The Second Sun, page 8
Captain Van Rensselaer went in alone when we arrived. He told the driver to take me back to the hotel and then to return. I was a tiny bit disappointed at not getting to meet Leahy, but then again, the five-star admiral who was sometimes called the second most powerful man in the world probably did not need to meet yet another lowly captain. I also realized I probably wasn’t going to get out to Chevy Chase to get my traveling clothes.
Evening was coming on and so I asked the desk clerk where the nearest gym was. He told me they had weights and exercise machines in a room next to the hotel’s indoor pool. I put in a call to my neighbor, who said he could go in the house and bring me whatever I needed. I thanked him and told him what to gather up and where I was staying. I reminded myself to bring him a wartime souvenir of some kind the next time I went out there. That problem solved, I spent the next hour pumping iron, doing some laps in the pool, and then treating myself to the whirlpool bath next to the pool. I was wondering if one could get bar service in the pool enclosure when the door opened and a statuesque brunette came through from the ladies’ changing room wearing a terry cloth bathrobe. She sat down on one of the pool benches, smiled at me, smoothed a bathing cap over her hair, and then slipped out of the bathrobe and into the pool, where she began a leisurely series of Australian-crawl laps. Very nice indeed, I thought, as I watched her slide through the water with a practiced, effortless ease, her head down, catching a breath every third stroke with a quick, minimal roll of her head. You’ve done this before, I thought, as I watched. The pool was shorter than a regular swimming pool, but she turned like a wet snake and never broke rhythm.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on soaking up the heat in the whirlpool bath and popping a couple of magnesium pills to urge all that lactic acid out of my sore muscles. Getting an occasional workout was no substitute for daily time with my beloved weights. I’d passed the stage where I needed coaching and instruction in a lifting gym. I did pretty much the same set of exercises each time, not pushing anything too hard, and my body rewarded me with some excellent sculpting and a complete release from whatever stupid stressors had come with any given day. I’d started lifting a long time ago, before the academy and then even aboard ship, to gain strength and a good-looking body, but eventually I’d learned that sustaining what I’d achieved was one of the best stress relievers out there. Charles Atlas, whose comic book ads had turned me on to weight lifting as a teenager, could relax. Plus, it was possible that I might, just might, be getting older. I’d watch the young bucks trying to impress each other with Herculean lifts that they’d later regret, and smile. You’ll see, I’d think to myself. You’ll see.
Fifteen minutes later she got out of the pool and went back over to where she’d parked the bathrobe. She took off the bathing cap and shook out her hair, giving me an opportunity to appraise at closer range. She was wearing an entirely modest one-piece bathing suit but there was no denying that she had an elegant and lovely body. She then turned and walked over to the whirlpool bath.
“May I join you, Captain?” she said.
Captain? My surprise must have shown. “By all means,” I said. She stepped down the steps into the pool and submerged in the quietly bubbling waters right up to her chin.
“I’m Lieutenant Commander Janet Waring, from ONI,” she said. “I was told to come to this hotel, get a room, and then meet you and a Captain Van Rensselaer for dinner at six thirty.”
“How’d you recognize me?” I asked.
“They showed me facial pictures,” she replied, with the barest hint of smile, as she rose out of the water to sit on the hot tub’s bench. She had what I’d call a severe face, one that could have been conventionally pretty if not for that emanation of reserved authority with not a hint of coquettishness. “They told me that Van Rensselaer was exceptionally tall,” she said. “And that you were a dedicated weight lifter.” She pretended to briefly ogle my chest and shoulders. “So: all in all, not that difficult.”
I laughed. Her voice was deeper than those of most of the women I’d met, and she radiated a degree of commissioned confidence. A lady lieutenant commander in ONI. Given her apparent age, mid-thirties, I guessed, she must have some important skills.
“Well,” I said. “This is all news to me, but I suppose I look forward to it.”
“Suppose?”
“I wasn’t aware that I was in the ONI pictorial files,” I said. “And I don’t think you should tell Van Rensselaer that he is, either. I’m not anybody special in this man’s Navy; he, on the other hand, appears to be exceptionally connected, so much so that he requested a meeting this afternoon with the CNO on a no-notice basis and was given an audience. Immediately.”
“Yes, we heard about that,” she said. “But not on the first try, correct? Captain Villem Van Rensselaer. Consorts with presidents, etcetera, etcetera. The Office of Naval Intelligence keeps tabs on people in Washington who either could be considered powerful or have powerful access. You have that access—now, and before, on the CNO’s personal hit squad. That way if one of these people call, we know how to act. Makes us look good.”
“Which is all-important,” I acknowledged, and meant it.
“You betchum, Red Ryder,” she said, and then we both laughed. Suddenly I liked her. I’d met one other ONI lady officer, and she would have fit right in with the flying monkey brigade serving that wicked witch in Oz.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll check with the dining room to see if there’s a reservation for us tonight. Van Rensselaer said nothing about dinner to me, but he did ask Admiral King for some ONI help.”
“There is a reservation,” she said. “I was told to wear civvies, and to arrive in the dining room at eighteen forty. My job in ONI is as the head of the division assigned to evaluate Japan’s remaining capability to wage war in preparation for the invasion. I speak tolerably good Japanese and I can even read kanji. Other than that, I’m in the dark about this evening, too. I assume this must have something to do with Japanese weapons.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “And ours, too.”
“So,” she urged. “Something new?”
I hesitated. “You have no idea,” I replied unhelpfully and rose to get out of the hot tub. I think I was still a little disturbed at being in ONI’s files. “But I suspect you soon will. See you at the dinner table.”
THIRTEEN
THE GAME BEGINS
I went down to the main lobby at six. I’d picked up the suitcase my neighbor had generously delivered to the hotel. I was wearing a three-piece Gaskill-Chewning light gray woolen bespoke suit made in New York to fit my outsize frame. The hotel bar was just off the main lobby so I availed myself of a Scotch-rocks and then went back to the lobby and took one of the out-of-the-way chairs parked against the wall to watch the procession of new arrivals, hotel guests, and all the people waiting to meet other people that were filling up the lobby area. It was an eclectic crowd but typical of wartime Washington, more men than women, no children, everyone trying to watch everyone to see who was there this evening without being too obvious about it. There was an optimistic aura about it all, with Germany defeated, a new president, and Japan pretty obviously on the ropes. Tell that to the Marines, I thought idly.
And tell that to the Army, Navy, and Marines headed for Okinawa and beyond. On the ropes, perhaps, but in a corner, like a dangerous animal. Dear God, I thought, as my imagination built a picture of Marines and Army grunts storming ashore—in homeland Japan.
And now this—thing. The gadget. The name all these wizards, magicians, alchemists, and scientific necromancers involved had chosen to call it, in order to avoid saying out loud what they were really doing. I could see the absolute utility of having a weapon like that. When you thought about it, what was the difference between flying 250 B-29s over Tokyo and setting the entire city on fire and this thing, this gadget? Well, 250 bombers, for one. If Van Rensselaer was to be believed this bomb, this atomic bomb, would flash the power and the heat of the sun itself, over its target in one-millionth of a second, reducing every living thing it touched to the purest form of interstellar carbon, and radioactive carbon at that. I finished my Scotch in one go.
“Captain Bowen?”
I looked up. Van Rensselaer and the lovely Janet Waring were standing in front of me. Van Rensselaer was wearing a suit that looked like a tux but wasn’t. Waring had cleaned up very well indeed in a shin-length little black dress with a string of pearls around her neck. I had to stop myself from staring at her. “Sorry,” I said. “I was miles away, thinking about—gadgets.”
Van Rensselaer gave me a halfhearted warning look and then indicated it was time for dinner. Off we went, the impossibly tall Van Rensselaer easing Waring and myself ahead of him to our reserved corner table. People stared, and I had to wonder if it was Waring or Van Rensselaer they were staring at. Certainly not me, that was for sure. My bet was on Waring, but then I liked girls. I wasn’t sure what Van Rensselaer liked, if anything or anyone.
He immediately assumed the duties of host. We ordered drinks—another Scotch for me, a vodka martini for Waring, and a glass of sparkling water with a lime wedge for himself. Having not had that much to eat that day, I took it slow with the second Scotch. The service and then the dinner were excellent. The conversation was innocuous, with Van Rensselaer treating the two of us to a colorful running commentary about who was who in the dining room. His knowledge was impressive. Clearly, we were seeing an exclusive clientele for wartime Washington. The prices on the menu were startling for someone like me, who rarely dined out, but I followed his lead. For some reason, visions of my commanding officer tour in a heavy cruiser kept flitting through my brain as I watched all these well-nourished swells. I’d seen my share of naval gunfights, and briefly wondered if official Washington, while Navy men were dying of burns, explosive shock, or fighting off sharks in oil-covered tropical waters after one of those deadly night engagements with the IJN, had been going to dinner in places just like this, talking knowingly about combat statistics and strategic advantage.
Waring had been gliding through the entire scene as if she had been to the manor born. I soon realized she was quietly playing up to Van Rensselaer, who was visibly enjoying her attention. Who wouldn’t, I thought, but then I wondered: what was this dinner all about? Was he going to gather us both to the hotel bar after dinner and reveal the Manhattan Project to her? In a hotel bar? Not bloody likely. Then it hit me: she already knew. ONI already knew. She was playing up to Van Rensselaer because she knew he was a Washington kingpin in some important project. If that was true, I asked myself for the hundredth time, why the hell had Van Rensselaer pulled me onto this atomic web? And if that wasn’t true, what was she doing here with the two of us? Suddenly I yearned for the happy simplicity of sitting in the captain’s chair up on the bridge of my cruiser, sipping on serious coffee and waiting for the sun to set and the fun to begin.
Yes, I’d overheard the two Japanese prisoners talk about their own weapons program, but that could have been talk about anything at all. So what? Through a mildly Scotch-befuddled haze I began to wonder if I hadn’t been drawn into something that went beyond finding out if Japan had a similar program. I thought about excusing myself for a head call and then keeping going, right the hell out of this hotel. It was the same feeling I’d sometimes gotten out there in the western Pacific, when everything went quiet, much too quiet, and the radars had no contacts, surface or air. I would order the bridge to sound general quarters, button up the ship, and begin to maneuver evasively in the dark. That back-of-the-neck crawling sensation had saved us from being torpedoed more than once. I was beginning to feel it now.
I was made no wiser through dinner. It was as if Van Rensselaer had been purposefully keeping the conversation innocuous. Over coffee, he asked Waring to describe the current organization of ONI headquarters. Not what they were doing, but how they were organized within the Navy department to deal with and cooperate with the rest of the Washington headquarters’ intelligence departments, such as Army Intelligence, the State Department’s INR bureau, or even the OSS.
“Poorly,” she admitted. “In my limited experience, wartime intelligence is a parochial business. Each organization treats its collection of secrets, however obtained, as a treasure to be protected at all costs. That doesn’t apply to the operational fleet commands, of course. They’re our principal ‘customers.’ But other agencies? They’re our bureaucratic competitors, not our allies. We’re not an operational spy agency, like the OSS. Our information comes from naval attachés around the Allied world, the signals intelligence stations who work for the fleet commands, after-action reports from the fleet, and quite a bit from civilian industry. We also have connections in the various American laboratories and scientific research centers supporting the war effort. I think the other agencies and bureaus feel the same way. I think it cries out for centralization, but, with a war on, that’s not likely.”
“Captain Bowen,” he asked, “what’s been your experience with ONI, first as a cruiser skipper, and then recently, as part of the CNO’s personal staff?”
“As a cruiser skipper, almost none,” I said. “We’d get intelligence briefings from our operational commanders and the Pacific Fleet commander. ONI published some recognition guides—enemy ships and aircraft—but otherwise, ships had no contact with them. At the CNO staff level, ONI was, well, not highly regarded. Much too bureaucratic, unwilling to turn loose information, and usually hiding behind a ‘you have no need to know’ mantra when we mere mortals would ask inconvenient questions.”
Van Rensselaer looked at Waring, who shrugged. “That’s about right,” she admitted. “We are in the secret intelligence business. We share with operational commanders, but most of our information is not time sensitive, as in, here they come, look out. We collect, we analyze, we sift out trends, we give estimates of the Japanese’s war-making potential based on reports from the commanders of submarines regarding attrition of Japanese imports and after-action reports to estimate how many ships are left, or how many aircraft.”
“You sound like military librarians,” he said.
She bristled at that. “We like to think we contribute, if only because no one else in the Navy is doing anything like we do. Remember Midway.”
“That wasn’t ONI,” Van Rensselaer pointed out. “That was a dedicated group of analysts working out of the basement of the Fourteenth Naval District headquarters building at Pearl. With opposition.”
“But which ONI funded and staffed,” she retorted.
“Fair point,” he admitted. “But unwillingly. As I remember, Nimitz made ONI do it.”
“Where we going with this discussion?” I asked, finally.
Van Rensselaer smiled. “Ah,” he said. “Captain Heart-of-the-Matter speaks. Okay: I want to know if ONI headquarters could run an actual intelligence operation in the far western Pacific. Without any of the other Washington agencies’ knowledge. Using strictly Navy communications systems. Based on Guam, probably. Driving Navy operational assets. In a highly dangerous place, well behind enemy lines. In the next month.”
“What’s the target?” Waring asked immediately.
“At this moment, you do not have the need to know,” Van Rensselaer said, innocently.
Waring snorted. “Touché,” she said. “But c’mon: we’re not secret agents. That’s not what we do. I mean, we’d need an op-con center, naval communications station access, area training, and—”
“Wouldn’t you just,” he observed. “Your ‘we need’ sounds to me like that’s precisely what you do. You just don’t talk about it.”
She gave him an exasperated look. She was, like me, getting tired of these little verbal skirmishes. But then he changed the subject.
“Do you have direct access to Admiral Thebaud?” he asked.
“Well, yes, I do, but—”
“Ask him if you can manage an op like that on short notice,” Van Rensselaer said. “And ask him tomorrow. First thing. Tell him who’s asking, namely me. Then tell him I said for him to call Admiral Leahy at the White House and give him a yes or no answer. By noon tomorrow. I was told you can go in and ask him a question like that. Can you do that?”
She was clearly taken aback. “He’ll demand to know what it is you’re talking about, and I’ll have to tell him I have no idea.”
“Yup,” Van Rensselaer said. His demeanor, however, had changed. No more the genial host of the dinner table. His expression revealed a personal sense of power, one I’d seen before in the Portsmouth shipyard and then in the CNO’s office. You. Idiot. You. Command power and authority. Combined with his towering physical presence and those fire-bright eyes, he now had Waring’s complete attention. Mine, too. And then he seemed to subside.
“Okay, forget that,” he said. “I’ll do it myself. Saves time.”
I knew she wanted to ask more questions, but Van Rensselaer was clearly no longer in the mood. He got up, told us he had the check, thanked us both courteously for coming, and strode across the barroom toward the lobby. A Marine officer in uniform, whom neither of us had noticed, was waiting for him in the lobby and they headed for the front door.
We sat there for a long moment, both of us trying to absorb what had just happened. She tilted her head and asked me if I knew what the hell was going on here. In one sense, I did, but in another, this business with ONI had come as a complete surprise. Based on my experience, ONI was meant to be a support organization to commanders of operational forces: cryptography, indications and warning, intel on enemy ships and aircraft, classified maps and charts, and other matters. But individual ships’ commanding officers rarely had any direct contact with ONI. For public consumption, anyway, it was just another Washington headquarters bureau, and definitely not a real cloak-and-dagger bunch. Time for some equivocation on my part.
“Yes and no,” I answered. “All I can tell you right now is that it concerns something so important and so big that it could end the war with Japan in one day. And if it’s any consolation, I have no idea why I’m involved, much less you and ONI.”
