and then stepped around McCoy to assist Mrs. McCoy in leaving the aircraft.
“Oh, Bill,” Ernie said. “What a pleasant surprise!”
“You’re as beautiful as ever,” Lieutenant Colonel Dunn said, “and as careless as ever about the company you keep.”
Pick Pickering got out of the airplane.
“Wee Willy!” he cried happily, wrapped his arms around Lieutenant Colonel Dunn, and kissed him wetly on the forehead.
Second Lieutenant Malcolm S. Pickering, USMCR, had been First Lieutenant William C. Dunn’s wingman, in VMF-229, flying Grumman Wildcats off of Fighter One, on Guadalcanal. They had become aces within days of one another. Dunn had gone on to become a double ace. The Navy Cross, the nation’s second-highest award for valor in the Naval service, topped Dunn’s four rows of fruit salad.
Dunn freed himself from Pickering’s embrace.
“You’re a disgrace to the Marine Corps,” Dunn said, failing to express the indignation he felt was called for, but did not in fact feel. “My God, you’re not even wearing socks!”
“I don’t have a loving wife and helpmeet to care for me,” Pick said. “How’s the bride?”
“About to make me a father for the fourth time,” Dunn said, “and unaware I’m on this side of the country.”
“What are you doing here—on this side of the country—and here?”
“Here,” Dunn said, gesturing to indicate the airfield, or maybe southern California, “because I need to borrow, beg, or, ultimately, steal Corsair parts from our brothers in the Navy, and here here”—he pointed at the ground— “because when I landed I called the Coronado to see if you might be in town, and they said you were expected about now. So I checked with Base Ops to see if they had an inbound Corsair. The AOD was all upset about some civilian airplane about to land. I knew it had to be you.”
“As a token of the Navy’s respect for the Marine Corps reserve, I have permission to land here in connection with my reserve duties,” Pick said. “It’s all perfectly legal, Colonel, sir.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Dunn said.
“Ken’s reporting into Pendleton,” Pick said. “We all just came from Japan—and on the way over, immodesty compels me to state, I set a new record. . . .”
“The most violently airsick passengers on one airplane in the history of commercial aviation?” Dunn asked, innocently.
McCoy laughed.
“Those who have nothing to boast about mock those who do,” Pickering said, piously. “But since you ask, there is a new speed record to Japan.”
“Inspired, no doubt, by a platoon of angry husbands chasing the pilot?” Dunn said.
McCoy laughed again.
“You understand, Ernie,” Pickering said, as if sad and mystified, “that these two—Sarcastic Sam and Laughing Boy—are supposed to be my best friends?”
“The way I heard it, they’re your only friends,” Ernie said.
“Et tu, Brutus?” Pick said.
Dunn laughed, then turned to McCoy.
“What are they going to have you doing at Pendleton, Ken?” Dunn asked.
“I really don’t know, Colonel,” McCoy replied.
Dunn didn’t press McCoy. As long as Dunn had known him—and he had met him on Guadalcanal—he had been involved in classified operations of one kind or another that couldn’t be talked about.
“Captain McCoy,” Pick said. “If you would be so kind, go into Base Ops and call us a cab while the colonel and I tie down the airplane. We have to eat, and the food is much better at the Coronado Beach than in the O Club here.”
Pickering walked around the nose of the Staggerwing to where Dunn was really stretching to insert a tie-down rope into a link on the wing.
“Bill, so you don’t say anything in innocence. . . . What the Killer’s going to do at Pendleton is make up his mind whether he wants to go back to the ranks.”
“Jesus Christ!” Dunn said, in surprise. “I thought he at least would be the exception to the rule. . . .”
“What rule?”
“Commissioned officers have to have a college degree,” Dunn said. “I’ve lost four pilots in the last three months to that policy. But I thought they’d make an exception for somebody like McCoy.”
Pickering had not heard about that policy.
But if I let Wee Willy think that’s the reason the god damn Corps is giving him the boot, I won’t have to get into the Killer’s “There Will be a War in Korea in Ninety Days or Less” theory. Which, of course, I can’t anyway.
“I guess not,” Pickering said.
“Is he going to take stripes? Or get out?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think it would bother him to be a gunny, but Ernie . . .”