Leon Uris (27 page)

Ben Boone made a perfunctory knock, then entered the adjoining office. It was clogged with half-full sea chests, their contents being separated on a worktable twenty feet in length, set up on sawhorses.

Books, maps, retrospective reports, documents, artists’ renderings, memoirs, studies, scholarly dissertations, monographs, and whatnot. This was Ben Boone’s collection, gathered for over a generation. It was being sorted out chronologically and dated back to a time before Christ.

Second Lieutenant Zachary O’Hara was asleep atop the table, his jacket rolled up as a pillow.

“Hit the deck! The United States Navy has provided you with a bunk.”

Zach popped one eye open, then the other, rolled off the table, and tried to arrange himself.

“It took me years to collect this crap. You’re not going to get it sorted out in a week.”

The major knew his man was working around the clock out of sheer exuberance . . . partly. And partly to keep his mind off Amanda Kerr, who was due to arrive in Newport soon. The annual “march of the moguls” to their summer “cottages” had begun its entry into the town like overloaded elephants hitched trunk to tail.

“Get your eyes drained or you’ll bleed to death. What are you working on here?”

“The stuff Captain Storm sent you from China.”

Ben picked up the thick notebook which had been opened and left lying alongside Zach.

“It’s a jewel, this. It covers the years from the Sea of Japan to Borneo to the Indian Ocean.” He flipped the pages. “ ‘The Thirteenth-Century Mongol Invasion of Japan,’” he read, and set it back on the table. “Storm’s monograph is the finest treatise on the subject. Unfortunately, most of the reading here is dull going. It will suck you dry. It shot me down so, I couldn’t face opening another trunk.”

Zach didn’t seem to hear him. “How did you get all the foreign documents translated?”

“Maybe that’s what wore me out. I had every professor of language in every university from Hopkins to Harvard translating, pro bono.”

“Sir, it’s not dull to me.”

“It will be. Give it time.”

“Whenever I get into a new paper, I feel like—what?—a spelunker entering a dark cave and inching my way in. Then
bang!
I come to this gigantic room illuminated with prehistoric drawings on the walls. I can’t get over man’s ingenuity to do battle four thousand years ago.”

“Yeah, he got up off all fours with a club in his hand looking for a fight. And each century, man improved his capacity for slaughter. Anyhow, show up at my cottage for chow this evening.”

“Aye, aye, sir, thank you, sir.”

“And get your ass circulating around Newport. Take a little lib
erty. This shit will always be waiting for you when you get back. Newport is where good guys go to die.”

During colonial times, Newport had been a major commercial center along with Boston and New York, its wharves filled with ships and its town hall buzzing with the new ideas of democracy.

Before the Revolution, British warships patrolled Narragansett Bay, collecting the king’s royalties and impressing merchant crewmen.

Militia forts defended the coastal towns as best they could, but were scarcely able to stand up to the firepower of a flotilla of British barkentines.

Narragansett Bay was so choked that the Rhode Island Colony commissioned a “navy” of two vessels, which sailed forth to badger the British.

One of these vessels, the
Providence,
would later become the flagship of John Paul Jones and land marines to combat for the first time. It was the Rhode Island delegation to the Continental Congress that proposed the formation of a single navy to protect all the colonies.

Newport paid the price during the War of Independence. Her docks, dry docks, and warehouses were completely wasted and she ceased to be a commercial destination.

After the war, after a time, Newport returned to life, but the basic character of the place had been changed forever. Wealthy Southerners deserted their scorching plantations in the summer and made an exodus to the town. Then they came from everywhere in the country—the grand new entrepreneurial tycoons, the captains of industry, and the wealthy of all stripes flocked to Newport, established palatial summer homes, and converted the town to a center of culture and a showplace of rank, flying the colors of privilege from their yacht clubs.

The influx of wealth required a large pool of servants and a middle class of merchants and craftsmen as a support system.

An enclave of former slaves found the atmosphere less threatening than the South.

After the Civil War, recreation and vacations for ordinary people became part of a better way of life.

Advancements in electricity led to amusement parks and fun palaces.

Newport arrived, somewhat decently balanced between Vivaldi from the mansions and rinky-dink jazz on Moonlight Bay.

The United States Navy never grew tired of its love affair with Narragansett Bay. During the Civil War, when the Naval Academy was forced to relocate from Annapolis, it settled in Newport for the duration. There was always a sprightly naval presence in the town, from sailor boys to high-ranking staff officers.

Coaster’s Island, a hundred-acre affair, was connected to the town by a pair of short causeways. It held a drab, massive Victorian public building that had housed the Rhode Island poorhouse and insane asylum.

In the early 1880s, the navy took over Coaster’s and remodeled the main structures, converting it into the world’s first naval war college.

Major Benjamin Malachi Boone had been the lone Marine on permanent assignment. Despite his humbled branch of the services, Major Boone was accorded the special respect due an eccentric one-armed maverick genius who had led the charge at Chapultepec.

Ben carved out his space in the attic, which no one else wanted, then seriously pursued his collection of documents on amphibious warfare. He badgered ship’s captains, seagoing Marines, U.S. consulates, and whomever to send him material, which he got translated by twisting the arms of college language professors.

Ben was a brilliant curiosity, constantly in demand to give lectures, back and forth to Washington for consultations, able to afford less and less time for mining his amphibious pile.

The Corps, always squeezed in its budget, was unable to assign him personnel. His collection got musty and he grew cranky.

The size of the Marine Corps contingent at the Naval War College doubled with the arrival of Second Lieutenant Zachary
O’Hara. Ben believed that he had found a new right arm to replace the one he had lost on maneuvers.

Because of the major’s longevity, modest needs, and respect, he was assigned to a small but lovely cottage on one of Coaster’s bluffs, with a view to the bay. Boone had an orderly and with his per diem and poker winnings, he was able to afford a maid and a cook. Many were the flag officers who wore a path to Ben’s door for a drink, a fine meal, and most of all, an evening of wisdom.

The “whiskey” hero had a sharp tongue to match his sharp mind. He could be intimidating. Ben’s kind of power intrigued the power cult of Newport. He was on everyone’s elite list. When the beast in him arose, in quarterly cycles mostly, he had no trouble linking up with a fine lady.

After a dinner beyond Zach’s normal fare, he took up a rocking chair next to Ben’s on the porch overlooking the Narragansett.

“I’d like to run something past you, Major,” Zach said.

“As long as it’s within budget.”

“The empty space down from our office. I have a use for it.”

“You’d suffocate. Can’t get cross-ventilation in there.”

“Suppose I use it only at night or on cool days.”

“What for?”

“Building scale models like the ones they have here for naval battles in the lecture halls.”

“Those admirals look like croupiers in Monte Carlo shoving battleships instead of gambler’s chips around.”

“Well, this is a war college.”

“You’re not here to play board games. A good general keeps a battlefield in his head.”

“I’m just a lieutenant, sir.”

“You studied the Battle of Marathon at AMP?”

“Yes, sir. Captain Storm taught that one personally.”

“Refresh me, Zach.”

“Four ninety b.c. comes to mind.”

“Close enough.”

Ben stopped his rocker and swept his arm in a semicircle. “If you look closely, you’ll see the Persian fleet.”

Zach squinted and studied the nothingness before him.

“Yes, sir, I see it.”

“Well, what’s going on?”

“The way the squadrons are moving, there must be six hundred boats, trières. Maybe between fifty and a hundred oarsmen on each of three levels. Another thirty or forty crew and infantry—that is, heavy and light bowmen and enough arrows to run a three-day battle. Supply boats with food and water, maintenance and ordnance crews, engineers.”

“Miss anything?”

“There are a hundred boats pulled with a hundred oarsmen, each, and each carrying five horses, cavalrymen, and handlers.”

“To what end?”

“Darius, the Persian emperor, has won the largest empire in the world. He had to use great resources to hold a line against the Russian tribes to his north. Crossing the Libyan desert is a bone in his throat. It was time for him to take the Greek option.”

“Which was?”

“He had installed governors and garrisons in the Greek provinces, but they were loosely held and in a constant state of rebellion. A few years earlier, Darius had sent a fleet to punish the city of Eritrea for failing to pay its taxes. Athens came to the aid of Eritrea and the Persian fleet was badly mauled by the sea. Darius was a sore loser. The Greek provinces, anchored by Athens and Sparta, had to be punished and brought under control. In truth, Darius was coming on to move the boundaries of his empire. Beyond the Hellenic region lay Rome and Gaul and all of Western Europe.”

Ben Boone was somewhat impressed. He threw an attack of questions. Many of the answers had to be a matter of personal analysis. Zachary O’Hara was intensely joined.

“This was a cumbersome fleet with primitive vessels and spit-to-the-wind navigation. It crossed the Aegean and rolled up the Cyclades Islands, constantly needing more supplies and conscripts.
It takes a lot of water to keep six thousand galleymen rowing and a lot of shovels to get rid of the shit from five hundred horses. They moved up on the Macedonian coast, north of Athens.”

Zach was on his feet scanning that ancient horizon, pressing his recollections. He described the Persian landing sites, a long sandy beach buffered and protected by a swampy marsh.

“Darius debarked and set up a perimeter, then uploaded and assembled his forces, pitched tents. He planned a march to open ground, where he would engage the enemy with his cavalry of longbowmen and make mud of the Greeks. Fact was, no one could stand against his horsemen on open ground.

“It was a mistake from the beginning,” Zach concluded.

“How so?”

“Darius’s leisurely unloading of his army gave the Greeks under Miltiades time to organize a defense, round up allied militia, set up ambushes in the passes, lay trees down across the mountain roads, and get a runner down to Sparta for help.”

“Would the Spartan forces arrive in time?” Ben asked.

“No. The Spartans were involved in a pagan ceremony and would not move their troops until after a full moon passed. However, the Athenians maneuvered the oncoming Persian army away from open ground, so that Darius was flanked on one side by the sea, had a swamp at his back, and was stuck with one of his flanks in the foothills of Mount Ethos. It was not the maneuvering ground Persia wanted.”

“Having dictated the battle site, Miltiades used his smaller numbers to outfox the enemy.”

“Normally,” Zach went on, “the center of an Athenian line was held by a phalanx of long spearmen, ten deep. Miltiades thinned the center out to four deep and gave it fallback positions and put his best forces on the flanks.

“Conversely, Darius put his best troops, the ‘Immortals’ and other elites, in the center, and the Persian flanks were turned over to conscripts from around the empire.

“. . . the Persians caused the Greek phalanx in the center to
retreat to secondary defensive positions, as the Greeks had planned.

“. . . Athens stood off a weak attack on her flanks, wheeled and executed a double envelopment of the Persians, an absolutely perfect pincer movement, for the first time in history.

“. . . the Persians were squeezed inside of a circle with no maneuvering room and effectively unable to use their longbowmen. The Greeks were winging spears, taking target practice. Their archers’ strength nullified and in jammed disarray, the Persians fled into the swamp and back to their boats. Darius lost seven to nine thousand men, and Miltiades fewer than two hundred.”

Ben Boone was very impressed. “If Persia had won, we would be looking over Xerxes Bay right now instead of Narragansett, speaking Farsi instead of English, and going to church in a Zoroaster temple. What happened, Zach? The Persian bowman was the finest in the world. He was well supplied. The Spartans were out of the action. Why did he fail? What have we learned from Marathon? After all, it was the might of an empire thrown at a weaker force.”

Zach needed time to consult with himself.

“The makeup of the Persian force and their battle mentality were unsuited for the occasion. They’d usually burst in with the best cavalry archers in the world, then set siege to their goal. It had worked everywhere else. The Persians were hill and mountain men who never developed chariot forces, but there are two main reasons I can see.”

“That’s interesting.”

“This may be conjecture, but Darius had to conquer Athens because the place was a hotbed of ideas that went against the very nature of royalty. Athens had the idea that kings or royal personages were not demigods on earth with divine rights but mere mortals. Athens, as a democracy, had made man flourish in thought, art, literature, in a manner not believed possible. It proved the idea that an imperial force could not defeat free men.”