Leon Uris (30 page)

There was great consternation in Newport when it was learned that George Washington Barjac, a Catholic, had purchased five wooded and prized acres of cliffside land.

The mansions of Newport had been solid affirmations of the success of the Reformation. How to handle the invasion? It would do no good to ostracize Barjac, but he was building a family hamlet up there. The architecture was vulgar, low, and hugging the bluff lines. No grandeur. However, it was in keeping with the shore below it . . . rather graceful, actually.

Attitudes mellowed in time.

Hell, Newport was a tolerant place. Didn’t it have the first Hebrew synagogue in America? What of that?

On second thought, having George Washington Barjac as the Newport house Catholic had a certain enticement to it. The man was an entrepreneur, a tobacco king, and his wife, Josephine, could charm a lion out of a meat bone.

Fifi Barjac had a head start over Rhode Islanders in playing the arch game of court. Court had been in her blood for generations, centuries. The influx of their Parisian utterness soon had curious noses sniffing. From her accent to her scent to her opinions and tastes, she set an impeccable standard that made her the pied piper of Newport.

Their salon showed the shadowy, fuzzy art that was now gaining notice in Paris, and words were spoken at readings by the authors of the day, and music was performed by the composers and singers and players that no one but Madame Josephine could obtain.

Even the highest lords of industry looked for the chance to rub elbows in that certain Fifi French aura.

“Benjamin Malachi Boone!” George roared as Ben’s shay passed through the carriage gate. George was grayed and thinning atop with a potbelly amidships, but as neatly pruned as a Faustian character, and he greeted Ben with a bear hug.

The lady alongside George made a full statement of her command, with no words needed. Josephine was a stunning matter, in full bloom and of easy manner.

“And you are the son of Sergeant Major O’Hara!”

“Yes, sir.”

George took a step back, examined Zachary, and nearly broke into tears as he pinched Zach’s cheeks and unloaded a juicy kiss that landed somewhere on the bridge of Zach’s nose.

“I, of course, was long out of the Corps when your sainted father served, but I had the honor to meet him on a number of occasions and I even saw you a few times as a boy, but you wouldn’t remember.”

“He spoke of you with great reverence,” Zach said.

“My wife, Madame Josephine Barjac.”

She kissed Zach on both cheeks, her eyes twinkling. The host and hostess each took an arm and led him up a long path toward a knoll.

Halfway up the path, Lilly Villiard came to meet them with a big embrace and kisses on the cheeks of Ben Boone.

Zach became instantly aware of her. She was a petite lady with eye-catching roundness and of elegant carriage. Her milliner’s creation was a broad-brimmed hat that curved to form a classic silhouette of her face. Her white skin was framed by black curls that lay across bared shoulders.

Lilly’s nose was definitely Barjac, but she wore hers as an attraction.

“My daughter, Baroness Lilly Villiard, and this, dear Lilly, is the son of Paddy O’Hara, one of the great men of the Corps.”

Zach shook her hand and nodded, taken by the way she bore her four decades with little flaw, like a nicely turned out Limoges statuette.

“Nice to meet you, ma’am,” he said.

“Call me Lilly,” she said.

“And I am George and this is Fifi and this is your home. Lilly will introduce you around and we will catch up with you.”

Lilly took Zach’s arm pleasantly and they ambled up ahead, exchanging getting-acquainted banter.

At the top of the lane, they passed through an arabesque archway that led to an immense lawn and garden. It was as though a book had been opened in its center and a lace valentine had popped up; a tree bearing a swing bearing a little girl, a row of pansies with their faces all bent in the same direction, a dog leaping for a ball, two boys rolling down a slope, a girl running a hoop, ladies in little boxy straw bonnets, and two gentlemen in conference with their heads close and hands clasped. Behind the tree, lovers sneaking a kiss.

If one jiggled the tabs, the valentine went into motion, the tree swung, the pansies swayed in unison, the doggy went up and down on his hind legs.

Zach had never seen a scene like it, except in an illustration in a book. The whole place seemed to be floating.

. . . until a scream as a child fell into the frog pond, was fetched by his nanny, and the mud scraped off.

It was easy to tell the Barjac sisters from their sisters-in-law, not
only by their fine noses, but a universal twinkle of mischief and matching scents.

“Oh, hi
hi,” followed every introduction.

Zachary acquainted himself at each level. He fungoed fly balls treetop-high to the boys and was a one-man demon on the soccer field, but it was his skipping rope double Dutch that won him all the maidens. Zach knew his double Dutch. Gunny Kunkle at AMP used it as a torture device.

He moved among them well; no stuffy yachting type or golden-armed admiral, but a Marine like Uncle Ben and George Washington Barjac himself. Winks, smiles, nice little touching.

Onde la Mer was a mood piece, a low rippling spread along the cliff, a departure from the massive Protestant manor houses, a cloud misting in and out of the levels with a central Moorish fountain and graceful archways. But France was also represented in a tiled roof overhang on the big patio and a square like that of a Mediterranean farming village.

Walkways went out like spokes to a number of petite villas set on the bluffs.

A long table had been set for the children and their nannies. The adults’ tables were at a remove, with smaller and more intimate seating.

Seeing that Lilly and Zach were pleasantly fine, Fifi seated them at a table for two, where they could be properly viewed and gossiped over.

Zach had doffed his jacket for the games on the lawn and could not help but note that Lilly seemed to enjoy a quick feel of the steel in his arm, and for a flash or two, their eyes said it was very pleasant.

The big serving table was filled with creatures he had never seen before and other foods foreign to the enlisted men’s and officers’ messes. Lilly had a cart with samples of everything rolled up to their table, and she filled their wineglasses. They clinked and everyone looked toward them and clinked.

Then Zach won the day. There was an outbreak of hugs and
kisses and English and French babble as the children were paraded through with their nannies.

Zach took the hand of one of the granddaughters and kissed it gallantly.

“But you don’t know my name,” she said.

“You are Alice with the blue ribbons to match your blue eyes. And this is Madeleine and Paul and you are André and Nicole.”

George and Fifi were impressed.

“You have made yourself very popular, Lieutenant,” Lilly said.

“This whole thing doesn’t seem quite real,” he said.

“We are all on our good behavior today. Everyone is talking to everyone, but it’s still early.” She smiled toward Fifi and her father and raised her glass once more.

More dishes arrived as works of art.

An hour into the meal and the music of flute and harp made the wine go down like magic nectar.

Zach became light-headed. Impromptu singing broke out and storytelling on a borderline of salty humor, and a good Gallic argument erupted with much flurry and no blows.

Then more stories.

Then toasts.

And the patio filled up with children.

Now dancing.

And a slow balloon descent back to earth.

They eased off, two by two, leaving the table as though limping from a battlefield.

Lilly found an empty hammock. Zach insisted, weakly, that she take it.

“No, no, Lieutenant. You must be exhausted from working your way through lunch. Let me spoil you.”

He lay on his back, swinging in a kind of levitation. Zach stared at a starling nest in the tiles. As the birds came out for their own cleanup feast, he was taken by the number that had been able to fit into the nest, and a scent of tobacco soon held the courtyard and he blinked curiously. Lilly was smoking a cigarette in a long holder.

“Hello,” she said as she rocked the hammock.

“This is nice.”

“Good. You’re looking at me strangely.”

“I’ve never seen a woman smoke a cigarette.”

“Do you mind?”

“No.”

“That might only be the first of our naughty habits.”

Major Ben and George Barjac came up behind Lilly. Zach gave them a wave, a grin, and he konked off to sleep.

Zach laid the monograph on his desk and made an ugly face at it. There was nothing so puzzling as the memoir of an admiral or general who was defeated in a battle explaining how he had really won.

Ben’s footsteps on the stairs gave him a reprieve. He came to his feet, smiling.

“Welcome back from Washington, Major.”

They gave each other light jabs on the left shoulder, a way of personal greeting. Ben nodded at the workload on Zach’s desk.

“Doesn’t look like you’ve missed me,” Ben said.

“I feel like we’re really up and running,” Zach answered.

Ben took a document from his briefcase and handed it to Zach.

Naval War College Project Random Study Sixteen is hereby reclassified as Top Secret. Second Lieutenant Zachary O’Hara, USMC, is accorded Top Secret clearance in matters relevant to this study.

The meaning of it thrilled him. Zach had entered the ranks of a small circle of men, keepers of national secrets. Ben let him think about it.

“How did this all come about?”

“The way you’ve attacked this project means we are going to have a comprehensive look at the hits, runs, and errors of over five thousand years of amphibious warfare. Your line of logic says we need to lay a foundation for modern thinking to be examined and tested.”

“Hell, I’m not that smart,” Zach said.

“Could be. Could be that the subject has been badly overlooked. If you keep going the way you are going, ‘Random Study Sixteen’ can become an important work. Here’s where we start having some fun. You remember Richard X. Maple?”

“Yep.”

“Maple is leading an American team to draw up a naval protocol with the British Admiralty defining areas of vital national interest, joint use of facilities, intelligence sharing, joint training. You yourself predicted this at AMP.”

“I didn’t realize anyone was listening.”

“What do you know about the Amnesty Islands?”

Zach shrugged.

“It is a small archipelago of both volcanic and coral origin south of Jamaica, in the middle of nowhere, between the Mona and Windward Passages.

“Back in the 1700s, the British were unable to stop a brigand, Sebastian Lyme, from becoming the scourge of shipping on the Spanish Main. So they made a deal. Lyme was declared an earl and awarded the Amnesties as his earldom in exchange for protecting the British shipping lanes. Lyme only partly behaved. Entrance to the Amnesties is treacherous, with squalls, reefs, shifting channels, rock bottoms, and a convergence of rough weather.

“So long as British cargo was protected, the Brits turned a blind eye to the islands’ use as a pirates’ haven bulging with contraband.”

Zach got the flow. “Are the British turning the Amnesties over to us as part of the protocol?”

“That’s it. Paragraph ten. The Amnesties didn’t mean doodly shit to America until our recent ambition to build a canal. The islands will become very important, afford us an advance base, not a great one but a place from which we can monitor the seas to and from the isthmus.”

“What’s doing there now?”

“Still an earldom with the worst kind of sugar plantation operation. Dirty history, slave breeding in cribs, penal colony, black magic, orchids, mosquitoes, smugglers’ paradise, Chinese colony
runs the port . . . There are a few thousand blacks working the cane fields and refinery. They die off young.”

“Trouble?”

“No, but I’ve never seen a black man from the Caribbean who wasn’t rightfully pissed off. There were a few surviving Carib Indians on one of the islands and they staged an insurrection about ten years ago and joined the other two million murdered by the Spanish, who were replaced with slaves. We’re not getting involved in local politics. We have other fish to fry.”

Ben spread a map. “Each island has several names. They’ve never been fully surveyed. For our purposes, we have identified them as Sinkhole, Mudhole, Blackhole, Asshole Major, Petite Asshole, Rat Hole, Bunghole, and the large island here, Shithole.”

Zachary toured them with a magnifying glass, smelling out Ben Boone’s prints. “Looks like the Amnesties are off the trail, isolated, away from prying eyes, and filled with beaches and jungle, a perfect training ground to practice landings and jungle warfare.”

“I’ve wanted these islands for a long time,” Ben said. “ ‘Random Sixteen’ ties in perfectly. The Corps can work up dozens of exercises. The navy can have itself a firing range. Future joint Marine-Navy maneuvers will home us in on the full possibilities of naval gunfire. All the things that ‘Random Sixteen’ will call for, future weaponry, wireless ship-to-shore communications, crafting the perfect landing boat, can be proven there. The navy has to give the Corps these islands to garrison.
Capisce?
”

“What are our chances?”

“ ‘Random Sixteen’ now becomes essential to shaking the Civil War dust off them hound-dog admirals.”

“Nothing,” Zach said, “nothing is going to get in the way of me getting this project done, and a hell of a lot faster than you think.”

They went over it again. It was heady stuff, a sweet coming together, and by Christ, Ben the old master could pull it off. They were glowing from the challenge.

“Anything exciting happen in Newport?” Ben said, slyly shifting the subject.

“I’ve been to Onde la Mer a couple of times,” Zach said. “Three nights back, there was a reading in the salon by Mark Twain, just the family and a few close friends. It bends a man’s mind.”