Leon Uris (6 page)

The waiting room of Navy Secretary Nathaniel Culpeper’s office was efficiently quiet. Three male clerks, civilians, and a naval attaché scratched away at the papers on their desks with an air of importance. In a small foyer, an unblinking statue of a Marine private guarded Culpeper’s door.

Amanda Blanton Kerr wiggled restlessly, trying to get into her book. She opened her necklace watch. Her father had been inside for nearly an hour. Amanda’s eyes drifted from her pages. Her alert glance took in everything about her.

The attaché gave a small smile and nod of sympathy as he checked out Amanda’s enthralling beauty. She gave him a slight curl of her lip, hinting of a flirtatious engine inside her.

Her eyes went up the Marine guard and down the Marine guard with scarcely a glance. The attaché sniffed another smile. The Marine continued looking forward, unblinking.

* * *

Beyond the mighty door, Secretary of the Navy Nathaniel Culpeper pondered. He was a great ponderer. On one side of his desk sat Horace Kerr, the shipbuilding titan, and beside him Commodore Chester Harkleroad, chief of the navy’s massive building program.

The pair of them stood foursquare against Lieutenant Colonel Commandant Thomas Ballard, referred to snidely as the Marine Corps’ “Uncle Tom.” The old warrior was desperately trying to salvage his Corps, but he was in for another lacing today. Moreover, those two bastards opposite him had managed to keep his major, Ben Boone, out of the meeting.

The commodore’s naval architects and Horace Kerr’s engineers had proffered advance blueprints for a new class of armored cruisers. No quarters, mess, or provisions had been drawn for a Marine unit, not even to man secondary guns.

Final approval by Secretary Culpeper would further deplete the Marines. Two nights earlier, young Theodore Roosevelt, a rising star in the Republican Party and naval circles, urged Culpeper to sign off on the plans.

“The Marines,” Roosevelt argued, “breed animosity aboard ships. Sailors can, most certainly, police their own vessels. The Marines went out of style with grappling hooks and cutlasses. They don’t even shoot well anymore.”

Though there was some sentimental feeling for the Marines from past fights, the Corps had become a redundant, obsolete unit of candy soldiers. Culpeper was bending under the demands of the party, the admirals, and a most vocal Horace Kerr.

The story goes that Horace Kerr’s ancestors had landed south of Plymouth Rock two days earlier than the
Mayflower
. His great-grandfather was an hour ahead of the Minutemen at Concord and his shipworks won the war for the North.

Indeed, Kerr had made his initial fortune building ships for the Union fleet. He was a rising star among the entrepreneurial barons.

Now, over two decades after the war, Kerr was in the center of the new steam-and-steel navy. He himself was a man of steel, help
ing craft the new American fleet, an imperial fleet, for the nation’s great leap into world commerce. A hard-edged genius, Kerr was a real power in the power rooms of Washington.

Four presidents had heard him out, carefully. He could not be intimidated by anyone . . . except, perhaps, by his daughter, Amanda, who at that moment burst into the office and headed for the cloud of cigar smoke.

The Marine on guard followed on her heels.

“Amanda,” Horace Kerr roared, “what the devil is going on here?”

“Sorry, sirs,” the Marine said. “I told the lady the meeting was closed.”

“You might have restrained her,” Commodore Harkleroad grumbled. “You people do have training on how to stand guard?”

“Sirs, I did not think there was anything in the manual that directly applied to this situation. I felt that shooting her or threatening her with my saber or physically placing her under arrest was not appropriate to the situation, inasmuch as she and Mr. Kerr had the same last name,
sirs!
”

“You were standing guard against a girl!” Harkleroad snapped.

“She used trickery to get past me,” the Marine answered.

“You are impertinent! I demand a reprimand!” Horace Kerr feigned a rage that caused the potted plants to tremble.

Secretary Culpeper joined them, turning to Commandant Ballard to see what “Uncle Tom” had to say. The commandant scratched out a note and slid it over the desk.

Culpeper glanced at it and passed it to the others. It read:
Paddy O’Hara’s son.

Silence.

“Amanda, how lovely to see you,” Culpeper crooned.

Commodore Harkleroad said something in mangled French on the order of “beware the femme fatale.” What might have been considered a laugh found its way around the table.

“I really don’t think this calls for bread and water, does it, Miss Amanda?” Tom Ballard asked softly.

Amanda, who had gathered which way the wind was blowing, turned to the Marine and said, “I was very rude and I apologize.”

The others nodded in unison.

“Colonel Ballard,” Amanda said, “I’d like you to command . . . Private . . . er . . .”

“Zachary O’Hara,” Ballard said.

“I want you to order Private O’Hara to attend a post-debutante charity dance at Inverness,” she said, referring to an event that was to be held at the Kerrs’ Baltimore mansion. “Saturday, next.”

“I can assure Miss Amanda that Private O’Hara will be guarding your door, properly.”

“No,” Amanda corrected. “I wish to extend my apology by having him as a guest.” She turned. “I’ll wait, Father,” she said, and burst out of the office as suddenly as she had burst in. Ballard nodded for Zachary to leave.

Horace Kerr softened. “She’s a handful. Just turned sixteen, you know, made her social debut in Baltimore a few months ago. She’s feeling her oats. Stepping into her charity duties, all that.”

“He does have a proper uniform for the occasion, does he not, Tom?” Kerr asked, referring to the private.

“I can’t do a hell of a lot for the Marines these days, but I can see to it he has a dress uniform.”

In the 110-year history of the Corps, it was the only time that a commandant ordered a new dress uniform for a private. It included a white sash belt, a gleaming brass buckle, a white spiked hat with pom-pom, and the loan of an officer’s ceremonial sword.

•
6
•

The senior Wart-Hog, Tobias Storm, received his commission into the Marines through the established system of political patronage.

His father, Marcus Storm, a Bostonian, had been among the ranks of Andrew Jackson’s troops when they handed the British a sound defeat in the War of 1812 at New Orleans. The war had been over when the battle was fought, but the victory was celebrated, nonetheless, as one of a David over a Goliath.

Marcus Storm took his discharge there, overwhelmed by the allure of New Orleans and its French heritage. The fancy goods and tawdry way of life were of a sort not seen in Boston.

He returned to Boston two years later, with a dozen trunks of silk and wines and aromas and ornate gems. Marcus Storm became a smashing success as a purveyor of luxury imports from France, which filled a hole in the staid Bostonian existence.

His marriage was blessed with four sons, more than enough to carry on the family enterprise; in fact, there was one too many. Marcus selected sons numbers one, two, and four. Number three, Tobias, was odd man out.

Tobias was a spirited young man more given to chasing skirts than to selling the material to make them. He was a contender in every saloon he patronized. It would be best, Marcus thought, to ease him away from Boston, but neither the army nor the navy would take him. As a last resort, he was imposed on the Marine Corps and went on to have an undistinguished career, notable only for the fact that he was present with Admiral Dewey when the latter entered Tokyo Bay to introduce Japan to the glories of Western civilization.

Tobias was left in Tokyo to put together a small railroad, one of the gifts to the Japanese emperor. He had a way with iron and machinery.

On returning to the States, Lieutenant Storm’s value to the Corps came in his assessment of military ordnance. There was no standard for procurement of weapons and Storm’s job was to try to see to it that his little Marine Corps was not handed down everyone’s obsolete cannons and muskets.

In the final months of the Civil War, the Union had cracked through at Vicksburg, Farragut was in Mobile Bay, and the Confederacy was cut in half along the Mississippi.

On the coast side, an enormous fleet of over a hundred Union warships, packing more than a thousand guns, moved toward Cape Fear. Wilmington, North Carolina, one of the last operating Confederate ports, was the objective.

Fort Fisher, twenty miles downriver, stood between the Union armada and Wilmington. This assault plan was to achieve the obliteration of Fisher, by naval gunfire; then an invasion would be led by an entire battalion of Marines.

Second Lieutenant Tobias Storm had remained Second Lieu
tenant Storm throughout the war, but had been part of the creative planning that improved the accuracy and destructiveness of artillery firepower.

With the war going the Union’s way, Storm needed his piece of it and nagged his way onto the USS
Algonquin
as commander of a company. The men loved Storm. He was of medium height but powerful build, and jolly comments came through his great mustache. He had, by doubling a navy requisition illegally, gotten a new rifle-bored, single-shot, lever-action gun to replace their pitiful muskets.

More good fortune was his when Sergeant Paddy O’Hara was assigned to him. O’Hara had been seething to avenge the disaster at Sumter, and from the looks of this fleet and a Marine battalion to lead the assault, Fisher would fall.

Fort Fisher was earth and sandbags and logs, surely no match for the Union’s thousand-plus guns.

A Confederate shell hit the powder stores of the
Algonquin,
blowing Tobias Storm off the bridge into an inferno on the deck below.

Fortunately, he landed at the feet of Paddy O’Hara, who carried him to the ship’s rail, held him, and leaped into the water and swam for another ship a moment before the
Algonquin
exploded.

Fort Fisher did not fall that day. The Union, no longer as squeamish about casualties, made another assault later, and this time was successful.

That is how Tobias Storm became a Wart-Hog. After the conflict was done, the nation wanted war no more. Stationed mostly in Washington, he was promoted to first lieutenant and married a robust lady, Matilda Morris, whose inheritance allowed them to establish a home and a family.

Storm loved the military and refused to resign to open a branch of the family importing firm in Washington. He also thought less of himself for not having seen a single action in a war in which he was tossed overboard just as the battle had commenced.

* * *

The Marine Corps was now scraping around, looking for some sort of mission to help keep it relevant, when they were brought in to solve a domestic problem.

There was growing concern in the government regarding happenings in the territory of Alaska.

Alaska had been purchased for a pittance from a bankrupt Russian czar. Locked in and frozen a good part of the year as it was, only the most daring adventurer attempted to traverse the uncharted northern passages. Death pointed an icy finger at courageous but ill-advised men who penetrated too far north.

The current source of riches around the Bering Sea was being plundered by Russian poachers. The Aleutian Islands formed stepping-stones between Russian settlements in Siberia and the Alaskan mainland. The Russians had devastated the fragile Indian civilization, imposed a system of serfdom, and otherwise ravaged the region under their mangling rule.

Seals, otters, and other fur-bearing animals were the life-support systems of the natives and the victims of savage commercialism by the Russians.

During nesting season, Russian poachers came over the Aleutians to Alaska, though it was now an American possession, and slaughtered seals by the tens of thousands, often by club, to save ammunition and prevent damage to the valuable skins.