a consummate master of the art of molding public opinion.
Roosevelt had managed to garner public support for policies-Lend-Lease in particular-that were, in Pickering’s judgment, not only disastrous and probably illegal, but which had, in the end, on the day of infamy, brought the United States into a war it probably could have stayed out of, and which it was pathetically ill-prepared to fight.
Fleming Pickering was considerably more aware than most Americans of what an absolute disaster Pearl Harbor had been. He and his wife had been in Honolulu when the Japanese struck. They had witnessed the burning and sinking battleships at the Navy Base, and the twisted, smoldering carnage at Hickam Field.
Despite his personal misgivings about Roosevelt, less than an hour after the last Japanese aircraft had left, as he watched the rescue and salvage operations, he had understood that the time to protest and oppose the President had passed, that it was clearly his-and everyone’s-duty to rally around the Commander in Chief and make what contribution he could to the war effort.
Fleming Pickering had come to Washington to offer his services.
He had two additional thoughts as the taxi drove down Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House.
First, a feeling of sympathy for the soldiers standing there in the freezing cold in their steel helmets. A tin pot is a miserable sonofabitch to have to wear when it’s cold and snowing and the wind is blowing. He knew that from experience. Corporal Fleming Pickering, USMC, had worn one in the trenches in France in 1918.
And second, that with a little bit of luck, when the American people learned the hard way what that sonofabitch in the White House had gotten them into, he could be voted out of office in 1944. If there was still something called the United States of America in 1944.
The taxi, a DeSoto sedan painted yellow, turned off Pennsylvania Avenue, made a sharp U-turn, and pulled to the curb before the marquee of the Foster Lafayette Hotel. A doorman in a heavy overcoat liberally adorned with golden cords trotted out from the protection of his glass-walled guard post and pulled open the door.
"Well, hello, Mr. Pickering," he said, with a genuine smile. "It’s nice to see you, Sir."
"Hello, Ken," Pickering said, offering his hand. "What do you think of the weather?"
Once out of the cab, he turned and handed the driver several dollar bills, indicating with his hand that he didn’t want any change, and then walked quickly into the hotel and across the lobby to the reception desk.
There was a line, and he took his place in it. Four people were ahead of him. Finally it was his turn.
"May I help you, Sir?" the desk clerk asked, making it immediately plain to Fleming Pickering that the clerk had no idea who he was.
"My name is Fleming Pickering," he said. "I need a place to stay for a couple of days, maybe a week."
"Have you a reservation, Sir?"
Pickering shook his head. The desk clerk raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
"Without a reservation, Sir . . ."
"Is Mr. Telford in the house?"
"Why, yes, Sir, I believe he is."
"I wonder if you could tell him I’m here, please?"
Max Telford, resident manager of the Foster Lafayette Hotel, a short, pudgy, balding man wearing a frock coat, striped trousers, and a wing collar, appeared a moment later.
"We didn’t expect you, Mr. Pickering," he said, offering his hand. "But you’re very welcome, nonetheless."