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    Semper Fi
    Semper Fi
    Semper Fi
    Ebook495 pages7 hours

    Semper Fi

    By W.E.B. Griffin

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    The New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Brotherhood of War saga brings to life the men of the Marine Corps in the first Novel of the Corps.

    From Shanghai to Wake Island, the Corps was America’s first line of defense as the winds of war exploded into the devastating surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Now, this elite group of courageous, honorable men steel themselves for battle, prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice...
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
    Release dateNov 1, 1986
    ISBN9781440634925
    Semper Fi
    Author

    W.E.B. Griffin

    W.E.B. Griffin is the author of six bestselling series—and now Clandestine Operations.   William E. Butterworth IV has worked closely with his father for more than a decade, and is the coauthor with him of many books, most recently Hazardous Duty and Top Secret.  

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    Reviews for Semper Fi

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    • 5/5
      Griffin is a master storyteller. He grabs your interest from the first page and never let's go. His characters are real and you come to love the heroes and hate the villains. This is at least the fourth time I have started reading the series. I highly recommend you become acquainted with this author. You will not be disappointed.
    • 5/5
      These books belonged to my dad. Mom gave them to me after he passed several years ago. I have a strong interest in history, particularly military history. These books are an interesting jaunt through the WWII years. I have read the entire Corps series and half the Honor Bound series and have enjoyed them all.
    • 4/5
      I've been wanting to read this series for a while now.....it was worth the wait. This follows the trials of Kenneth "Killer" McCoy as he progresses from a Marine corporal in China spying on Japanese occupation to a commissioned lieutenant in D.C. during the time right before the invasion of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Along the way he makes friends, mistakes, and meets a few women. A hard-nosed look at the Marine Corps during WWII, and I am looking forward to the next few in this series.

    Book preview

    Semper Fi - W.E.B. Griffin

    PREFACE

    In 1900, with the approval of the Dowager Empress of China, a Chinese militia, the I Ho Chuan, (or Righteous Harmony Fists, hence Boxer) began, under the motto Protect the country, destroy the foreigner! to kill both Westerners and Chinese Christians. The German ambassador in Peking was murdered, as were thousands of Chinese Christians throughout China, and the Boxers laid siege to the Legation Quarter at Peking.

    The ninety-day siege of Peking was relieved on August 14, 1900, by an international force made up of Russian, French, Italian, German, English, and American troops.

    The Imperial Court fled to Sian. Although war had not been declared against China, the Foreign Powers nevertheless demanded a formal settlement. The Protocol of 1901 provided, among other things, for the punishment of those responsible for the Boxer Rebellion; the fortification of the Legation Quarter at Peking, to be manned by Powers troops; and the maintenance by foreign troops of communication between Peking and the sea.

    As far as the Americans were concerned, this initially meant the stationing of U.S. Army troops and U.S. Marines in Shanghai, Peking, and elsewhere; and the formation of the U.S. Navy Yangtze River Patrol. The Navy acquired shallow draft steamers, armed them, designated them Gun Boats, and ran them up and down the Yangtze River.

    The Russians, following their resounding defeat in the Russian—Japanese War of 1905, had for all practical purposes turned over their interests in China to Japan. Furthermore, the Versailles Treaty, which had set the terms of the peace between the Western Allies and the Germans and Austro-Hungarians at the end of The World War of 1914–1918, had also given the Japanese rights over the Shantung Province of China.

    The reality of the situation in China in 1941 was that the lines had already been drawn for World War II. It was no secret that Japan’s ultimate ambition was to take as much of China as it could, into the Greater Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere. It was also no secret that they intended to expel the British, the French, and the Americans when the time was ripe. And they most likely wanted the Italians out, too, although the Italians and the Japanese were on much better terms than either was with the French, the English, or the Americans.

    The official hypocrisy was that all were still allies, in very much the same way they had been since the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.

    It had been agreed then, when the international military force was formed to relieve Peking, that they were not waging war upon China, but rather simply suppressing the Boxers and protecting their own nationals from the savagery of the Chinese.

    Thus the Japanese view in 1941, which no one challenged, was that their actions in China were nothing but extensions of what the allies started in 1900. The Japanese were prepared to protect all foreigners from Chinese savagery, and they expected the French, the Italians and the Americans to do likewise.

    But because the Imperial Japanese Army’s tanks and artillery were doing nothing more than protecting their own, and other foreign nationals, they could logically raise no objection to the Americans or others protecting their nationals with token military forces.

    The Japanese carefully restrained themselves, with several notable exceptions, from becoming involved in incidents involving an exchange of gunfire between themselves and troops of the neutral powers. They still paid lip service to international convention, because international convention condoned their occupation of Shantung Province. If an incident came before the League of Nations, it was likely to go off at a tangent into such things as the behavior of the Imperial Japanese Army.

    Everyone understood that the Japanese prefer not to openlytell the League of Nations to go to hell. If necessary, of course, they would. But as long as they could avoid doing so, they would.

    In January 1941, the American military presence in China consisted of the U.S. Navy Yangtze River Patrol; the U.S. Navy Submarine Force, China and the 4th-Regiment USMC (both based in Shanghai); and the U.S. Marine Detachment, Peking.

    I

    (One)

    Company D, 4th Marines

    Shanghai, China

    2 January 1941

    PFC Kenneth J. McCoy, USMC, stood with his hands on his hips staring at the footlocker at the end of his bed. He’d been that way for quite some time; he was trying to make up his mind. McCoy was twenty-one years old, five feet ten and one-half inches tall, and he weighed 156 pounds. He was well built, but lithe rather than muscular. He had even features and fair skin and wore his light brown hair in a crew cut. His eyes were hazel, and bright; and when he was thinking hard, as he was now, one eyebrow lifted and his lip curled as if the problem he faced amused him. He had once been an altar boy at Saint Rose of Lima Church in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and there were traces of that still in him: There was now, as then, a suggestion that just beneath the clean-cut, innocent surface, was an alter ego with horns itching for the chance to jump out and do something forbidden.

    It was the day after New Year’s, and PFC McCoy had liberty. And it was two days after payday, and he had his new gambling money in his pocket. So he wanted to go try his luck. But what he couldn’t quite make up his mind about was whether or not he should leave the compound armed, and if so, how.

    What had happened was that on Christmas Eve at a dance hall called the Little Club, there had been a not entirely unexpected altercation between United States Marines and marines assigned to the International Military Force in Shanghai by His Majesty, Victor Emmanuel III, King of the Italians. It wasn’t the first time the Americans and the Italians had gotten into it, but this time it had gotten out of hand.

    McCoy had heard that as many as eighteen Italians were dead, and there were eight Marines in sick bay, two of them in very serious condition. Rumor had it—and McCoy tended to believe it—that there were bands of Italian marines roaming town looking for U.S. Marines. The officers certainly didn’t doubt it. They’d granted permission for Marines to wear cartridge belts (with first-aid pouches) and bayonets. A sheathed bayonet made a pretty good club; a drawn bayonet was an even better personal defense weapon. But sending the men out with bayonets, sheathed or unsheathed, was far short of sending them out with rifles, loaded or otherwise.

    McCoy had not been at the Little Club on Christmas Eve, partly because a Marine who wanted to celebrate Christmas Eve by getting drunk had offered him three dollars (McCoy had negotiated the offer upward to five) to take the duty. But even without the offer, McCoy wouldn’t have gone to the Little Club on Christmas Eve. He had known from experience that the place would either be depressing as hell, and/or that there would be a fight between the Marines and the Italians. Or between the Marines and the Seaforth Highlanders. Or between the Marines and the French Foreign Legion.

    Getting into a brawl on Christmas Eve was not McCoy’s idea of good clean fun. And getting into any kind of a brawl right now was worse than a bad idea.

    McCoy’s blue Marine blouse had two new adornments, the single chevron of a private first class and a diagonal stripe above the cuff signifying the completion of four years’ honorable service. He had just shipped over for another four years, with the understanding that once he had shipped over he would be promoted to PFC. With the promotion came the right to take the examination for corporal.

    It had also been understood, unofficially, that he would get a high rating when he went before the promotion board for the oral examination. They were willing to give him that, he knew, because no one thought he would stand a chance, first time out, of getting a score on the written exam that would be anywhere close to the kind of score needed to actually get promoted.

    Well, they were wrong about that. He wanted to be a corporal very much, and he had prepared for the examination. The tough part of it was military engineering, which mostly meant math questions. He had a flair for math, and he thought it was likely that he hadn’t missed a single question. But McCoy had more going for him. When the promotion board sat down at Marine Barracks in Washington to establish the corporal’s promotion list, they paid special attention to something called additional qualifications.

    McCoy had found out, by carefully reading the regulations, that there was more to this than the sort of skills you might expect, skills like making Expert with the .45 and the Springfield. You got points for that, of course, and he would get them, because he was a pretty good shot.

    But you also got points if you could type sixty words per minute or better. When he took the test, he had been rated at seventy-five words a minute. He had kept that ability a secret before reenlisting, because he hadn’t joined the Marine Corps to be a clerk. But even that wasn’t his real ace in the hole. What that was, was foreign language skills.

    Foreign language skills, he was convinced, was going to make him a corporal long before anyone else in the 4th Marines thought he had a chance. His mother had been French, and he’d learned that from her as a baby. Then he’d taken Latin at Saint Rose of Lima High School because they made him, and French because he thought that would be easy.

    When he’d come to Shanghai, he had not been surprised that he could talk French with the French Foreign Legionnaires, but he had been surprised that he could also make himself understood in Italian, and that he could read Italian documents and even newspapers. And that still wasn’t all of it.

    Like every other Marine who came to the 4th, he had soon found himself exchanging half his pay for a small apartment and a Chinese girl to share the bed, do the laundry, and otherwise make herself useful. Mai Sing could also read and write, which wasn’t always the case with Chinese girls. Before he had decided that he really didn’t want a wife just yet—not even a temporary one—and sent Mai Sing back wherever the hell she had come from with two hundred dollars to buy herself a husband, she had taught him not only to speak the Shanghai version of Cantonese, but how to read and write a fair amount of the ideograms as well.

    There was a standard U.S. Government language exam, and he’d gone to the U.S. Consulate and taken it. So far as the U.S. Government was concerned, he was completely fluent in spoken and written French, which was as high a rating as they gave; nearly fluent in spoken and written Italian; nearly fluent in spoken Cantonese; and had a 75/55 grade in written Cantonese, which meant that he could read seventy-five percent of the ideograms on the exam, and could come up with the ideogram for a specific word more than half the time.

    The guy at the consulate had been so impressed with McCoy’s Chinese that he tried to talk him into taking a job with the Marine guard detachment. He could get him transferred, the guy said, and he wouldn’t have to pull guard once he got to the consulate. They always needed clerks who could read and write Chinese.

    McCoy had turned that down, too. He hadn’t joined the Corps to be a clerk in a consulate, either.

    The promotion list would be out any day now. He was sure that his name was going to be near the top of it, and he didn’t want anything to fuck that up. Like getting in a brawl with a bunch of Italian marines would fuck it up.

    They wouldn’t make him a corporal if he was dead, either, and the way this brawl was going, getting meaner and meaner by the day, that was a real possibility.

    There were two things wrong with going out wearing a cartridge belt and bayonet, he decided in the end. For one thing, he would look pretty silly walking into the poker game at the Cathay Mansions Hotel with that shit. And if he did run into some Italian marines, they would take his possession of a bayonet as a sure sign he was looking for a fight.

    McCoy finally bent over the footlocker and took his Baby Fairbairn from beneath a stack of neatly folded skivvy shirts. He had won it from a Shanghai Municipal cop after a poker game. He’d bet a hundred yuan against it, one cut of the deck.

    There was an officer named Bruce Fairbairn on the Shanghai Municipal Police, and he had invented a really terrific knife, sort of a dagger, and was trying to get everybody to buy them. He had made quite a sales pitch to General Smedley Butler, who commanded all the Marines in China. And Butler, so the story went, had wanted to buy enough to issue them, but the Marine Corps wouldn’t give him the money.

    McCoy’s knife was made exactly like the original Fairbairn, except that it wasn’t quite as long, or quite as big. It was just long enough to be concealed in the sleeve, with the tip of the scabbard up against the joint of the elbow, and the handle just inside the cuff.

    McCoy took off his blouse, strapped the Baby Fairbairn to his left arm, put the blouse back on over it, looked at himself in the full-length mirror mounted on the door, and left his room.

    Their billets had once been two-story brick civilian houses that the 4th Marines had bought when they came to China way back in 1927—blocks of them, enough houses to hold a battalion. Cyclone fences had been erected around these blocks. And the fences were topped with coils of barbed wire, called concertina. At the gate was a sandbagged guardhouse, manned around the clock by a two-man guard detail.

    As McCoy walked through, the PFC on guard told him he had heard that the Wops had ganged up on some Marines and put another two guys in the hospital. If he were McCoy, he went on, he would go back and get his bayonet.

    I’m not going anywhere near the Little Club, McCoy said. And I’m not looking for a fight.

    The faster of two rickshaw boys near the gate trotted up and lowered the poles.

    Take me to the Cathay Mansions Hotel, McCoy ordered in Chinese as he climbed onto the rickshaw.

    The guard understood Cathay Mansions Hotel.

    What the fuck are you going to do there, McCoy? he asked.

    They’re having a tea dance, McCoy said, as the rickshaw boy picked up the poles and started to trot down Ferry Road in the direction of the Bund.

    As they approached the hotel, McCoy called out to the rickshaw boy to pull to the curb at the corner. He paid him and then walked down the sidewalk past the marquee, and then into an alley, which led to the rear of the building. He went down a flight of stairs to a steel basement door and knocked on it.

    A small window opened in the door, and Chinese eyes became visible. McCoy was examined, and then the door opened. He walked down a long corridor, ducking his head from time to time to miss water and sewer pipes, until he came to another steel door, this one identified as Store Room B-6. He knocked, and it opened for him.

    United States Marines were not welcome upstairs in the deeply carpeted, finely paneled lobby and corridors of the Cathay Mansions Hotel. The often-expressed gratitude of the Europeans of the International Settlement for the protection offered by the United States Marines against both the Japanese and Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang did not go quite as far as accepting enlisted Marines as social equals.

    PFC Ken McCoy was welcome here, however, in a basement storeroom that had been taken over with the tacit permission of Sir Victor Sassoon, owner of the hotel, by its doorman, a six-foot-six White Russian. The storeroom was equipped with an octagonal, green baize-covered table and chairs. A rather ornate light fixture had been carefully hung so as to bathe the table in a light that made the cards and the hands that manipulated them fully visible without causing undue glare.

    McCoy was welcome because he always brought to the table fifty dollars American—sometimes a good deal more—which he was prepared to lose with a certain grace and without whining.

    In the nearly four years that he had been in China, McCoy had evolved a gambling system that had resulted in a balance of nearly two thousand dollars at Barclays Bank. He thought of this as his retirement program.

    He began each month’s gambling with fifty dollars, twenty-five of which came from his pay (by the time they had made the deductions, this now came to about forty-nine dollars) and twenty-five of which came from the retirement fund in Barclays Bank.

    He played until he either went broke or felt like quitting. If he was ahead of his original fifty dollars when he quit, he put exactly half of the excess over fifty dollars away, to be deposited to his account at Barclays. The rest was his stash for the next game.

    Almost always, he went broke sometime during the month, and he never played again until after the next payday. But again, he had almost always put a lot more into Barclays Bank during the month than the twenty-five dollars he would take out after the next payday. And sometimes—not often—the cards went well, and post-game deposits were sixty, seventy dollars. Once there had been a post-game deposit of $140.90.

    As he approached the group, the bright light illuminating the table made everything but the lower arms and hands of the players seem to disappear for a moment into the darkness, but gradually his eyes became adjusted, and he could see faces to go with the hands.

    The White Russian, who claimed to have been a colonel of cavalry in his Imperial Majesty’s 7th Petrograd Cavalry, was at the table. Piotr Petrovich Muller (he had a German surname, he once told McCoy, because he was a descendant of the Viennese who had been imported into Moscow to build the Kremlin) was a very large man with a very closely shaven face.

    He bowed his head solemnly when he saw McCoy and then gestured for him to take an empty chair.

    There was another Russian who had found post-revolution employment with the French Foreign Legion, and a Sikh, a uniformed sergeant of the Shanghai Municipal Police. There was also Detective Sergeant Lester Chatworth of the Shanghai Municipal Police, who looked up at McCoy and spoke.

    I thought you’d be out bashing Eye-talians.

    Except for a thick, perfectly trimmed mustache, Chatworth looked not unlike McCoy, but he spoke with the flat, nasal accent of Liverpool.

    I thought I’d rather come here and take your money, McCoy said.

    Why not? Everybody else is, Detective Sergeant Chatworth said, grinning.

    The men at the table had nothing at all in common except that they met Piotr Muller’s rigid standard of a decent poker player: Each could play the game well enough and each, at one time or another, had lost a good deal of money gracefully. PFC Kenneth McCoy was younger than any of them by at least a decade, and a quarter of a century younger than Muller. Neither he nor any of the others associated when they were not playing cards, nor were they friendly with any of the perhaps forty other more or less temporary residents of Shanghai who were welcome at Muller’s table in the basement of the Cathay Mansions.

    There were no raised eyebrows when McCoy took off his blue blouse and revealed the Baby Fairbairn strapped to his arm. It was prudent, if technically illegal, to arm oneself when going out for a night on the town in Shanghai.

    McCoy hung his blouse on the back of his chair, unstrapped the knife and tucked it in a pocket of the blouse, then sat down and laid his gambling money on the table. Fifty dollars American that month had converted to just over four hundred yuan. He had before him four one-hundred-yuan notes, which were printed lavender and white in England and were each the size of a British five-pound banknote. He also had some change, including an American dollar bill.

    He made himself comfortable in the chair, and then watched as the hand in play was completed. When it was over, Muller nodded at him, and he reached for a fresh deck of cards, broke the seal, and went through them, finding and discarding the extra jokers. He then spread the cards out for the others to examine.

    Afterward, he gathered the cards together, shuffled, announced, Straight poker, and dealt.

    Three hours later, there were twenty-odd lavender-and-white one-hundred-yuan notes in front of McCoy; the Sikh and the Foreign Legionnaire had gone bust; and it was between McCoy, Piotr Petrovich Muller, and Detective Sergeant Chatworth. A half hour after that, Muller examined the two cards he had drawn, threw his hand on the table, and pushed himself away from it.

    That left only McCoy and Detective Sergeant Chatworth.

    I don’t play two-handed poker, McCoy announced.

    I’m willing to quit, Chatworth said, and tossed the just-collected deck into the wastebasket, where it joined a dozen other decks of cards.

    Stiff from three hours of little movement, McCoy stood up and stretched his arms over his head. He then strapped the Baby Fairbairn to his left arm, put his blouse on, and followed the others out of the storeroom.

    When he was back out on the street, McCoy considered having his ashes hauled. It had been about a week, and it was time to take care of the urge. But he decided against it. For one thing, he had too much money with him. He hadn’t counted it out to the last yuan, but he’d won a bunch—say at twelve dollars to the hundred-yuan note, a little better than $250. That was too much money to have in your pocket when visiting a whorehouse.

    Even if the Italian marines weren’t on the warpath.

    The smart thing to do was go back to the billet. He put his hand up and flagged a rickshaw, and told the driver to take him down Ferry Road.

    Three blocks from the compound, he saw the Italian marines, hiding in an alley. There were four of them, in uniform. The uniforms were a mixture of army and navy—army breeches and navy middie blouses.

    I am minding my own business, McCoy told himself, and I am not carrying a bayonet, and I was not at the Little Club when this whole business started. With a little bit of luck, they will let me pass.

    They didn’t say anything to him as the rickshaw pulled past the alley and there could no longer be any question that the rickshaw passenger was a Marine. So for a moment he thought they’d decided to wait for Marines who were looking for a fight.

    And then the rickshaw was turned over on its side. The rickshaw boy started to howl with fear and rage even before McCoy hit the ground, striking the elbow of his blouse on the filth of the street.

    McCoy sat up and looked around to see if there was someplace he could run. But the Italian marines had picked their spot well. There was no place to run to.

    Maybe I can talk to them, McCoy thought, tell them the fucking truth, I wasn’t at the Little Club, I have no quarrel with them.

    Then he saw the Italian marine advancing on him with a length of bicycle chain swinging in his hand. McCoy felt a little faint, and then tasted something foul in the back of his mouth.

    I don’t know who you’re looking for, he said in Italian. But it isn’t me.

    The Italian marine replied that his mother fucked pigs and that he was going to mash his balls.

    The bicycle chain missed McCoy’s leg, but before it struck the pavement with a frightening whistle, it came close enough to catch his trouser’s leg and leave the imprint of the chain there. McCoy quickly slid sideward, taking the Baby Fairbairn from his sleeve as he got to his feet.

    The Italian marine told him his sister sucked Greek cocks and that he was going to take the knife away and stick it up his ass.

    McCoy sensed, rather than saw, that two other Italian marines were making their way behind him.

    The idea was that the two would grab him and hold him while the other one used the bicycle chain. The thing to do was to get past the Italian marine with the bicycle chain.

    He made a feinting motion with the knife, and the Italian marine backed up.

    It looked like it might work. And there was nothing else to do.

    He made another feinting move, a savage leap accompanied by as ferocious a roar as he could muster, at the exact moment that the Italian marine lunged at where McCoy’s Baby Fairbairn had been.

    The tip of the Baby Fairbairn punctured the Italian marine’s chest at the lower extremity of the ribs. McCoy felt it grate over a bone, and then immediately sink to the handguard. The knife was snatched from his hand as the Italian marine continued his plunge.

    The man grunted, fell, dropped the bicycle chain, rolled over, sat up, and started to pull the Baby Fairbairn from his abdomen. He gave it a hearty tug and it came out. A moment later, a stream of bright red blood as thick as the handle of a baseball bat erupted from his mouth. The Italian marine looked puzzled for a moment, and then fell to one side.

    Jesus Christ, I killed him!

    One of the three remaining Italian marines crossed himself and ran away. The other two advanced on McCoy, one of them frantically trying to work the action of a tiny automatic pistol.

    I can’t run from that!

    McCoy picked up the Baby Fairbairn and advanced on the two Italian marines.

    He made it to the one with the gun and started to try to take it away from him, or at least to knock it out of his hand. The other one tried to help his friend. McCoy lashed out with the Baby Fairbairn again. The blade slashed the Italian’s face, but that didn’t discourage him. He got his arms around McCoy’s arms and held him in a bear hug.

    The other one managed to work the action of his tiny pistol.

    McCoy remembered hearing that a .22 or a .25 will kill you just as dead as a .45, it just takes a little longer—say a week—to do it.

    With a strength that surprised him, he got his right arm free and swung it backward at the man who had been holding him. He felt it cut and strike something, something not anywhere as hard as the ribcage, but something. And it went in far enough so that he couldn’t hang on to it when the man fell down.

    Then, free, he jumped at the man with the pistol. The pistol went off with a sharp crack, and he felt something strike his leg hard, like a kick from a very hard boot. And then he knocked the pistol from the Italian marine’s hand and, when it clattered onto the cobblestones, dived after it.

    He picked it up and aimed it at the Italian marine. Then he followed his eyes. What he had done when he had swung his knife hand backward was stick it in the man’s groin. The man was now holding his groin with both hands. The handle of the Baby Fairbairn was sticking out between his fingers. The man was whimpering, and tears were on his face.

    Down the street, McCoy could hear the growl of the hand-cranked siren at the compound.

    This is going to fuck up my promotion, he thought. Goddamn these Italians.

    (Two)

    Captain Edward J. Banning, USMC, was S-2, the staff Intelligence Officer, of the 4th Marines. He was thirty-six years old, tall, thin, and starting to bald. And he had been a Marine since his graduation from the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina: a second lieutenant for three years, a first lieutenant for eight years, and he’d worn the twin silver railroad tracks of a captain for four years.

    There were four staff officers. The S-1 (Personnel) and S-4 (Supply) were majors. The S-3 (Plans and Training) was a lieutenant colonel. As a captain, Banning was the junior staff officer. But he was a staff officer, and as such normally excused from most of the duties assigned to non-staff officers.

    He took his turn, of course, as Officer of the Day, but that was about it. He was, for instance, never assigned as Inventory Officer to audit the accounts of the Officers’ or NCO clubs or as Investigating Officer when there was an allegation of misbehavior involving the possibility of a court-martial of one of the enlisted men. Or any other detail of that sort. He was the S-2, and the colonel was very much aware that taking him from that duty to do something else did not make very good sense.

    So Banning had been surprised at first when he was summoned by the colonel and told that he would serve as Defense Counsel in the case of the United States of America versus PFC Kenneth J. McCoy, USMC. But he was a Marine officer, and when Marine officers are given an assignment, they say aye, aye, sir and set about doing what they have been ordered to do.

    This one can’t be swept under the table, Banning, the colonel said. It’s gone too far for that. It has to go by the book, with every ‘t’ crossed and every ‘i’ dotted.

    I understand, sir.

    Major DeLaney will prosecute. I have ordered him to do his best to secure a conviction. I am now ordering you to do your best to secure an acquittal. The Italian Consul General has told us that he and Colonel Maggiani of the Italian marines will attend the court-martial. Do you get the picture?

    Yes, sir.

    The picture Banning got was that he was going to have to spend Christ alone knew how many hours preparing for this court-martial, participating in the court-martial itself, and then Christ alone knew how many hours after the trial, going through the appeal process.

    About half of the total would have to come from the time Banning would have normally spent with his hobby. His hobby was Ludmilla Zhivkov, whom he called ‘Milla.’

    Milla was twenty-seven, raven-haired, long-legged and a White Russian. And he had recently begun to consider the possibility that he was in love with her.

    Banning was a Marine officer—even worse, a Marine intelligence officer—and Marine intelligence officers were not supposed to become emotionally involved with White Russian women. It had not been his intention to become emotionally involved with her. He had met her, more or less, on duty. There had been an advertisement in the Shanghai Post: Russian Lady Offers Instruction in Russian Conversation. It had coincided with an unexpected bonus in his operating funds: two hundred dollars for Foreign Language Training.

    There were supposed to be fifteen thousand White Russian refugee women in Shanghai. They made their living as best they could, some successfully and some reduced to making it on their backs. He had somewhat cynically suspected that the Russian Lady offering Russian Conversation was doing so only because she was too old, or too ugly, to make it on her back.

    Milla had surprised him. She was a real beauty, and she was the first White Russian he’d met who was not at least a duchess. She was also devoutly religious, which meant that she was not going to become a whore unless it got down to that. Milla told him her father had operated, of all things, the Victor Phonograph store in St. Petersburg. They had come from Russia in 1921 with some American dollars, and it had been enough, with what jobs he had been able to find, to keep them while they waited for their names to work their way up the immigration waiting list for the United States.

    And then he had died, and she hadn’t been able to make as much money as she had hoped, even working as a billing clerk in the Cathay Mansions Hotel and teaching Russian conversation. When he met her she was down to living in one room. The next step was to become somebody’s mistress. After that she’d have to turn into a whore. Becoming a whore would keep her from going to the States.

    The first thing Banning had done was pay her the whole two hundred dollars up front. Then one thing had led to another, and they had gone to bed. Soon he had helped her get a larger place to live.

    But the ground rules established between them were clear: It was a friendly business relationship and never could be anything more. When he went home, that would be the end of it. She understood that. She had lived up to her end of the bargain. And she would, he believed, stick to it.

    Her powerful character, he sometimes thought, was one of the reasons he was afraid he was in love with her. And sometimes he wondered if she wasn’t playing him like a fish (she was also the most intelligent woman he had ever known) and nobly living up to her end of the bargain because she had figured that was the one way to get him to break it.

    But what he nevertheless knew for sure was that if he married her, he could kiss his Marine career good-bye; and that he could not imagine life outside the Corps; and that he could not imagine life without Milla.

    For the first time in his life, Ed Banning did not know what the hell to do.

    Banning went by the orderly room of D Company, First Battalion and read through PFC Kenneth J. McCoy’s records slowly and thoroughly. He talked to his company commander, his platoon leader, his platoon sergeant, his section leader and his bunk mate.

    The picture they painted of McCoy was the one reflected by his records. He had joined the Corps right out of high school (in fact, several months before; his high school diploma had come to him while he was at Parris Island and was entered into his record then), had served for three months with the Fleet Marine Force at San Diego, and then been shipped to the 4th Marines in Shanghai, where they’d made him an assistant

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