Semper Fi

Chapter One

(One)

Company "D," 4th Marines

Shanghai, China

2 January 1941

PFC Kenneth J. McCoy, USMC, stood with his hands on his hips staring at the footlocker at the end of his bed. He'd been that way for quite some time; he was trying to make up his mind. McCoy was twenty-one years old, five feet ten and one-half inches tall, and he weighed 156 pounds. He was well built, but lithe rather than muscular. He had even features and fair skin and wore his light brown hair in a crew cut. His eyes were hazel, and bright; and when he was thinking hard, as he was now, one eyebrow lifted and his lip curled as if the problem he faced amused him. He had once been an altar boy at Saint Rose of Lima Church in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and there were traces of that still in him: There was now, as then, a suggestion that just beneath the clean-cut, innocent surface, was an alter ego with horns itching for the chance to jump out and do something forbidden.

It was the day after New Year's, and PFC McCoy had liberty. And it was two days after payday, and he had his "new gambling money" in his pocket. So he wanted to go try his luck. But what he couldn't quite make up his mind about was whether or not he should leave the compound armed, and if so, how.

What had happened was that on Christmas Eve at a dance hall called the "Little Club," there had been a not entirely unexpected altercation between

United States Marines and marines assigned to the International Military Force in Shanghai by His Majesty, Victor Emmanuel III, King of the Italians.

It wasn't the first time the Americans and the Italians had gotten into it, but this time it had gotten out of hand.

McCoy had heard that as many as eighteen Italians were dead, and there were eight Marines in sick bay, two of them in very serious condition. Rumor had it-and McCoy tended to believe it-that there were bands of Italian marines roaming town looking for U.S. Marines. The officers certainly didn't doubt it. They'd granted permission for Marines to wear cartridge belts (with first-aid pouches) and bayonets. A sheathed bayonet made a pretty good club; a drawn bayonet was an even better personal defense weapon. But sending the men out with bayonets, sheathed or unsheathed, was far short of sending them out with rifles, loaded or otherwise.

McCoy had not been at the Little Club on Christmas Eve, partly because a Marine who wanted to celebrate Christmas Eve by getting drunk had offered him three dollars (McCoy had negotiated the offer upward to five) to take the duty. But even without the offer, McCoy wouldn't have gone to the Little Club on Christmas Eve. He had known from experience that the place would either be depressing as hell, and/or that there would be a fight between the Marines and the Italians. Or between the Marines and the Seaforth Highlanders. Or between the Marines and the French Foreign Legion.

Getting into a brawl on Christmas Eve was not McCoy's idea of good clean fun. And getting into any kind of a brawl right now was worse than a bad idea.

McCoy's blue Marine blouse had two new adornments, the single chevron of a private first class and a diagonal stripe above the cuff signifying the completion of four years' honorable service. He had just shipped over for another four years, with the understanding that once he had shipped over he would be promoted to PFC. With the promotion came the right to take the examination for corporal.

It had also been understood, unofficially, that he would get a high rating when he went before the promotion board for the oral examination. They were willing to give him that, he knew, because no one thought he would stand a chance, first time out, of getting a score on the written exam that would be anywhere close to the kind of score needed to actually get promoted.

Well, they were wrong about that. He wanted to be a corporal very much, and he had prepared for the examination. The tough part of it was "military engineering," which mostly meant math questions. He had a flair for math, and he thought it was likely that he hadn't missed a single question. But McCoy had more going for him. When the promotion board sat down at Marine Barracks in Washington to establish the corporal's promotion list, they paid special attention to something called "additional qualifications."

McCoy had found out, by carefully reading the regulations, that there was more to this than the sort of skills you might expect, skills like making Expert with the.45 and the Springfield. You got points for that, of course, and he would get them, because he was a pretty good shot.

But you also got points if you could type sixty words per minute or better. When he took the test, he had been rated at seventy-five words a minute. He had kept that ability a secret before reenlisting, because he hadn't joined the Marine Corps to be a clerk. But even that wasn't his real ace in the hole. What that was, was "foreign language skills."

"Foreign language skills," he was convinced, was going to make him a corporal long before anyone else in the 4th Marines thought he had a chance. His mother had been French, and he'd learned that from her as a baby. Then he'd taken Latin at Saint Rose of Lima High School because they made him, and French because he thought that would be

easy.

When he'd come to Shanghai, he had not been surprised that he could talk French with the French Foreign Legionnaires, but he had been surprised that he could also make himself understood in Italian, and that he could read Italian documents and even newspapers. And that still wasn't all of it.

Like every other Marine who came to the 4th, he had soon found himself exchanging half his pay for a small apartment and a Chinese girl to share the bed, do the laundry, and otherwise make herself useful. Mai Sing could also read and write, which wasn't always the case with Chinese girls. Before he had decided that he really didn't want a wife just yet-not even a temporary one-and sent Mai Sing back wherever the hell she had come from with two hundred dollars to-buy herself a husband, she had taught him not only to speak the Shanghai version of Cantonese, but how to read and write a fair amount of the ideograms as well.

There was a standard U.S. Government language exam, and he'd gone to the U.S. Consulate and taken it. So far as the U.S. Government was concerned, he was "completely fluent" in spoken and written French, which was as high a rating as they gave; "nearly fluent" in spoken and written Italian; "nearly fluent" in spoken Cantonese; and had a 75/55 grade in written Cantonese, which meant that he could read seventy-five percent of the ideograms on the exam, and could come up with the ideogram for a specific word more than half the time.

The guy at the consulate had been so impressed with McCoy's Chinese that he tried to talk him into taking a job with the Marine guard detachment. He could get him transferred, the guy said, and he wouldn't have to pull guard once he got to the consulate. They always needed clerks who could read and write Chinese.

McCoy had turned that down, too. He hadn't joined the Corps to be a clerk in a consulate, either.

The promotion list would be out any day now. He was sure that his name was going to be near the top of it, and he didn't want anything to fuck that up. Like getting in a brawl with a bunch of Italian marines would fuck it up.

They wouldn't make him a corporal if he was dead, either, and the way this brawl was going, getting meaner and meaner by the day, that was a real possibility.

There were two things wrong with going out wearing a cartridge belt and bayonet, he decided in the end. For one thing, he would look pretty silly walking into the poker game at the Cathay Mansions Hotel with that shit. And if he did run into some Italian marines, they would take his possession of a bayonet as a sure sign he was looking for a fight.

McCoy finally bent over the footlocker and took his "Baby Fairbairn" from beneath a stack of neatly folded skivvy shirts. He had won it from a Shanghai Municipal cop after a poker game. He'd bet a hundred yuan against it, one cut of the deck.

There was an officer named Bruce Fairbairn on the Shanghai Municipal Police, and he had invented a really terrific knife, sort of a dagger, and was trying to get everybody to buy them. He had made quite a sales pitch to General Smedley Butler, who commanded all the Marines in China. And Butler, so the story went, had wanted to buy enough to issue them, but the Marine Corps wouldn't give him the money.

McCoy's knife was made exactly like the original Fairbairn, except that it wasn't quite as long, or quite as big. It was just long enough to be concealed in the sleeve, with the tip of the scabbard up against the joint of the elbow, and the handle just

inside the cuff.

McCoy took off his blouse, strapped the Baby Fairbairn to his left arm, put the blouse back on over it, looked at himself in the full-length mirror mounted on the door, and left his

room.

Their billets had once been two-story brick civilian houses that the 4th Marines had bought when they came to China way back in 1927-blocks of them, enough houses to hold a battalion. Cyclone fences had been erected around these blocks. And the fences were topped with coils of barbed wire, called concertina. At the gate was a sandbagged guardhouse, manned around the clock by a two-man guard detail.

As McCoy walked through, the PFC on guard told him he had heard that the Wops had ganged up on some Marines and put another two guys in the hospital. If he were McCoy, he went on, he would go back and get his bayonet.

"I'm not going anywhere near the Little Club," McCoy said. "And I'm not looking for a fight."

The faster of two rickshaw boys near the gate trotted up and lowered the poles.

"Take me to the Cathay Mansions Hotel," McCoy ordered in Chinese as he climbed onto the rickshaw.

The guard understood "Cathay Mansions Hotel."

"What the fuck are you going to do there, McCoy?" he

asked.

"They're having a tea dance," McCoy said, as the rickshaw boy picked up the poles and started to trot down Ferry Road in the direction of the Bund.

As they approached the hotel, McCoy called out to the rickshaw boy to pull to the curb at the corner. He paid him and then walked down the sidewalk past the marquee, and then into an alley, which led to the rear of the building. He went down a flight of stairs to a steel basement door and knocked on it.

A small window opened in the door, and Chinese eyes became visible. McCoy was examined, and then the door opened. He walked down a long corridor, ducking his head from time to time to miss water and sewer pipes, until he came to another steel door, this one identified as "Store Room B-6." He knocked, and it opened for him.

United States Marines were not welcome upstairs in the deeply carpeted, finely paneled lobby and corridors of the Cathay Mansions Hotel. The often-expressed gratitude of the Europeans of the International Settlement for the protection offered by the United States Marines against both the Japanese and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang did not go quite as far as accepting enlisted Marines as social equals.

PFC Ken McCoy was welcome here, however, in a basement storeroom that had been taken over with the tacit permission of Sir Victor Sassoon, owner of the hotel, by its doorman, a six-foot-six White Russian. The storeroom was equipped with an octagonal, green baize-covered table and chairs. A rather ornate light fixture had been carefully hung so as to bathe the table in a light that made the cards and the hands that manipulated them fully visible without causing undue glare.

McCoy was welcome because he always brought to the table fifty dollars American-sometimes a good deal more- which he was prepared to lose with a certain grace and without whining.

In the nearly four years that he had been in China, McCoy had evolved a gambling system that had resulted in a balance of nearly two thousand dollars at Barclays Bank. He thought of this as his retirement program.

He began each month's gambling with fifty dollars, twenty-five of which came from his pay (by the time they had made the deductions, this now came to about forty-nine dollars) and twenty-five of which came from the retirement fund in Barclays Bank.

He played until he either went broke or felt like quitting. If he was ahead of his original fifty dollars when he quit, he put exactly half of the excess over fifty dollars away, to be deposited to his account at Barclays. The rest was his stash for the next game.

Almost always, he went broke sometime during the month, and he never played again until after the next payday. But again, he had almost always put a lot more into Barclays Bank during the month than the twenty-five dollars he would take out after the next payday. And sometimes-not often- the cards went well, and post-game deposits were sixty, seventy dollars. Once there had been a post-game deposit of

$140.90.

As he approached the group, the bright light illuminating the table made everything but the lower arms and hands of the players seem to disappear for a moment into the darkness, but gradually his eyes became adjusted, and he could see faces to go with the hands.

The White Russian, who claimed to have been a colonel of cavalry in his Imperial Majesty's 7th Petrograd Cavalry, was at the table. Piotr Petrovich Muller (he had a German surname, he once told McCoy, because he was a descendant of the Viennese who had been imported into Moscow to build the Kremlin) was a very large man with a very closely shaven

face.

He bowed his head solemnly when he saw McCoy and then gestured for him to take an empty chair.

There was another Russian who had found post-revolution employment with the French Foreign Legion, and a Sikh, a uniformed sergeant of the Shanghai Municipal Police. There was also Detective Sergeant Lester Chatworth of the Shanghai Municipal Police, who looked up at McCoy and spoke.

"I thought you'd be out bashing Eye-talians."

Except for a thick, perfectly trimmed mustache, Chatworth looked not unlike McCoy, but he spoke with the flat, nasal accent of Liverpool.

"I thought I'd rather come here and take your money,"

McCoy said.

"Why not? Everybody else is," Detective Sergeant Chatworth said, grinning.

The men at the table had nothing at all in common except that they met Piotr Muller's rigid standard of a decent poker player: Each could play the game well enough and each, at one time or another, had lost a good deal of money gracefully. PFC Kenneth McCoy was younger than any of them by at least a decade, and a quarter of a century younger than Muller. Neither he nor any of the others associated when they were not playing cards, nor were they friendly with any of the perhaps forty other more or less temporary residents of Shanghai who were welcome at Muller's table in the basement of the Cathay Mansions.

There were no raised eyebrows when McCoy took off his blue blouse and revealed the Baby Fairbairn strapped to his arm. It was prudent, if technically illegal, to arm oneself when going out for a night on the town in Shanghai.

McCoy hung his blouse on the back of his chair, unstrapped the knife and tucked it in a pocket of the blouse, then sat down and laid his gambling money on the table. Fifty dollars American that month had converted to just over four hundred yuan. He had before him four one-hundred-yuan notes, which were printed lavender and white in England and were each the size of a British five-pound banknote. He also had some change, including an American dollar bill.

He made himself comfortable in the chair, and then watched as the hand in play was completed. When it was over, Muller nodded at him, and he reached for a fresh deck of cards, broke the seal, and went through them, finding and discarding the extra jokers. He then spread the cards out for the others to examine.

Afterward, he gathered the cards together, shuffled, announced, "Straight poker," and dealt.

Three hours later, there were twenty-odd lavender-and-white one-hundred-yuan notes in front of McCoy; the Sikh and the Foreign Legionnaire had gone bust; and it was between McCoy, Piotr Petrovich Muller, and Detective Sergeant Chatworth. A half hour after that, Muller examined the two cards he had drawn, threw his hand on the table, and pushed himself away from it.

That left only McCoy and Detective Sergeant Chatworth.

"I don't play two-handed poker," McCoy announced.

"I'm willing to quit," Chatworth said, and tossed the just-collected deck into the wastebasket, where it joined a dozen other decks of cards.

Stiff from three hours of little movement, McCoy stood up and stretched his arms over his head. He then strapped the Baby Fairbairn to his left arm, put his blouse on, and followed the others out of the storeroom.

When he was back out on the street,. McCoy considered having his ashes hauled. It had been about a week, and it was time to take care of the urge. But he decided against it. For one thing, he had too much money with him. He hadn't counted it out to the last yuan, but he'd won a bunch-say at twelve dollars to the hundred-yuan note, a little better than $250. That was too much money to have in your pocket when visiting a whorehouse.

Even if the Italian marines weren't on the warpath. The smart thing to do was go back to the billet. He put his hand up and flagged a rickshaw, and told the driver to take him down Ferry Road.

Three blocks from the compound, he saw the Italian marines, hiding in an alley. There were four of them, in uniform. The uniforms were a mixture of army and navy-army breeches and navy middie blouses.

I am minding my own business, McCoy told himself, and I am not carrying a bayonet, and I was not at the Little Club when this whole business started. With a little bit of luck, they will let me pass.

They didn't say anything to him as the rickshaw pulled past the alley and there could no longer be any question that the rickshaw passenger was a Marine. So for a moment he thought they'd decided to wait for Marines who were looking for a

fight.

And then the rickshaw was turned over on its side. The rickshaw boy started to howl with fear and rage even before McCoy hit the ground, striking the elbow of his blouse on the filth of the street.

McCoy sat up and looked around to see if there was someplace he could run. But the Italian marines had picked their spot well. There was no place to run to.

Maybe I can talk to them, McCoy thought, tell them the fucking truth, I wasn't at the Little Club, I have no quarrel with them.

Then he saw the Italian marine advancing on him with a length of bicycle chain swinging in his hand. McCoy felt a little faint, and then tasted something foul in the back of his mouth.

"I don't know who you're looking for," he said in Italian. "But it isn't me."

The Italian marine replied that his mother fucked pigs and that he was going to mash his balls.

The bicycle chain missed McCoy's leg, but before it struck the pavement with a frightening whistle, it came close enough to catch his trouser's leg and leave the imprint of the chain there. McCoy quickly slid sideward, taking the Baby Fairbairn from his sleeve as he got to his feet.

The Italian marine told him his sister sucked Greek cocks and that he was going to take the knife away and stick it up his ass.

McCoy sensed, rather than saw, that two other Italian marines were making their way behind him.

The idea was that the two would grab him and hold him while the other one used the bicycle chain. The thing to do was to get past the Italian marine with the bicycle chain.

He made a feinting motion with the knife, and the Italian marine backed up.

It looked like it might work. And there was nothing else to do.

He made another feinting move, a savage leap accompanied by as ferocious a roar as he could muster, at the exact moment that the Italian marine lunged at where McCoy's Baby Fairbairn had been.

The tip of the Baby Fairbairn punctured the Italian marine's chest at the lower extremity of the ribs. McCoy felt it grate over a bone, and then immediately sink to the handguard. The knife was snatched from his hand as the Italian marine continued his plunge.

The man grunted, fell, dropped the bicycle chain, rolled over, sat up, and started to pull the Baby Fairbairn from his abdomen. He gave it a hearty tug and it came out. A moment later, a stream of bright red blood as thick as the handle of a baseball bat erupted from his mouth. The Italian marine looked puzzled for a moment, and then fell to one side.

Jesus Christ, I killed him!

One of the three remaining Italian marines crossed himself and ran away. The other two advanced on McCoy, one of them frantically trying to work the action of a tiny automatic pistol.

I can't run from that!

McCoy picked up the Baby Fairbairn and advanced on the two Italian marines.

He made it to the one with the gun and started to try to take it away from him, or at least to knock it out of his hand. The other one tried to help his friend. McCoy lashed out with the Baby Fairbairn again. The blade slashed the Italian's face, but that didn't discourage him. He got his arms around McCoy's arms and held him in a bear hug.

The other one managed to work the action of his tiny pistol.

McCoy remembered hearing that a.22 or a.25 will kill you just as dead as a.45, it just takes a little longer-say a week-to do it.

With a strength that surprised him, he got his right arm free and swung it backward at the man who had been holding him. He felt it cut and strike something, something not anywhere as hard as the ribcage, but something. And it went in far enough so that he couldn't hang on to it when the man fell down.

Then, free, he jumped at the man with the pistol. The pistol went off with a sharp crack, and he felt something strike his leg hard, like a kick from a very hard boot. And then he knocked the pistol from the Italian marine's hand and, when it clattered onto the cobblestones, dived after it.

He picked it up and aimed it at the Italian marine. Then he followed his eyes. What he had done when he had swung his knife hand backward was stick it in the man's groin. The man was now holding his groin with both hands. The handle of the Baby Fairbairn was sticking out between his fingers. The man was whimpering, and tears were on his face.

Down the street, McCoy could hear the growl of the hand-cranked siren at the compound.

This is going to fuck up my promotion, he thought. Goddamn these Italians.

(Two)

Captain Edward J. Banning, USMC, was S-2, the staff Intelligence Officer, of the 4th Marines. He was thirty-six years old, tall, thin, and starting to bald. And he had been a Marine since his graduation from the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina: a second lieutenant for three years, a first lieutenant for eight years, and he'd worn the twin silver railroad tracks of a captain for four years.

There were four staff officers. The S-1 (Personnel) and S-4 (Supply) were majors. The S-3 (Plans and Training) was a lieutenant colonel. As a captain, Banning was the junior staff officer. But he was a staff officer, and as such normally excused from most of the duties assigned to non-staff officers.

He took his turn, of course, as Officer of the Day, but that was about it. He was, for instance, never assigned as Inventory Officer to audit the accounts of the Officers' or NCO clubs or as Investigating Officer when there was an allegation of misbehavior involving the possibility of a court-martial of one of the enlisted men. Or any other detail of that sort. He was the S-2, and the colonel was very much aware that taking him from that duty to do something else did not make very good sense.

So Banning had been surprised at first when he was summoned by the colonel and told that he would serve as Defense Counsel in the case of the United States of America versus PFC Kenneth J. McCoy, USMC. But he was a Marine officer, and when Marine officers are given an assignment, they say "aye, aye, sir" and set about doing what they have been ordered to do.

"This one can't be swept under the table, Banning," the colonel said. "It's gone too far for that. It has to go by the book, with every 't' crossed and every Y dotted."

"I understand, sir."

"Major DeLaney will prosecute. I have ordered him to do his best to secure a conviction. I am now ordering you to do your best to secure an acquittal. The Italian Consul General has told us that he and Colonel Maggiani of the Italian marines will attend the court-martial. Do you get the picture?"

"Yes, sir."

The picture Banning got was that he was going to have to spend Christ alone knew how many hours preparing for this court-martial, participating in the court-martial itself, and then Christ alone knew how many hours after the trial, going through the appeal process.

About half of the total would have to come from the time Banning would have normally spent with his hobby. His hobby was Ludmilla Zhivkov, whom he called 'Milla.'

Milla was twenty-seven, raven-haired, long-legged and a White Russian. And he had recently begun to consider the possibility that he was in love with her.

Banning was a Marine officer-even worse, a Marine intelligence officer-and Marine intelligence officers were not supposed to become emotionally involved with White Russian women. It had not been his intention to become emotionally involved with her. He had met her, more or less, on duty. There had been an advertisement in the Shanghai Post: "Russian Lady Offers Instruction in Russian Conversation." It had coincided with an unexpected bonus in his operating funds: two hundred dollars for Foreign Language Training.

There were supposed to be fifteen thousand White Russian refugee women in Shanghai. They made their living as best they could, some successfully and some reduced to making it on their backs. He had somewhat cynically suspected that the Russian Lady offering Russian Conversation was doing so only because she was too old, or too ugly, to make it on her back.

Milla had surprised him. She was a real beauty, and she was the first White Russian he'd met who was not at least a duchess. She was also devoutly religious, which meant that she was not going to become a whore unless it got down to that. Milla told him her father had operated, of all things, the Victor Phonograph store in St. Petersburg. They had come from Russia in 1921 with some American dollars, and it had been enough, with what jobs he had been able to find, to keep them while they waited for their names to work their way up the immigration waiting list for the United States.

And then he had died, and she hadn't been able to make as much money as she had hoped, even working as a billing clerk in the Cathay Mansions Hotel and teaching Russian conversation. When he met her she was down to living in one room. The next step was to become somebody's mistress. After that she'd have to turn into a whore. Becoming a whore would keep her from going to the States.

The first thing Banning had done was pay her the whole two hundred dollars up front. Then one thing had led to another, and they had gone to bed. Soon he had helped her get a larger place to live.

But the ground rules established between them were clear: It was a friendly business relationship and never could be anything more. When he went home, that would be the end of it. She understood that. She had lived up to her end of the bargain. And she would, he believed, stick to it.

Her powerful character, he sometimes thought, was one of the reasons he was afraid he was in love with her. And sometimes he wondered if she wasn't playing him like a fish (she was also the most intelligent woman he had ever known) and nobly living up to her end of the bargain because she had figured that was the one way to get him to break it.

But what he nevertheless knew for sure was that if he married her, he could kiss his Marine career good-bye; and that he could not imagine life outside the Corps; and that he could not imagine life without Milla.

For the first time in his life, Ed Banning did not know what the hell to do.

Banning went by the orderly room of "D" Company, First Battalion and read through PFC Kenneth J. McCoy's records slowly and thoroughly. He talked to his company commander, his platoon leader, his platoon sergeant, his section leader and his bunk mate.

The picture they painted of McCoy was the one reflected by his records. He had joined the Corps right out of high school (in fact, several months before; his high school diploma had come to him while he was at Parris Island and was entered into his record then), had served for three months with the Fleet Marine Force at San Diego, and then been shipped to the 4th Marines in Shanghai, where they'd made him an assistant gunner on a water-cooled.30-caliber Browning machine gun.

He had by and large kept out of trouble since arriving in China. And he got along all right with his corporal and his sergeant, who both described him as "a good man."

But there were several things out of the ordinary: He didn't have a Chinese girl, for one thing. But he had had a Chinese girl, so there didn't seem to be reason to suspect he was queer. He didn't have a buddy, either, which was unusual.

But some men were by nature loners, himself included, and this McCoy seemed to be another of them. There was nothing wrong with that, it was just a little unusual.

What was most unusual, though, was his skill as a typist and his language ability. Banning was a little chagrined to discover that Dog Company had a natural linguist who could type seventy-five words a minute assigned to a machine gun. If he had known that, PFC McCoy would have found himself assigned to headquarters company. Skilled typists were in short supply, but not nearly as short supply as people who could read and write French and Italian and Chinese.

Banning decided that McCoy, more than likely with the connivance of his first and gunnery sergeants, had wanted these skills kept a secret. Gunnery sergeants were concerned with having good men on the machine guns and cared very little for the personnel problems of the chairwarmers at regimental headquarters. And McCoy himself was probably one of those kids who did not want to be a clerk.

When he was convinced he had learned all he could about PFC Kenneth J. McCoy from his service records and those around him, Captain Banning went to the infirmary to see the accused face-to-face.

McCoy's medical records showed that he had been admitted to the dispensary at 2310 hours 2 January 1941 suffering cuts and abrasions and a penetrating wound of the upper right thigh possibly caused by a small-caliber bullet. A surgical procedure at 0930 hours 3 January 1941 had removed a lead-and-brass object, tentatively identified as a.25-caliber bullet, from the thigh. The prognosis was complete recovery, with return to full duty status in ten to fifteen days.

Captain Banning found PFC McCoy in a two-bed infirmary room. He was sitting in a chair by the window, using the windowsill as a desk while he worked the crossword puzzle in the Shanghai Post. An issue cane was hanging from the windowsill.

"As you were!" Banning barked, when McCoy saw him and started to rise. "Keep your seat!"

Banning could not remember ever having seen McCoy before, which was not that unusual. There were a number of young privates and PFCs in the 4th Marines who looked very much like PFC McCoy.

Captain Banning introduced himself and told McCoy he had been appointed his defense counsel. Then he made sure that McCoy understood his predicament. He told it as he saw it, that he didn't think there was any chance that McCoy would be found guilty of first-degree murder, which required serious elements such as previous intent, but that it was very likely that he would be found guilty of what was known as a "lesser included offense."

There was no question that there were two dead Italian marines or that McCoy had killed them. Neither was there any question that they had been killed with his knife. Banning then explained that while authority might-and did-look away at the illegal carrying of a concealed deadly weapon so long as nothing happened, when something did happen, the offense could no longer be ignored.

There were two lesser included offenses, Banning continued: "Manslaughter," which was the illegal taking of human life, and "Negligent Homicide," which meant killing somebody by carelessness.

"I haven't discussed this with Major DeLaney, who will serve as prosecutor, McCoy," Captain Banning said. "Because I wanted to talk to you first. But this possibility exists: When you come to trial, you have the option of pleading guilty to a lesser included offense. I feel reasonably sure that Major DeLaney would have no objection if you pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and perhaps I could persuade him to accept a plea of guilty to involuntary manslaughter."

PFC McCoy did not respond.

"If you did plead guilty to either of the lesser included offenses," Banning said, "the court-martial board would then decide on the punishment. No matter what they decided, the sentence would be reviewed both by the colonel and by General Butler, both of whom have the authority to reduce it."

"Sir, it was self-defense," McCoy said.

"Let me try to explain this to you," Banning said. "You would be better off if you had knifed two American Marines. But you killed two Italian marines, and they have to do something about it. The Italian Consul General and the Italian marine colonel are going to be at your court-martial. They want to be able to report that the U.S. Marine who killed two of their marines was found guilty and will be punished. Am I getting through to you?"

"Sir, it was self-defense," McCoy repeated doggedly.

"You don't have any witnesses," Banning said.

"There was the rickshaw boy and twenty, thirty Chinese that saw it."

"How do you plan to find them?" Banning asked.

McCoy shrugged his shoulders. "Ask around, I suppose."

There was no sense arguing with him, Banning decided. He just didn't understand the situation.

"Let me tell you what I think is going to happen," he said. "I think I can get Major DeLaney to accept a plea of guilty to a charge of manslaughter. You will be sentenced, and you might as well understand this, the sentence will be stiff. Maybe twenty years to life."

"Jesus Christ!" McCoy said.

"That will satisfy the Italians," Banning said. "You understand that's necessary?"

McCoy gave him a cold look but said nothing.

"The sentence is then subject to review by the colonel," Banning said. "He will take his time reviewing it, I think, to let things cool off a little. Then, he will decide that you're not really guilty of manslaughter, but of the lesser included offense of involuntary manslaughter, and he will reduce the punishment accordingly."

"To what?"

" 'To what, sir,' " Banning corrected him.

"To what, sir?" McCoy repeated, dutifully.

"The maximum punishment for involuntary manslaughter is five years."

"I've heard about Mare Island and Portsmouth," McCoy said, grim faced.

He had not appended "sir" as military courtesy required, but Banning did not correct him. It was Banning's personal opinion that the Naval Prisons at Mare Island, California, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the brutality under Marine guards was legendary, were a disgrace to the Marine Corps.

"The next step in the process," Banning went on, "is the review of the sentence by General Butler. I think it's very possible that General Butler would reduce the sentence even further, say to one year's confinement. And then, by the time you got to the states, the Navy Department would review the sentence still again, and I'm sure that they would pay attention both to your previous service and to the letters recommending clemency that your company and battalion commanders tell me they will write in your behalf. Your sentence could then be reduced again to time already served."

"In other words, sir," McCoy said, with a "sir" that bordered on silent insubordination, "I could count on being a busted Marine looking for a new home?''

"For Christ's sake, McCoy, you killed two people! You can't expect to get off scot-free!"

"Sir," PFC McCoy said, "no disrespect intended, but they gave me the court-martial manual to read, and in there it says I can have the defense counsel of my choice."

Banning felt his temper rise. The sonofabitch was a guardhouse lawyer on top of everything else.

"That is your right," he said, stiffly. "Who would you like to have defend you?"

"My company commander, sir."

"You can't have him, because he is your company commander. Neither can you have your platoon leader.''

"Then Lieutenant Kaye, sir, the assistant supply officer."

With a massive effort, Captain Banning kept his temper under control.

"McCoy," he said. "I'm going to give you twenty-four hours to think this over. I want you to carefully consider your position."

"Yes, sir," PFC McCoy said.

(Three)

On the way to his office from the infirmary, Captain Banning's anger rose. Among other things, he was going to look like a goddamned fool in front of the colonel when he had to go to him and tell him this knife-wielding PFC had refused his services as defense counsel. It was of course the kid's right, but Banning could not remember ever hearing of anything like this happening.

And PFC McCoy was not doing himself any good. If he went to trial and pleaded not guilty, he was digging his own grave. He was not being tried for stabbing the two Italians, but to make the point to the other Marines that they couldn't go around killing people.

If he went along with that, in three months he would be a free man at San Diego or Quantico, with only the loss of a stripe to show for having killed two men.

If he annoyed the court-martial board, they would very likely conclude that he was somebody who needed to be taught a lesson and sock him with a heavy sentence. If the colonel was annoyed, he would find nothing wrong with the sentence when it was reviewed. And if General Butler smelled that McCoy was a troublemaker, he wouldn't find anything wrong with the sentence, either.

PFC McCoy stood a very good chance of finding himself locked up in the Portsmouth Naval Prison for thirty years to life.

Captain Banning's rage lasted through lunch. And then he considered the situation from McCoy's point of view. The kid actually believed-since it was the truth-that he had acted in self-defense. It was therefore his own duty, Banning decided, to at least pursue that as far as it would go.

To prove self-defense he would need witnesses. The only witnesses right now were two Italian marines. They were prepared to testify that they were minding their own business when McCoy drew a knife on them, whereupon one of their number drew a pistol in self-defense.

When he went back to his office after lunch, Banning told his clerk to see if he could get a car from the motor pool. He had to go into town.

Banning hoped to find Bruce Fairbairn at the headquarters of the Shanghai Municipal Police. He knew him, and could explain the problem to him. But when he got to police headquarters, Fairbairn was not available, and neither was Chief Inspector Thwaite, who was the only other Shanghai Police officer he knew well enough to speak to with complete frankness.

He wound up talking to a Detective Sergeant Chatworth. Chat worth sat at an old wooden desk covered with papers. As Banning approached, he shuffled angrily through them, searching for something he had apparently mislaid.

Banning introduced himself and told him what he had come for.

"Right," Chatworth said, looking at Banning with a screwed-up face. He seemed surprised to hear Banning's story. "You Yanks always seem to have to wear white," he said after a moment while searching through his pocket for a near-empty package of vile Chinese cigarettes. "Fag?" he offered, holding one out.

"Thanks, no," Banning said.

"I mean, Christ," he went on, lighting up. "Don't you have any loyalty towards your own? For the sake of Italians? Really!" He inhaled deep, savoring it. Then blew out. "And besides, I know the boy. McCoy is a good one. Protect him. You don't find his class all that often."

"That may be." Banning shrugged, stiffening. He did not like Chatworth very much. "But Italian pride has been badly hurt. They've gone to the foreign service boys at the consulate. One thing has led to the other. And the consequence is that there is nothing we can do but court-martial PFC McCoy.

"And then on top of that," Banning continued, "McCoy is being difficult. He thinks he did it all in self-defense; and he simply refuses to understand that without witnesses, he can't possibly get away with that plea."

"So?" Chatworth said, beginning to understand.

"And so, Sergeant, I'm desperate. Could you people possibly help us and see if you can find some Chinese who (a) saw the fight and (b) would be willing to testify in McCoy's behalf at his court-martial?"

Rather abruptly, Detective Sergeant Chatworth turned his attention back to his papers.

"I'll look into the matter," he said, dropping the now-dead cigarette on the floor and snuffing it out with his heel. "And I'll be in touch with you in due course."

Banning saw that Chatworth did not like him any more than he liked Chatworth. And Banning also realized that Chatworth knew even better than he did that there was virtually no chance of finding a Chinese who would be willing to testify that he had seen the fight between the Big Noses. And it would matter to the Chinese not at all that the U.S. Marine Big Nose had clearly been the aggrieved party. Detective Sergeant Chatworth had abruptly dismissed him because he was wasting Detective Sergeant Chatworth's valuable time.

Banning did not go back to the office. He went to the apartment. Mil la was there, giving a Chinese woman hell because she had not ironed several of Banning's shirts to what Milla thought were Marine sartorial standards. She was acting wifely, and that upset him, too, and he got drunk.

And he told Milla about McCoy.

She was sympathetic. To him. She felt sorry for him that he had a problem with McCoy.

Later she consoled him in bed, which was usually enough to make him happy as hell. But not this time.

As he watched her get dressed to go to work, he tormented himself with fantasies of other men watching her naked, as she was now. And touching her naked flesh, as he had just done… which was sure as hell going to happen if he didn't marry her and get himself booted out of the Corps.

After she left, he hit the whiskey again, and ended up with some drunken ideas. He could go to trial and try to play on the sympathy of the court-martial board, paint PFC McCoy as a saint in uniform who was the innocent party in this whole mess. He could try to convince the court-martial that the reason PFC McCoy went around with a Fairbairn dagger in his sleeve was that he collected butterflies. He'd throw the fucking knife at them and-pin their wings. The poor fucking Wops had fallen onto the blade of the knife when they slipped on a banana peel.

(Four)

At eight- fifteen the next morning, as Captain Banning drank his third Coca-Cola of the day in a vain attempt to extinguish the fire in his stomach, his clerk came into his office with the first batch of the day's official correspondence from the message center.

Among the items which required his initials was a communication from Headquarters, United States Marine Corps: A promotion board having been convened to consider candidates for promotion to the grade of corporal had reached the end of its deliberations. There were thirty names on the list and there were twelve vacancies within the Marine Corps for corporals. Therefore, commanding officers of the first twelve names on the list were herewith directed to issue promotion orders for the individuals concerned. As additional vacancies occurred, authority would be granted to promote individuals on the list numbers 13 through 30.

The second name on the list was PFC Kenneth J. McCoy, Company "D," 4th Marines.

The Navy, and thus the Marine Corps, was governed by common law of the United States, and a pillar of that code of justice was that an accused was presumed innocent until proven guilty.

The colonel had just been directed by Hq, USMC, to promote PFC McCoy to Corporal McCoy, an action that would be very difficult to explain to the colonel commanding the Italian marines and to the Consul General of the King of Italy at Shanghai. It would look as if the punishment for stabbing to death two Italians was promotion to corporal.

Captain Banning wondered whether it was his duty to bring the problem to the colonel's attention himself, or whether the S-l would consider it part of his duty as personnel officer. Most likely, the problem would skip the G-l's attention, Banning decided. The Colonel was going to be furious when he found out about this, and the S-l knew it, too.

He was still considering the problem, and half expecting his telephone to ring with a call from either the S-l or the colonel's sergeant-major, when his clerk knocked at the door, put his head in, and announced that Detective Sergeant Chatworth and two Chinese were in the outer office.

As incredible as it sounded, had Chatworth turned up two witnesses? In so short a time?

"Ask him to come in, please." Banning said.

Chatworth came in with two coolies. Banning's heart sank again. The court-martial would not take the word of two coolies over that of two Italian marines.

"Good morning, Captain," Detective Sergeant Chatworth said. "May I present Constable Hang Chee and Senior Patrolman Kin Tong?"

The two coolies bowed their heads.

"Constable Hang and Patrolman Kin were fortunately in a position to see the McCoy incident from start to finish. Tell the captain what you saw, Hang."

Constable Hang spoke English very softly, but well. He reported that PFC McCoy had just stepped out of his rickshaw near the compound gate when he was beset by the five Italians and had no choice but to defend himself.

"He was three blocks from the compound," Banning said, "when four Italian marines overturned the rickshaw."

"Now that you mention it," Constable Hang said, "that's right. There were four Italian marines and the assault took place several blocks from the compound entrance."

It was clear to Banning that they had no more seen the fight than he had.

"What's going on, Sergeant Chatworth?" Banning asked.

"You wanted witnesses, I found them," Chatworth said. "Will a sworn statement suffice, do you think, or will these officers have to testify in court?"

I don't want McCoy to go to Portsmouth, either. But I am a Marine officer, and I can't close my eyes and pretend I believe Chatworth's Chinese.

"I could not put these men on the stand," Banning said, disliking Chatworth more than ever. "I think you misunderstood the purpose of my visit yesterday."

"You're a bloody fool, then, Banning," Chatworth said, coldly.

"Good day, Sergeant Chatworth," Banning said.

"I'll send the report of these officers concerning the incident they witnessed to you via the British Consulate," Chatworth said. "It'll take two, three days to get here, I'd suppose."

"I told you: as much as I might personally like to, I can't put these men on the stand."

"Why not?" Chatworth asked.

"Being very blunt, I'm not sure I believe your men. Goddamn it, I know I don't believe them."

"That's not really for you to decide, is it?" Chatworth said. "And, if you don't let these men testify, wouldn't that be 'suppression of evidence'?"

"Why the hell are you doing this?" Banning asked.

"We're just doing our duty as we see it," Chatworth said, sarcastically. "I can only hope that you're not one of those bloody fools who doesn't know he's in Shanghai and thinks he can go by the bloody book."

"How dare you talk to me that way?" Banning flared.

"What are you going to do about it?" Chatworth asked calmly.

"I tell you now, Sergeant Chatworth, that I intend to discuss this with Captain Fairbairn."

"Odd that you should mention his name," Chatworth said. "Constable Wang and Patrolman Kin are members of Captain Fairbairn's Flying Squad."

Banning's temper flared. He reached for the telephone, actually intending to call Fairbairn. But reason prevailed. He instead had the operator connect him with the colonel.

"Sir," he said. "There has been a rather startling development. When PFC McCoy was attacked by the Italian Marines, the whole incident was witnessed' by two Chinese police officers of Captain Fairbairn's Flying Squad. They are prepared to testify that it was clearly a case of self-defense."

"That's bloody well more like it," Detective Sergeant Chatworth said.