The Corp - Counterattack Part 3

(Two) Washington, D.C.

1735 Hours 19 December 1941 When Senator Richardson S. Fowler walked in, Fleming Pickering was sitting on the wide, leather-upholstered sill of a window in the Senator's sitting room. A gla.s.s of whiskey was in Pickering's hand.

Senator Fowler's suite was six rooms on the corner of the eighth floor of the Foster Lafayette, overlooking the White House, which was almost directly across Pennsylvania Avenue from the hotel.

"I had them let me in," Fleming Pickering said. "I hope you don't mind. The house is full."

"Oh, don't be silly," Senator Fowler said automatically, and then, with real feeling, "Jesus, Flem, it's good to see you!"

Senator Fowler was more than a decade older than Fleming Pickering. He was getting portly, and his jowls were starting to grow rosy and to sag.

He looks more and more like a politician, Flem Pickering thought, aware that it was unkind. Years ago, as a very young man, Pickering had heard and immediately adopted as part of his personal philosophy an old and probably ba.n.a.l observation that to have friends, one must permit them to have one serious flaw. So far as Pickering was concerned, Richardson Fowler's flaw was that he was a politician, the Junior Senator from the Great State of California.

Flem Pickering had a habit of picking up trite and ba.n.a.l phrases and adopting them as his own, ofttimes verbatim, sometimes revising them. So far as he was concerned, Richardson Fowler was the exception to a phrase he had lifted from Will Rogers and altered. Will Rogers said he had never met a man he didn't like. Pickering's version was that-Richardson Fowler excepted-he had never met a politician he had liked.

He had tried and failed to understand what drove Fowler to seek public office. It certainly wasn't that he needed the work. Richardson Fowler had inherited from his father the San Francisco Courier-Herald, nine smaller newspapers, and six radio stations. His wife and her brother owned, it was said, more or less accurately, two square blocks of downtown San Francisco, plus several million acres of timberland in Washington and Oregon.

If Fowler was consumed by some desire to do good, to lead people in this direction or that, it seemed to Pickering that the newspapers and the radio stations gave Fowler the means to accomplish it. He didn't have to run for office-with all that meant-for the privilege of coming east to the hot, muggy, provincial, small Southern town that was the nation's capital, to consort with a depressing collection of failed lawyers and other scoundrels.

But, oh, Flem Pickering, he thought, what a hypocrite you are! Right now you are delighted to have access to a man with the political clout you pretend to scorn.

Senator Fowler dropped his heavy, battered, well-filled briefcase at his feet and crossed the room to Pickering. They shook hands, and then the Senator put his arm around the younger man's shoulders and hugged him.

"I was worried about you, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d," he said. "You and Patricia. She here with you?"

"She's in San Francisco," Pickering said. "She's fine."

"And Pick?"

"He's at Pensacola, learning how to fly," Pickering said. "I thought you knew."

"I knew he was going down there," the Senator said. "I had dinner with him, oh, six days, a week ago. But he never came to say good-bye to me."

There was disappointment, perhaps even a little resentment, in his voice. Senator Fowler had known Pick Pickering from the day he was born.

"If you were a second lieutenant and they gave you two days off, would you spend them seeing an aging uncle-politician, or trying to get laid?" Pickering asked with a smile.

The Senator snorted a laugh. "Well, he could have tried to squeeze in fifteen minutes for me between jumps," he said. He turned and walked to an antique sideboard loaded with whiskey bottles. "I have been thinking about having one of these for the last two hours. You all right?"

Flem Pickering raised his nearly full gla.s.s to show that he was.

Senator Fowler half-filled a gla.s.s with Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch, added one ice cube, and then sprayed soda into it from a wire-wrapped soda bottle.

"This stuff," the Senator said, raising his gla.s.s, "is already getting in short supply. G.o.dd.a.m.n German submarines."

"I have four hundred and eleven cases," Fleming Pickering said. "If you treat me right, I might put a case or two aside for you."

Fowler, smiling, looked at him curiously.

"Off the Princess, the Destiny, and the Enterprise," Pickering explained.

The Pacific Princess, 51,000 tons, a sleek, fast pa.s.senger liner, was the flagship of the Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation. The Pacific Destiny and the Pacific Enterprise, 44,500 tons each, were sister ships, slightly smaller and slower, but, some said, more luxurious.

"Is that why you're here?" Senator Fowler asked. "The Navy after them again? Flem ..."

Pickering held up his hand to shut him off. "I sold them," he said.

"When rape is inevitable, etcetera, etcetera?" Fowler asked.

"No," Pickering said. "I think I could have won that one in the courts. The Navy could have commandeered them, but they couldn't have forced me to sell them."

Senator Fowler did not agree, but he didn't say so. "And it wasn't patriotism, either," Pickering said. "More like enlightened self-interest."

"Oh?"

"Or a vision of the future," Pickering said.

"Now you've lost me," Senator Fowler confessed.

"We came home from Hawaii via Seattle," Pickering said, pausing to sip at his drink. "On the Destiny. We averaged twenty-seven knots for the trip. It took us one hundred twenty hours-"

"Fast crossing," Fowler interrupted, doing some quick, rough arithmetic. "Five and a half days."

"Uh-huh," Pickering said, "testing the notion that a fast pa.s.senger liner can run away from submarines."

"Not proving the theory? You made it."

"The theory presumes that submarines are not sitting ahead of you, waiting for you to come into range," Pickering said. "And there may not have been any j.a.panese submarines around."

"OK," Senator Fowler agreed. "Theory."

"While we were in Seattle, I drove past the Boeing plant. Long lines of huge, four-engine airplanes, B-17s, capable of making it nonstop to Hawaii in eleven, twelve hours."

"Uh-huh," Fowler agreed. He had flown in the B-17 and was impressed with it. "That airplane may just get our chestnuts out of the fire in this war."

Pickering went off at a tangent.

"You heard, d.i.c.k, that some military moron had all the B-17s in Hawaii lined up in rows for the convenience of the j.a.panese?"

Fowler shook his head in disbelief or disgust or both. "There, and in the Philippines," he said. "Christ, they really caught us with our pants down."

"I talked to an Army Air Corps pilot in the bar of the hotel," Pickering said. "He said a flight of B-17s from the States arrived while the raid was going on. And with no ammunition for their machine guns."

"I heard that, too."

"Anyway," Pickering said, "looking at those B-17s in Seattle, it occurred to me that they could more or less easily be modified to carry pa.s.sengers, and that, presuming we win this war, that's the way the public is going to want to cross oceans in the future. Twelve hours to Hawaii beats five or six days all to h.e.l.l."

"Out of school-this is cla.s.sified-Howard Hughes proposes to build an airplane-out of plywood, no less-that will carry four hundred soldiers across the Atlantic."

"Then you understand what I'm saying. The day of the pa.s.senger liner, I'm afraid, is over. And since the Navy was making a decent offer for my ships, I decided to take it."

"A decent offer?"

"They're spending the taxpayers' money, not their own. A very decent offer."

"All of them?"

"Just the liners. I'm keeping the cargo ships, and I will not sell them to the Navy. If the Navy tries to make me sell them, I'll take them to the Supreme Court, and win. Anyway, that's where I got all the Scotch. I can also make you a very good deal on some monogrammed sterling silver flatware from the first-cla.s.s dining rooms."

Fowler chuckled. "I'm surprised the Navy let you keep that."

"So am I," Pickering said.

"What are you going to do with all that money?" Fowler asked.

"Get rid of it, quickly, before that sonofab.i.t.c.h across the street thinks of some way to tax me out of it," Pickering said.

"You are speaking, Sir," Fowler said, mockingly sonorous, "of your President and the Commander in Chief."

"You bet I am," Pickering said. "I told my broker to buy into Boeing, Douglas, and whatever airlines he can find. I think I'd like to own an airline."

"And when Pick comes home from the war, he can run it?"

Pickering met his eyes. "Sure. Why not? I don't intend to dwell on the other possibility."

"I don't know why I feel awkward saying this," Senator Fowler said, "but I pray for him, Flem."

"Thank you," Pickering said. "So do I."

"So what are you doing in Washington?" Fowler said, to change the subject.

"You know a lawyer named Bill Donovan? Wall Street?"

"Sure."

"You know what he's doing these days?"

"Where did you think he's getting the money to do it?" He examined his now-empty gla.s.s. "I'm going to build another one of these. You want one?"

"Please, d.i.c.k."

"You think you'd make a good spy?" Senator Fowler asked.

"No."

"Then why are you going to see Donovan?"

"He called me. Once before December seventh, and twice since. Once when Patricia and I were still in Honolulu, and the second the day before yesterday, in Frisco. He got me the priority to fly in here."

"Do you know what he's doing?"

"I figured you would."

Fowler grunted as he refilled their gla.s.ses. He handed Pickering his drink, and then went on, "Right now, he's the Coordinator of Information. For a dollar a year. It was Franklin Roosevelt's idea."

"That sounds like a propaganda outfit."

"I think maybe it's supposed to. He's got Robert Sherwood, the playwright, and some other people like that, who will do propaganda. They've moved into the National Inst.i.tutes of Health building. But there's another angle to it, an intelligence angle. He's gathered together a group of experts-he's got nine or ten, and he's shooting for a dozen, and this is probably what he has in mind for you-who are going to collect all the information generated by all the intelligence services, you know, the Army's G-2, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI, the State Department, everybody, and try to make some overall, global sense out of it. For presentation to the President."

"I don't think I understand," Pickering confessed.

"Donovan makes the point, and I think he's right, that the service intelligence operations are too parochial, that they have blinders on them like a carriage horse. They see the war only from the viewpoint of the Navy or the Army or whatever."

The Senator looked at Pickering to see if he was getting through. Pickering made a "come on, tell me more" gesture with his hand.

"OK. Let's say the Navy finds out, as they did, that the Germans had established a weather station and aerial navigation facilities in Greenland. The Navy solution to the problem would be to send a battleship to blow it up-"

"Where would they get one? The Navy's fresh out of battleships. The j.a.panese used them for target practice."

"You want to hear this or not?"

"Sorry."

"You're going to have to learn to curb your lip, Flem, if you're going to go to work for Bill Donovan. Or anywhere else in the government."

"What happened to free speech?"

"It went out the same window with Franklin Roosevelt's pledge that our boys would never fight on foreign soil," the Senator said.

"I'm not working for him yet," Pickering said.

Smiling, Senator Fowler shook his head, and then went on, "As I was saying, if Navy Intelligence finds something, they propose a Navy solution. If the Army Air Corps had found out about the Germans on Greenland, they would have proposed sending bombers to eliminate them. Am I getting through to you?"

Pickering nodded.

"The idea is that Donovan's people-his 'twelve disciples,' as they're called-will get intelligence information from every source, evaluate it, and make a strategic recommendation. In other words, after the Navy found the Greenland Germans, Donovan's people might have recommended sending Army Air Corps bombers."

"That sounds like a good idea."

"It is, but I don't think it will work."

"Why not?"

"Interservice rivalry, primarily. And that now includes J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Until Bill Donovan showed up, Edgar thought that if war came, the FBI would be in charge of intelligence, period. Edgar is a very dangerous man if crossed."

"The story I got was that Donovan got Hoover his job, running the FBI."