Command Decision (2 page)

“Brigadier General K. C. Dennis, Commanding General of the Fifth American Bombardment Division, Heavy. Don’t all good sergeants call their generals ‘the Old Man’?”

Leaving Evans to chew that one over, Brockhurst walked calmly over to the fighter-plane marking cross. Assurance went a long way with the army. He had just begun a closer study of the cross when he heard Evans’s even voice.

“Who let you in here?”

He continued his silent, absorbed examination.

“Who let you in here?”

“I can’t hear you, Sergeant,” he said over his shoulder.

Then he did hear the hard ominous steps, the hands on the Tommy gun, the clatter of a hand-ejected shell on the bare floor. He turned to find himself looking into the muzzle of the gun. The safety was forward.

The trigger pull on those guns was notoriously light, as light as the balance of impulses in that poker-faced boy who was pointing it squarely at his stomach. Too late he realized that he had been wasting subtlety on a barbarian. Brockhurst wet his lips.

“Look out. That thing might go off.”

“
Might
hell. Who let you in here?”

“I’ve got a pass.”

“I seen Dennis tear it up. A man without no pass is a spy.”

Evans had intended only to scare some of the condescension out of Brockhurst. It was the correspondent’s own manifest fear which now showed him the possibilities of the situation. He could teach the whole nosy breed of them a lesson with no risk whatever to himself. A man without a pass was a spy. He noted the sweat on Brockhurst’s forehead and thought aloud.

“Perry Machold over in the 291st MP’s he got the Soldier’s Medal for shooting at a guy that they didn’t even know if he was a spy and Perry missed him. I bet Dennis’d give me a Bronze Star.”

Brockhurst gulped.

“I’ve got a new pass, from Dennis’s boss.”

“Walk your pass over here, slow.”

Brockhurst extended it with exaggerated slowness over the Tommy-gun muzzle and listened while Evans muttered through a careful reading of the simple sentence.

“…signed… who?”

“Major General R. G. Kane, that’s who.”

Evans nodded, awed in spite of himself. “Imagine that? A goddamned old Major General probably gets as much money as a fair-to-middling third baseman and can’t sign his own name clear enough to read. Yeah, that’s old Percent himself.”

“Why do you boys call him that?” Brockhurst knew very well but there was safety in continuing the distraction.

“Because of the crap he puts in the papers about the percentage of Germany his gallant forces destroy every afternoon, weather permitting.”

Evans returned the pass, racked the Tommy gun, resumed his seat, and puffed hard to restore the fading ember of his cigar. Brockhurst resisted a wish to wipe his forehead with his handkerchief and sat down beside the Sergeant, keeping his eyes ostentatiously from that fighter-plane marking.

“You know the score,” said Brockhurst. “When I get through with that low-grade Fascist megalomaniac…”

“With who?”

“Dennis. That’s what he is, a low-grade Fascist megalomaniac.”

“What’s that?”

Brockhurst considered judicially. “He’s an ex-test pilot who’s been brought indoors to a job way over his head and still thinks if he makes enough records with other people’s lives and blood no one will find out what a hollow-headed humbug he is.”

“How long you been around the army?”

“Long enough to know that’s what Dennis is.”

“That’s what all generals are,” said Evans. “Coffee?”

Brockhurst welcomed this first intimation of cordiality. This sergeant probably knew every detail of the story he wanted.

“Where is Dennis, Sarge?”

“In the sack.”

“I see. After a sleepless night of planning, the gallant commander snatches a few winks while his men are out on the mission.”

“You must love that guardhouse, pumping me about missions.”

Brockhurst snorted. “Security! Even the hangar queen’s patched up and gone today but I’m not supposed to know there’s a mission out.”

“If you know, what are you hinting for?”

“Angles,” said Brockhurst. “I know the hottest story in the war when I smell it but two or three angles to fill in the picture would be worth plenty to me.” Brockhurst lowered his voice persuasively.

“I know he’s got the German plane that Swastika came from under close guard in Hangar Four. And I know he’s flown it himself, several times.”

“You know more than that,” Evans encouraged him.

“You’re damned right I do.”

“You know he throwed your ass in the guardhouse for writing a piece about it and kept the piece and tore up your pass.”

The sergeant burst into a triumphant chuckle. Brockhurst waited patiently for it to subside.

“I got out,” he said. “And I’ve got a new pass from General Kane. The guardhouse was a break for me. But I still want to know what became of the German Dennis had in there.”

“What are the other angles?”

“Why has Dennis been to London so often lately?”

Evans yawned. “Why does anyone go to London?”

“Not that Puritanical bastard,” said Brockhurst. “Then yesterday, without even alerting us, Dennis runs off the longest mission of the war and has the worst losses to date. We try to help you guys take the curse off it with a good story and you won’t even give us the target. ‘Industrial Objectives!’ That’s a fine comfort to a lot of new widows back home.”

“Go on.”

“This morning everything that could roll to the end of the runway went earlier and they aren’t back yet. Maximum effort, deep in Germany, two days straight. For what?”

“Why don’t you ask some smart newspaperman?”

Frustration made Brockhurst’s voice edgy. “Those jerks are still waiting permission to go to bases. They think this is just a routine mission.”

“What makes you think it isn’t?”

“Because I get paid for using my head instead of Public Relations handouts.” He let this sink in and then barked, “Why has Dennis got a squadron commander with a D.F.C. under close arrest right now in the same guardhouse where they had me?”

“Not brushing his teeth?”

“Okay, my helpful friend, I’ll tell you. He’s there for refusing to go on this hush-hush mission this morning.”

Evans jaw muscles tightened now. “Did he tell you that?”

“Rafferty won’t let me talk to him. And I suppose Dennis will back him up. But if that little tin-star tyrant thinks the American press will stand for this…”

“By God, you might be worth a Legion of Merit,” said Evans and shifted his glance pointedly to the Tommy guns.

Brockhurst snorted. “You won’t get it from Dennis. Cliff Garnett sat down at Prestwick last night by special plane.”

“Who’s he?”

“You never heard of Brigadier General Clifton C. Garnett, Secretary to the United Chiefs of Staff?”

“Oh God! Now we’ll never get the war over,” said Evans.

“I’ll bet you Dennis’s war is over in a week.”

“You reckon they’d trade him for one of them Pentagon bellhops?”

“Garnett should have had this job to begin with.”

Evans had heard of generals being fired but there was something about all this that didn’t quite fit. Remembering, he shook his head firmly.

“They can’t. They never fired no general yet till they give him the Legion of Merit, or if it was bad enough the D.S.M. Dennis, he hasn’t got neither.”

“They can give ’em mighty quick. Going to miss your hero?”

“He’s no hero to me. I just taken this job in with the big wheels to chisel myself a ticket to China now I’m done with this war. Does this Garnett drink whiskey or Scotch?”

Brockhurst leaned forward gravely, confidentially.

“Listen, Sarge, Dennis is washed up. Trouble with the press, record losses yesterday and probably again today, a hero in the guardhouse; he’s a ruptured duck, boy. But a couple of angles on this deal would be worth some good bourbon to me.”

“What angles?”

“What became of that German Dennis had in the guardhouse?”

“Bonded bourbon?”

“Bottled in bond.”

“How much?”

“Four bottles.”

Evans face darkened with indignation. “You give Rafferty in the guardhouse two cases, just for having his girl in the village make that phone call that got you out.”

“I did like hell. I gave Peterson one case…” Brockhurst shut his mouth, too late. He had set too many verbal traps himself not to feel the click of this one. “Okay, call it a case—for the whole story, though.”

Evans looked cautiously at both doors, removed the cigar from his mouth, and leaned forward. Brockhurst’s ears stretched.

“Dennis kept him there till last night. But yesterday they was a snafu at the Quartermaster’s and he run clean out of Spam. The General he said by God he’d promised the men meat for breakfast and if they wasn’t no other meat we’d just have to use that Kraut. If you could have heard them boys at breakfast bitching about the meat packers’ profiteering….”

Brockhurst arose, livid. “Okay, you got your joke and I still got my whiskey.”

Evans waited until the anteroom door banged shut on the correspondent. Then he jumped for the black phone on the General’s desk. “Guardhouse…. Rafferty, give me Peterson… Peterson, this is Evans. Bring six of them twelve marbles you just found to General Dennis’s anteroom in a musette bag.” He locked his lips over the cigar and revived the ember before cutting off the paean of protest that battered his eardrums. “You heard me… in twenty minutes. Well, Jesus Christ, I’m giving you half of ’em, ain’t I?”

He hung up the phone and stretched his long arms with tingling satisfaction. His instinct had been right. Now, for a little patience, he not only had six immediate bottles of whiskey, he had discovered an operating procedure. It always took time to get onto a new job but he had the war under control again now.

Evans decided to give Joan outright to Eddie Cahill. Eddie had a tough time, as all dopes did, and Joan was good, if monotonous. He would give them a bottle of bourbon for a dowry, to end the thing without hard feelings. The feeling of magnanimity, expanding with his new riches, was so pleasant that Evans extended it to Dennis. He was on easy street now, even if Dennis did get canned and this Garnett drank milk. War had many privations but there was no shortage of fools who wanted to talk to generals. He was thinking of them tenderly when the door opened and General Dennis walked in.

Chapter 2

General Dennis returned to work that afternoon feeling a little better than usual. He had had nearly five hours of sleep—two troubled and fitful until they awoke him with the strike signal, then three of deep and blessed oblivion. His powdered-egg omelet had been no worse than usual and the arrival of a new consignment of canned grapefruit juice had brightened his meal after the Sergeant assured him there was enough for noncombat messes.

On the way over to the office he had noted that six of yesterday’s crop of minor repairs were already restored to serviceability and practicing formation. It was a modest but tangible backlog against tomorrow.

But as his mind came fully to life again returning anxiety dispelled his momentary relief. It would be forty-odd minutes before he would know about his losses, either in the abstract or about Ted himself. In the meantime he had to get on with the Jenks case and whatever else had come up while he slept.

He noted the Sergeant’s flustered jump to attention and noted also that the man had been smoking with his feet on the desk. That was normal; it was also normal for them to think they were fooling a man who didn’t care. The click of the phone probably meant he had been phoning his girl in the village, but it might not.

“Was that for me?”

“No, sir,” said Evans blandly.

Dennis was already crossing the room for a hurried look through the window at the sky he had not now studied for a full thirty seconds. He fired another question over his shoulder.

“Any word since the strike signal?”

“No, sir.”

Dennis’s eyes were lost in the sky. Gently Evans placed the partly smoked cigar in the ash tray on the desk. He made it safely, and then scrutinized the General at the window with a curiosity he had never felt about him until this afternoon. The idea that the General, like other mortals, could be fired reduced him to the kind of estimate used for human beings.

Evans saw a wiry, almost fragile figure, immaculately trim and erect with half a lifetime’s habit of perfect posture. A lingering trace of shaving soap by the left ear almost matched the pallor of that bony face, with tight skin furrowed ten years deeper than its rightful forty. Not until this moment had Evans observed that Dennis always looked deeply, permanently tired. The sharpness of those deep-set gray eyes and the alertness of that trim figure camouflaged this fatigue most of the time. Seeing him in comparative repose now Evans was struck with the resemblance of his deep inner weariness to that he had noticed in older crew members toward the end of a tour. Without waiting to be asked he poured a cup of coffee and placed it on the desk.

Abruptly Dennis dismissed a sky he could not change and strode back to the desk. Evans held his breath. The General looked about him with a little frown of perplexity and then lifted the cigar to his mouth and inhaled deeply. The General was all business now as he reached for the coffee.

“Ask Colonel Haley to step in, alert the weatherman, and have the guard bring Captain Jenks.”

Evans vanished into the Ops room. Dennis reached into the top drawer of the desk and pulled out a Manila-covered file an inch thick. It was filled with orders, reports, certificates, judgments, records, qualifications; everything the Army of the United States considered worth remembering about Jenks, Lucius Malcolm, Capt. A. C., from its original satisfaction about the proportions of sugar and albumin in his urine right down to that ghastly moment this morning. Dennis had read the file through before sleeping. Now he only stared at it as if the cover might show him something the contents had not until Haley entered the room, saluting at the door.

The very sight of his Chief of Staff comforted Dennis but it was scarcely a personal emotion. Haley was solid gold and, like many forms of that substance, somewhat lumpy. He was painstaking about his uniforms but his appearance always suggested troublesome adenoids. Dennis leaned heavily on his tireless phlegmatic capability, but the relationship between them was more the product of custom than of written regulations.