that, Sergeant, you are to tell Colonel Vandenburg.”
Jennings nodded. “Aye, aye, sir.”
“Let’s go get some lunch,” Pickering said, and started toward the jeep.
Major General Ralph Howe, NGUS, was sitting at the dining room table in The House, drinking coffee with Master Sergeant Charley Rogers. The table was set for lunch.
“I’m surprised to see you, McCoy,” Howe said. “General Almond told me you took a pretty good hit.”
“A little piece of shrapnel, sir,” McCoy replied. “I’m all right.”
“That is not exactly the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but,” Pickering said as he shook hands with Howe. “Major McCoy is on limited duty. You do understand that, don’t you, Major McCoy? Limited?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. Then let’s have some lunch and decide where we go from here.”
Master Sergeant Charley Rogers stood up and went through the swinging door into the kitchen. A moment later, two Korean women came through it carrying china tureens. Rogers followed them into the room.
“Fish chowder and chicken and dumplings,” he said. “If it tastes as good as it smells, we’re in luck.”
“So far as I’m concerned in your where-we-go-from-here scenario, Fleming,” General Howe said, “Charley and I are on the 1700 courier flight to Tokyo, where I will make my manners to General MacArthur, and then get on a plane—a Trans-Global flight, you should be pleased to learn—for the States.”
“You’re really determined to leave me all alone here, are you?”
“There are a lot of things I have to say to the President that I don’t want to put on paper,” Howe said. “After I tell him what I think he should hear, and he wants me to come back over here, I will.”
Pickering nodded.
“I think the first thing on this agenda,” Howe said as he smiled thanks for the fish chowder being ladled into his bowl, “should be Colonel Van’s new status, with which he’s not entirely delighted. I wanted to make sure he understands that while I’m sure you’re delighted to have him, his transfer to the CIA—you—was my idea, not yours.”
“I have to tell you, Colonel,” Pickering said, “that it makes sense to me, and I feel a little foolish for not having thought of it myself.”
Vandenburg didn’t say anything, but it was clear that he had made the decision not to say what he was thinking.
“Let’s get it out in the open, Colonel,” Pickering said. “What’s on your mind?”
Vandenburg met Pickering’s eyes, then shrugged.
“General, in War Two, when I was asked to join the OSS, I decided I could be of more use where I was, in counterintelligence. I never regretted that decision to stay in the Army. Especially after the war, when the OSS was disbanded and my friends who had gone into the OSS— I’m talking about career officers—went back to the Army. They were treated like lepers, sir.”
McCoy snorted. “Lepers with a social disease?” he asked. “ ‘Where were you when we were fighting the war?’ ”
“Exactly.” Vandenburg looked at Pickering and then went on: “Ken told me just about the same thing happened to him when he went back to the Marine Corps.”
“I didn’t realize until right now that it was that bad, Ken,” Pickering said, and then remembered: “Weren’t you offered a chance to go into the CIA?”
McCoy nodded.
“Why didn’t you?”
“I was a Marine,” McCoy said. “I know what the colonel’s talking about. He’s a soldier.”
“The same thing happened to me, in 1948, in Greece,” Vandenburg went on. “They really wanted me in the CIA there, and I really didn’t want to go. And I didn’t. And now, all of a sudden, I’m told I’m now in the CIA. This time nobody asked me.”
“Okay, I’m the villain,” Howe said. “But don’t mistake that for an apology, Colonel. It was my judgment that unless we got you out of the Army, you were about to be coopted by General Willoughby, and I decided you were too valuable an asset for General Pickering to lose.”
“General, I wasn’t looking for an apology,” Vandenburg said. “I’m a soldier—I go where I’m sent. But General Pickering asked what was on my mind.”
“And I’m glad you told me,” Howe said. “The President’s going to hear about this.”
“General, I wish you wouldn’t do that. I’m not whining, ” Vandenburg said.
“I didn’t think you were, Colonel,” Howe said. “But my job is to tell the President what I think he would be interested in hearing. And that’s what I’m going to do.”
“Ken,” Pickering asked, “did the same sort of thing happen to Ed Banning when the OSS was