looked very much like the radioman second, except that he was perhaps four years older and just a little heavier. But he was slight, too, and wore glasses and looked very young.
He took the sheet of yellow paper from the radioman second and read it:
MFS FOR US FORCES AUSTRALIA
MFS FOR US FORCES AUSTRALIA
ACNOW BRTSS DXSYT QRSHJ ERASH
POFTP QOPOQ CHTFS SDHST ALITS
CGHRZ QMSGL QROTX VABCG LSTYE
ACNOW BRTSS DXSYT QRSHJ ERASH
POFTP QOPOQ CHTFS SDHST ALITS
CGHRZ QMSGL QROTX VABCG LSTYE
MFS STANDING BY FOR US FORCES AUSTRALIA
MFS STANDING BY FOR US FORCES AUSTRALIA
“What the hell is this?”
“Look at the third block, Sir, ” the radioman second said.
“What about it?”
“It was the emergency code, no SOI, when the Army was still using the old M94,” the radioman second said.
“Who’s MFS?” the j.g. asked.
“There’s no such station, Sir,” the radioman second said.
“What do you think?”
“I think it’s the Japs playing games,” the radioman said.
“Well, what the hell, I’ll send it over to the Presidio,” the j.g. said. “Maybe they’ve still got an M94 around someplace. ”
“You don’t think I should give them a call back?”
“They weren’t trying to reach us, they were calling Australia. Let Australia call them back.”
3
THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH BUILDING WASHINGTON, D.C. 10 JANUARY 1943
Motor Machinist’s Mate First Class Charles D. Staley, USN, in compliance with his orders, presented himself at the National Institutes of Health building.
Five weeks before, Staley had been running the tune-up shop at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center motor pool, outside Chicago. It was a hell of a thing for a first class petty officer with eighteen years’ service to be doing with a war on; but Staley was a Yangtze River Patrol sailor, and he had learned that Yangtze River Patrol sailors who had managed to make it back to the States—instead of either getting killed or captured in the Philippines—seemed to get dumb billets like that. The Navy didn’t seem to know what to do with them, so it gave them billets like running a motor pool, shit that had to be done but had little to do with ships or fighting a war.
And then the personnel chief had called him in and said there was a levy down from BuPers—the Navy Bureau of Personnel—for someone with his rate, who had been a China Sailor, and who was unmarried. The personnel chief said he had to volunteer, for the billet was “classified and hazardous.” Reasoning that anything had to be better than cleaning carburetors, Staley volunteered.
Five days later, his orders came through. For the first time in his service, Staley was flown somewhere in a Navy airplane. He was flown to Anacostia Naval Air Station in Washington, where a civilian driving a Plymouth station wagon met him and took him to a large country estate in Virginia about forty miles from Washington. Some very rich guy’s house—there was a mansion, and a stable, and a swimming pool, set on 240 acres in the middle of nowhere—had been taken over by the government for the duration.
A real hard-nosed civilian sonofabitch named Eldon C. Baker had given him and ten other guys a short speech, saying the purpose of the training they were about to undergo was to determine if they met the standards of the OSS. Staley didn’t know what the hell the OSS was, but he’d been in the service long enough to know when to ask questions and when not to ask questions, and this was one of the times not to ask questions.
Baker, as if he had been reading his mind, almost immediately made that official.
“This is not a summer camp,” Baker said, “where you will make friends for life. You are not to ask questions about the backgrounds, including girlfriends and families, of other trainees, and if a trainee asks you questions that do not directly concern what is going on at the school, you will report that immediately to one of the cadre.”
Baker had made it clear that if you reported it, the trainee who had asked the questions would be immediately “relieved” (which Staley understood to mean thrown out on his ass), and if you didn’t report it, you would be relieved.
They would be restricted to the camp, Mr. Baker told them, for the length of the course, or unless “sooner relieved for cause.”
The training itself had been part boot camp—running around and learning about small arms; part how to fight like a Shanghai pimp—in other words, with a knife, or by sticking your thumbs into a guy’s eyes, or