It was that, and the reference to Flem Pickering. And what Flem had said about Lieutenant Cory, whose place this young sergeant was taking.
The morning he left, Pickering had told him about MAGIC, and about his concern that Cory might have known about it. If Cory had that knowledge, he should never have been sent to Guadalcanal.
The sergeant, obviously, does not know about MAGIC. For one thing, that sort of secret is not made known to junior enlisted men. For another, he worked for Fleming Pickering. Therefore, if he knew, Pickering would have made sure he would not be sent to Guadalcanal
But this lieutenant colonel: He was an intelligence officer, he's senior enough to have had responsibilities which would have given him the Need to Know. And they rushed him here to replace Goettge. Since so few people actually knew about MAGIC, it was possible that whoever had rushed him over here hadn't even considered that possibility.
And this fellow-General Vandergrift had made a snap, and perhaps unfair, judgment that Lieutenant Colonel Dailey was not too smart; otherwise he would not have been assigned as a liaison officer to SHSWPA-if he was privy to MAGIC, it might well have been decided to send him to Guadalcanal anyway.
"Colonel," General Vandergrift asked. "Does the phrase MAGIC mean anything to you?"
"No, Sir," Lieutenant Colonel Dailey replied. "I've heard the word, Sir, but..."
"It's not important," General Vandergrift said.
(Five)
S-2 SECTION, FIRST MARINES
GUADALCANAL, SOLOMON ISLANDS
2005 HOURS 19 AUGUST 1942
Sergeant John Marston Moore, USMCR, sat on the dirt floor of the S-2 bunker in the brilliant light of a hissing Coleman gasoline lamp. His legs were crossed under him, and his undershirt was sweat soaked. He had long before removed his utility jacket. The Thompson submachine gun Major Stecker had given him now rested on it.
He was about two-thirds of the way, he judged, through the foot-and-a-half-tall pile of personal effects removed from Japanese bodies; and he had been at it steadily since shortly after eleven, less time out for "dinner"-a messkit full of rice, courtesy of the Japanese; a spoonful of meat and gravy, courtesy Quartermaster Corps, U.S. Army; and two small cans of really delicious smoked oysters, again courtesy of the Japanese.
He had found virtually nothing that Major Stecker could possibly use. He had learned that the Marines already knew the identity of the Rikusentai engineers-the 11th and 23rd Pioneers-who had been building the airfield.
He had been able to augment this by finding, in written-but-not-mailed letters home, references to the names of the commanding officers. He had written them down. He couldn't see how the names of three or four junior Japanese officers would be of much use, except perhaps as a psychological tool for prisoner interrogation.
That seemed to be a moot point. For one thing, Moore had learned there were damn few prisoners. The story of the Japanese warrant officer who led Colonel Goettge and the others into the trap had quickly spread through the division. The Marines had decided that discretion-don't take a chance, shoot the fucker!-overwhelmed the odd and abstract notion that prisoners had an intelligence value.
Tell that to Colonel Goettge!
For another, there seemed to be very few people around capable of interrogating prisoners at all, unless they happened to speak English, much less of outwitting them with psychological tricks.
He had spent long hours reading letters from home. It had been emotionally unnerving. He had lived in Japan. Tokyo was really as much home to him as Philadelphia. When he found an envelope bearing a Denenchofu return address, he knew it was entirely possible that he and the writer, somebody's mother, had met and bowed to each other at the door of a shop.
Much of the stuff was stained with a dark and sticky substance, now beginning to give off a sickly sweet smell, that he could not pretend was mud or oil or plum preserves.
Moore heard someone coming into the sandbagged tent. He turned and looked over his shoulder. It was Captain Fein-camp, the First Marine's S-2, and he had with him a lieutenant and a technical sergeant, a balding, lean man in his late thirties.
"How you coming, Sergeant?" Feincamp asked.
"I haven't found anything interesting so far, Sir," Moore replied.
"He's a linguist," Captain Feincamp explained to the lieutenant. "They just flew him in. There's a replacement for Colonel Goettge, too."
And then he explained to Moore the reason why the lieutenant and the technical sergeant were there.
"They just came off patrol, Sergeant," he said. "They ran into some Japs and had themselves a little firefight. I think maybe you'd better listen in on this."
"Yes, Sir," Moore said, grateful for the chance to stop rummaging through personal effects.
He spun around on the dirt floor.
The lieutenant and then the technical sergeant handed him several wallets and some more personal mail.
"We're the first ones back, I suppose," the lieutenant said. "Maybe you can make something out of this shit."
Moore took it, glanced through it, and quickly decided it was more of the same sort of thing he'd been looking at for hours.
Feincamp produced a map. The lieutenant looked at it for a moment, and then pointed.
"Right about here on the beach, Captain," he said. "Captain Brush called a lunch break. I told him that I'd been there before, and twenty, thirty minutes inland was an orange farm..."
"A what?"
"Orange trees."
"Orange grove," Feincamp provided.
"Yes, Sir. Well, the captain said we could walk another half hour if it meant fresh fruit, so we started inland. Ten, fifteen minutes later, right about here..." he pointed, "all hell broke loose. We lost Corporal DeLayne right away. He took a round in the head."
"The big blond kid?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Damn."
"So Captain Brush told me to take a squad around here, on the right flank, and the rest started for where the fire was coming from. Straight ahead. When we started that, they started withdrawing, and we started after them."
Moore saw that the technical sergeant was admiring a Japanese helmet he had taken as a souvenir.
"So then it was sort of like the wild west for maybe twenty minutes. But we whipped their ass!"
"Casualties?"
"A pisspot full of them. We counted thirty-one Japs, and I'm sure we missed some."
"I was speaking of Marines," Feincamp said coldly.
"Three KIA, Sir. Three wounded."
"Sergeant," Moore suddenly interrupted, "let me see that helmet, please?"