The Fighting Agents Part 23

The five-inch fired five rounds; one fell nowhere near the targets, but the other four went where they were supposed to go. Meanwhile, the 40mm and 20mm rapid-firing cannon fired continuously, the 20mm in a rapid staccato, the 40mm in a slower, more measured cadence. The targets were obscured by dust and smoke.

Commander Lennox counted the five-inch rounds. The moment he saw the muzzle flash of the fifth round, without taking his eyes from his binoculars, he ordered, "Cease fire, secure the guns, clear the decks."

The talker repeated the orders. The sailors at the guns now prepared them for submersion. The crews of the rapid-firing cannon began to pa.s.s unfired ammunition back into the hull, and then they all went below.

"Sir," the talker said, "chief of the boat reports gun crews secure from firing."

"Dive!" the captain ordered.

"Dive!" the talker said. "Dive!"

A Klaxon sounded. The exec, the talker, and finally the captain went through the hatch and secured it after them. By then, the decks were already awash.

"Take her to a hundred and fifty feet," Commander Lennox ordered.

"One fifty feet, aye," Lt. Rutherford repeated.

"What have we got, Helmsman?" Commander Lennox asked a minute later.

"Sir, we are steering two six five degrees. . . ." The helmsman paused and waited until the needle on the depth gauge was where it was supposed to be, and then went on, "at one five zero feet, sir."

"Keep her so," Commander Lennox ordered, and then he stepped to the public address system again.

"This is the captain speaking," he said formally. "For a bunch of Kansas hayseeds and Brooklyn thugs, that wasn't half bad. And the chief of the boat would have told me by now if somebody had gone over the side."

Chuckles and laughter ran through the boat.

Leaving the microphone open, Commander Lennox said, "Take her up, make turns for sixteen knots, and set us on a course for Pearl Harbor."

He let the spring-loaded microphone switch go and motioned for the chief of the boat to come to him.

"Chief," Commander Lennox said, "I would not be too upset, when you check the guns, if you were to find something that would take, say, thirty-six hours to fix."

"Aye, aye, Sir," the chief of the boat said.

"And, of course, if the men aren't needed to help with the repair, there's no reason I can see why they shouldn't be given liberty."

"Aye, aye, Sir," the chief of the boat said.

"Surface, surface!" Lt. Rutherford ordered.

3.

HEADQUARTERS, U.S. FORCES IN THE PHILIPPINES MISAMIS OCCIDENTAL PROVINCE, MINDANAO 14 FEBRUARY 1943.

They had worked out a cipher: On the fifth of February KSF had sent a message, as opposed to responding to one of Fertig's messages. So far, all that establis.h.i.+ng a radio link with the United States had done was to enable Fertig to get word to his wife that he was alive and not in a j.a.panese POW camp.

KSF FOR MFS NAMES OF TOWN AND STATE WHERE PATRICIA LIVES WILL BE USED AS CODE PHRASES FOR DOUBLE TRANSPOSITION STOP SEND TEST MESSAGE IMMEDIATELY KSF BY.

Patricia, Fertig's daughter, was living with her mother in Golden, Colorado.

Using that as the basis for a rudimentary double transposition code, Fertig's homemade transmitter sent a meaningless phrase to KSF. Receipt of the message was acknowledged, but the reply, in the new code was only: KSF FOR MFS NO TRAFFIC FOR YOU AT THIS TIME KSF OUT.

Two days later, on February 11, 1943, there had been another message for MFS: YOUR STATION DESIGNATED WYZB REPEAT WYZB STOP ALL REPEAT ALL FUTURE TRAFFIC WILL BE WITH KAZ REPEAT KAZ STOP KAZ HAS FILE OF ALL PAST TRAFFIC KSF OUT.

KAZ was the call sign of General Douglas MacArthur's General Headquarters, Southwest Pacific Command, in Australia. They heard KAZ on the air all the time, but had been unable to get KAZ to respond to their calls.

Now things might be different. But several hours of calls to KAZ had produced no response whatever. There were several possible explanations for that, the most likely that radiations from Gerardo Almendres's homemade transmitter were for some reason unable to reach Australia. Fertig did not permit himself to dwell on the possibility that MacArthur did not want to talk to him.

While Fertig did not personally know MacArthur, he had a number of friends who did. To a man, they reported that Douglas MacArthur, onetime Army Chief of Staff, later Marshal of the Philippine Army, and now once again in U.S. Army uniform, had an ego on a par with, say, Charlemagne's.

While Fertig did not believe that the fall of the Philippines was MacArthur's fault-indeed, he had acquired a deep respect for MacArthur's military ability; MacArthur's delaying actions with his limited resources had been undeniably brilliant-he suspected that MacArthur was personally shamed by his defeat.

If that were the case, that shame might be deepened by proof that not all American officers and Philippine forces had hoisted the white flag and marched docilely into j.a.panese captivity.

During his brief service as an officer, Fertig had quickly learned an old soldier's requisitioning trick. If you need something for one hundred men, and you want to be sure you get it, you requisition a quant.i.ty sufficient for two hundred. Or four hundred. Then, when the supply authorities cut your requisition by fifty percent, or seventy-five percent, you still wind up with what you really need.

Fertig had been "generous" in his communications with KSF with regard to his estimated strength report for the troop strength of the U.S. force in the Philippines. Not dishonest, just generous. He had elected to take the word of Philippine army officers who had not elected to surrender (putting his own serious doubts aside), when they told him how many men they had at their disposal, and how anxious-providing he could supply and pay them-they were to put themselves and their men under the command of Brigadier General Wendell W. Fertig and the U.S. forces in the Philippines.

If they told him, for example, that they had five hundred troops just waiting for the arms and food that would permit them to engage the j.a.panese, he took them at their word, even if it looked to him as if the five-hundred-man force consisted of a couple of officers and maybe sixty Philippine Scouts.

He had added up all the Philippine forces he was told were anxious to place themselves under his command and come up with a figure just in excess of six thousand officers and men.

His "requisitions" for arms and food and gold coins had been based on this strength figure.

MacArthur, according to the radio message from San Francisco, had been made aware of this troop strength.

Fertig wondered how Douglas MacArthur was going to react to learning that, after he had reported his forces had fought to the last man and the last bullet, there were six thousand troops under a brigadier general still fighting on Mindanao.

When Second Lieutenant (formerly Private) Robert Ball of USFIP came to report that MacArthur (or at least KAZ, his radio station) was finally being heard from, Brigadier General Fertig, a Thompson submachine gun beside him, was drinking a cup of tea on the shaded veranda of his combined headquarters and quarters. The tea was Lipton's. It had been grown in the Far East, sent to the United States, blended, put in tea bags, and then sent back to the Far East. How it had pa.s.sed into the hands of the Moro tribal chief who had given it to Fertig, Fertig didn't know.

All he knew was that Lipton was putting out a better product than he had previously suspected. The tea bag that had produced the tea he was now drinking was on its fourth brewing cycle. (Brew, dry, brew again, dry, et cetera.) He knew this because he was a methodical man, and each time he drenched the tea bag in boiling water, he tore one of the corners of the tea-bag-tag off. The tea-bag-tag drying on the bamboo railing beside him was cornerless.

He felt that it behooved him to conceal from his subordinate staff the excitement he felt now that MacArthur was finally being heard from.

"Thank you, Ball," he said, with as much savoir-faire as he could muster. "How long do you think it will take Captain Buchanan to decrypt the message?"

"About thirty minutes, Sir," Ball said.

"Fine," Fertig said. "I expect to be here in half an hour, when Captain Buchanan is finished."

Forty-five minutes later, Captain Horace Buchanan handed Brigadier General Fertig the two sheets of paper on which he had neatly lettered (Signal Section, HQ, USFIP, did not possess a typewriter) the decrypted message. From the look on Buchanan's face-disappointment and embarra.s.sment-Fertig knew that there was little good news in the radio message.

"Thank you," Fertig said, and read the message:

KAZ FOR MFS.

ONE LT COL WENDELL W. FERTIG CORPS OF.

ENGINEERS US ARMY RESERVE DETAILED INFANTRY.

TWO COLONEL MARCARIO PERALTA PHILIPPINE.

SCOUTS DESIGNATED MILITARY GUERRILLA CHIEF OF.

TEMPORARILY OCCUPIED ENEMY TERRITORY.

THREE THE ISSUANCE OF MILITARY SCRIP IS.

EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN REPEAT EXPRESSLY.

FORBIDDEN.

FOUR COMMAND OF GUERRILLA FORCES WILL BE.

EXECUTED ONLY BY OFFICERS PRESENTLY IN DIRECT.

COMMAND OF SAME.

FIVE THIS HEADQUARTERS WILL ENTERTAIN.

REQUISITIONS FOR SMALL IN SIZE URGENTLY.

NEEDED EQUIPMENT ONLY.

BY COMMAND OF GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR.

COMMANDER IN CHIEF SOUTHWEST PACIFIC.

COMMAND.

WILLOUGHBY BRIGADIER GENERAL USA.

Fertig looked up and met Buchanan's eyes.

"I took out the 'stops' and stuff, General," Buchanan said.

There had been a faint hesitation, Fertig noticed, before Buchanan had called him "General."

It wasn't only a little bad news, it was all bad news.

As far as MacArthur was concerned, he was a reserve lieutenant colonel in the Corps of Engineers, not a brigadier general in command of U.S. forces in the Philippines.

Colonel Marcario Peralta was "military guerrilla chief of temporarily occupied enemy territory." Fertig did know Peralta. Peralta had been a successful lawyer in Manila before the war. The last Fertig had heard, just before the surrender, Peralta had been a major. Now he was a colonel, which meant that Fertig was supposed to be subordinate to him.

That could explain why MacArthur had pointedly reminded him that he was a lowly lieutenant colonel.

There was another possibility: If he had not promoted himself, and thus offended MacArthur's sense of the military proprieties, it was possible (now that he thought of it, even likely) that he would have been promoted to colonel and named "military guerrilla chief of temporarily occupied enemy territory."

The really worrisome paragraph was the one about forbidding him to issue scrip. He'd been issuing the scrip, signing each one-, five-, and ten-dollar bill himself; and the crude money had been accepted by the Filipinos; they had taken him at his word that, when the war was over and the j.a.panese had been driven from the Philippines, it would be redeemed at face value.

And since MacArthur obviously was not about to send him gold, the scrip he was "expressly forbidden repeat expressly forbidden" to issue was the only way he had to pay the troops and to buy whatever the natives were willing to sell.

That was even more important than his rank, or Colonel Peralta's appointment as "military guerrilla chief." Peralta was on the island of Panay. There was little or no chance that he would try to exercise command over Fertig. Peralta was no fool; he knew that Fertig would simply ignore him.

"Captain Buchanan," Fertig said, "I presume that no one but you has seen the contents of this message?"

"No, Sir."

"It is herewith cla.s.sified Top Secret," Fertig said, and put a match to it. "No one else is to be made privy to its contents."

"Yes, Sir."

"You may tell Lieutenant Ball and whomever else you wish," Fertig said, "that the message dealt with our reinforcement in the future."

"Yes, Sir," Buchanan said. "Sir, what do I call you?"

"That would seem, Captain Buchanan," Fertig said, looking at him, "to be entirely up to you."

There was a just-perceptible hesitation before Buchanan spoke. Then he said, "Will there be a reply, General Fertig?"

"No, no reply," Fertig said. "That will be all, Captain, thank you."

"Permission to withdraw, General?"

"Granted," Fertig said. Then, suddenly, "Yes, there will be a reply, Captain." Fifteen minutes later, MFS went on the air:

MFS FOR KAZ.

PERSONAL FOR GENERAL MACARTHUR.

REFERENCE PARA FIVE YOUR VALENTINES DAY.

MESSAGE STOP URGENTLY REQUEST VIA FIRST.