"How long do you think it will take Captain Buchanan to decrypt the message?"
"About thirty minutes, Sir," Ball said.
"Fine," Fertig said.
"I expect to be here in half an hour, when Captain Buchanan is finished."
Forty-five minutes later, Captain Horace Buchanan handed Brigadier General Fertig the two sheets of paper on which he had neatly lettered (Signal Section, HQ, USFIP, did not possess a typewriter) the decrypted message. From the look on Buchanan's face--disappointment and embarrassment--Fertig knew that there was little good news in the radio message.
"Thank you," Fertig said, and read the message:
KAZ FOR MPS
ONE LT COL WENDELL W. FERTIG CORPS OF ENGINEERS US ARMY
RESERVE DETAILED INFANTRY
TWO COLONEL MARCA RIO PER ALTA PHILIPPINE SCOUTS DESIGNATED
MILITARY GUERRILLA CHIEF OF TEMPORARILY OCCUPIED ENEMY
TERRITORY
THREE THE ISSUANCE OF MILITARY SCRIP IS EXPRESSLY
FORBIDDEN REPEAT EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN
FOUR COMMAND OF GUERRILLA FORCES WILL BE EXECUTED ONLY BY
OFFICERS PRESENTLY IN DIRECT COMMAND OP SAME
FIVE THIS HEADQUARTERS WILL ENTERTAIN REQUISITIONS FOR
SMALL IN SIZE URGENTLY NEEDED EQUIPMENT ONLY
BY COMMAND OF GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR COMMANDER IN CHIEF
SOUTHWEST PACIFIC COMMAND
WILLOUGHBY BRIGADIER GENERAL USA
Fertig looked up and met Buchanan's eyes.
"I took out the 'stops' and stuff, General," Buchanan said.
There had been a faint hesitation, Fertig noticed, before Buchanan had called him "General."
It wasn't only a little bad news, it was all bad news.
As far as MacArthur was concerned, he was a reserve lieutenant colonel in the Corps of Engineers, not a brigadier general in command of U.S. forces in the Philippines.
Colonel Marcario Peralta was "military guerrilla chief of temporarily occupied enemy territory." Fertig did know Peralta. Peralta had been a successful lawyer in Manila before the war. The last Fertig had heard, just before the surrender, Peralta had been a major. Now he was a colonel, which meant that Fertig was supposed to be subordinate to him.
That could explain why MacArthur had pointedly reminded him that he was a lowly lieutenant colonel.
There was another possibility: If he had not promoted himself, and thus offended MacArthur's sense of the military proprieties, it was possible (now that he thought of it, even likely) that he would have been promoted to colonel and named "military guerrilla chief of temporarily occupied enemy territory."
The really worrisome paragraph was the one about forbidding him to issue scrip. He'd been issuing the scrip, signing each one-, five-, and ten-dollar bill himself; and the crude money had been accepted by the Filipinos; they had taken him at his word that, when the war was over and the Japanese had been driven from the Philippines, it would be redeemed at face value.