In Danger's Path

by W. E. B Griffin

  It wasn’t across the hall, it was adjacent to 808, where, at that very moment, Janice was probably unbuttoning her crisp white shirt and getting ready for bed.

  He stepped into his room, found his bag, and took from it a bottle of scotch whisky from the Greenbrier’s liquor store, with every intention of taking at least one very stiff drink.

  But when he poured it, he changed his mind.

  Obviously, the last thing in the world you need is a drink. One drink will lead to another, and the next thing you know, you will be knocking at the connecting door to Janice’s room and making a four-star ass of yourself.

  You don’t need a drink, you need a cold shower. A long, ice-cold shower.

  A long ice-cold shower gave him goose bumps and the shivers but did little to erase from his mind the image of Janice taking off her uniform. He put on a terry-cloth bathrobe he found hanging on the bathroom door, went into the bedroom, and decided he really did need a drink, for medicinal purposes.

  As he felt the scotch warming his body, there was a knock at the door. He opened it and looked out, but there was no one in the corridor.

  Jesus Christ, that’s Janice knocking at the connecting door!

  He went to it.

  “Jim?”

  “Yes.”

  Who the hell did she expect?

  “Open the door.”

  He unlocked the door.

  She was wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe identical to his.

  He had a very clear mental image of her just before she slipped into it.

  “Turn off the lights,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You heard what he said, about turning the lights off before you open the curtains.”

  “Right,” Jim said, and went around the room, turning off the lights. When he had finished, he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, but then there was the sound of curtains being opened. And in a moment, his eyes adjusted to the light.

  Janice was standing by the window.

  He went and stood behind her.

  She smelled now of soap, not perfume. Her hair was still wet.

  He put his hand on her shoulder. He could feel the warmth of her body even through the thick robe.

  “How beautiful,” Janice said, and leaned back against him.

  He looked out the window. The sky was clear and the moon was full. He could see people walking on the board-walk, and the surf crashing onto the beach.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Her hand came up and caught his.

  “Do you love me?”

  “Oh, God, yes!”

  She pushed herself erect and turned around and stood on her tiptoes to raise her face to his. He kissed her and wrapped his arms around her.

  He thought for a moment, terrified, that he had gone too far with the kiss, with holding her so tight, for she struggled to free herself. He let her go.

  And then he saw what she was doing. She was shrugging out of the terry-cloth robe. She had been wearing nothing under it.

  “Don’t say anything,” Janice said. “Just take me to bed.”

  XIII

  [ONE]

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff

  The Pentagon

  Washington, D.C.

  0805 15 March 1943

  As Chief, Communications & Communications Security, Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colonel H. (Hulit) A. (Augustus) Albright, Signal Corps (Detail, General Staff Corps), U.S. Army, had the day-to-day responsibility for the operation and the security of the Special Channel over which MAGIC intelligence data was transmitted—a responsibility he had held virtually from the beginning of the Special Channel.

  His immediate superior was Major General Charles M. Adamson, USA, the Secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The title “Secretary” was somewhat misleading. In almost any other military organization, General Adamson would have been known as Chief of Staff. But someone had apparently decided that a Chief of Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was going to be more than a little confusing, and his position was defined as “Secretary.”

  General Adamson customarily signed interoffice memoranda and other material with his initials, CMA. Early on, Colonel Albright concluded that these letters actually stood for “Covering My Ass.” General Adamson’s interoffice memoranda were quite skillfully written to ensure that if anything went wrong, the blame could be laid on any shoulders but his own.

  Colonel Albright, a short, barrel-chested man, had been commissioned from the ranks. Specifically, he had served as an enlisted man in the Signal Corps, rising in two years to corporal. He had also sufficiently impressed several senior officers there with his unusual intelligence and character that they had encouraged him to study for and take the competitive examination for entrance to West Point, with the result that he was offered an appointment to the United States Military Academy.

  He graduated from the USMA seventh in a class of 240, earning the right to choose his branch of service. Against the advice of his classmate, Cadet Charles M. Adamson, who reminded him that very, very few Signal Corps officers ever rose to be generals, he chose the Signal Corps.

  Four years at the U.S. Military Academy in the company of Cadet Adamson had convinced Cadet Albright that Adamson was a pompous horse’s ass who had arrived at the visionary conclusion that the key to a successful military career was never to make a decision of any kind without first finding someone to lay the blame onto if anything went wrong.

  When the two met at a West Point class reunion in 1939, Albright was forced to admit that Adamson had indeed found a faster route to military advancement than he had. By dint of hard work (he’d taken a master’s degree and then earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT, among other things), Albright had earned the reputation of being one of the Army’s most knowledgeable officers in radio communication, with a sideline specialty in cryptography. He had risen to major. Adamson, meanwhile, had spent the ensuing years shooting and polishing artillery pieces and making the right kind of friends. He was a full colonel.

  At the reunion, Adamson somewhat grandly announced to Albright that if he was given command of a division—an outcome as inevitable as the rising of the sun, he seemed to think—he would see what he could do about having Albright assigned as his signal officer.

  This was not at all a pleasant prospect for Major Albright. Having all his teeth extracted without novocaine seemed on the whole more desirable than serving under his old classmate. But he smiled and said nothing.

  They next met several years later, at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Albright was by then a lieutenant colonel, and Adamson was a major general and the Secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “This means,” he explained to his old friend, “that I’m finally in a position to do something for you.”

  “I truly appreciate the offer,” Albright replied, “but I’d like to think I’m really making a genuine contribution to the war effort doing what I’ve been doing.” At that time, he was involved in developing a more efficient and reliable Radio Ranging and Direction system, called “Radar,” as well as doing some work he considered important in the area of cryptography.

  “Odd that you should mention that, Augie,” General Adamson said. “Cryptography’s more or less what I came to see you about.”

  Lieutenant Colonel H. (Hulit) A. (Augustus) Albright preferred to be informally addressed as “Hugh”; he despised “Augie.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “What I’m about to tell you, Augie, is Top Secret, and not to leave this room,” General Adamson said.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Navy cryptographers at Pearl Harbor have managed to break some of the most secret Japanese codes,” General Adamson announced.

  That was not news to Colonel Albright. Not only had he learned from peers in the Navy Department that they were working hard on that problem, but he had arranged for a Korean-American mathematics professor named Hon Song Do, whom he had known at MIT, to be commissioned into the Signal Corps and assi
gned to the Pearl Harbor code-breaking operation. He hadn’t actually been told, in so many words, that the codes had been broken, but he knew.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Now, I have been charged by Admiral Leahy with setting up an absolutely secure transmission channel for the transmission of this data between Pearl Harbor, Washington, and General MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia. And I think, Augie, that you’re just the man to handle it.”

  Oh, shit! I don’t want to be a crypto officer. I’m overqualified to be a crypto officer, and too senior. That’s a job for a captain, not a light colonel. What this sonofabitch is trying to do is cover his ass. Again.

  “In this connection,” Adamson went on pontifically, “intelligence has managed to lay their hands on a German cryptographic device. To our good fortune, the Germans believe the device has been destroyed rather than compromised….”

  This caught Lieutenant Colonel Albright’s attention. He had heard some interesting things about the German device. For starters, it was such a clever design that decrypting material first encrypted on it was virtually impossible without using a device like it and a matching signal-operating instruction. And, if Adamson knew what he was talking about, and the Germans did not suspect that the device had fallen into the hands of the Allies, it was a major intelligence/cryptographic coup, with enormous implications.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “The question has been raised: Could we—that is to say, could you duplicate this device, if you had your hands on it. It would be used solely for the transmission of the intelligence data, code-named MAGIC, which has been generated in Hawaii.”

  “They call that reverse engineering, sir,” Albright replied. “Yes, sir. If I can get my hands on one, I can duplicate it.”

  Before going on, General Adamson stared at Lieutenant Colonel Albright a long moment—obviously weighing whether or not to believe him.

  “I’ll have to get the go-ahead from Admiral Leahy, of course, Augie, but what I’m thinking is that we should fly you to London, so that you could physically bring this device back to the United States. A destroyer has been made available for this purpose; flying it here is considered too risky.”

  Maybe, with a little bit of luck, I can do everything he wants, and stay here, and not find myself working for the sonofabitch.

  Three days later, Lieutenant Colonel Albright was on his way to England to bring the device to the United States. By the time the destroyer with the device aboard tied up at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Adamson had arranged for Albright’s transfer to the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as Chief, Communications & Communications Security. He had additionally and not without difficulty, he said, arranged his promotion to full colonel and detail to the General Staff Corps. “Don’t make me regret it, Augie,” he told him.

  Within a month, Colonel Albright learned that he owed his promotion to the suggestion of the chief signal officer, not General Adamson, and that his detail to the General Staff Corps had been directed by Admiral Leahy himself, as a cover for his secret communications role. No one would pay much attention to one more GSC colonel on the Joint Chiefs; but people might wonder what a full bird colonel of the Signal Corps was actually doing.

  In three closely guarded rooms at the Army’s Signal Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, Albright immediately set up “the factory.” There the first machine was carefully reverse-engineered, and the devices based on it—naturally called MAGIC devices, after the code name of the intelligence data itself—were put into production. The first two of these were installed in Washington and Pearl Harbor. The third went to Brisbane, Australia, for MacArthur’s use, where it was placed in the care of Lieutenant Hon Song Do, Signal Corps, USAR. In time, the “factory” was capable of manufacturing two of the devices each month.

  During the initial setup of the “Special Channel,” Major General Charles M. Adamson, USA, predictably proved to be a royal pain in the ass; but that was the price Albright knew he had to pay for being involved with an operation as important as MAGIC…an importance confirmed to Colonel Albright on more than one occasion by Admiral Leahy himself. Leahy privately told Albright that the MAGIC information transmitted over the Special Channel was one of the United States’ two most important secret operations, the other being the Manhattan Project under Brigadier General Leslie Groves, USA. Under Groves, a team of physicists and mathematicians was engaged in developing a bomb that would release the energy Einstein theorized was contained in all matter. One such bomb, Admiral Leahy told Albright, would have an explosive force equivalent to that of twenty thousand tons of trinitrotoluene, better known as TNT.

  It was now clear to Albright that he’d been wrong to worry about becoming an overqualified crypto officer, a colonel doing a captain’s job. In fact, he sometimes wondered if he was qualified to protect the MAGIC secret from compromise. The basic problem, as he saw it, was not technical or mechanical, but human. The MAGIC devices worked flawlessly. The problem was that more and more people were being added to the loop.

  The Special Channel was originally intended to provide an absolutely secure transmission channel for MAGIC between the headquarters of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief, Pacific, in Hawaii; General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, South West Pacific Ocean Area, in Brisbane, Australia; and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States in Washington.

  On the surface, one might imagine that no more than half a dozen people would be involved. Such thinking proved to be overoptimistic. For starters, people had to actually operate the devices. That is, somebody had to actually push the typewriter-like keys that would encrypt or decrypt MAGIC material. Originally, the cryptographers at Pearl Harbor did this. But it didn’t take their superiors long to realize that their time could be better spent decrypting intercepted Japanese communications than doing work clerk-typists could do just as well. So a few cryptographers who had been handling routine cryptographic material had to be granted MAGIC clearances, and their names were added to the very short list of people, headed by the President, authorized to know that MAGIC existed.

  In time other names were added to the MAGIC list, starting with the Secretaries of the Navy (Frank Knox) and the Army (Henry Stimson). The Director of the Office of Strategic Services (William Donovan) obviously had the Need To Know what the Japanese were up to, and he had gone on the list, as had the Chief of Naval Operations, the Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, and the Chief of the USMC Office of Management Analysis. In Brisbane, MacArthur decided that his Chief of Intelligence, Brigadier General Willoughby, had to be on the list, and he was added. Navy Secretary Frank Knox, meanwhile, sent a personal representative to the Pacific, a commissioned civilian named Fleming Pickering. Since he did not wish the Navy brass to know what Pickering was reporting to him, Knox gave him a MAGIC clearance so that his reports could be transmitted over the Special Channel. And Army Secretary Stimson had recently convinced the President that General Dwight D. Eisenhower, soon to command the Allied Invasion of the European Landmass, needed access to MAGIC material; and a MAGIC device had been authorized for his headquarters in England and flown to London. Eisenhower had immediately obtained permission for his Chief of Staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, to be added to the MAGIC list.

  The brass had quickly learned that the Special Channel provided them with an absolutely secure means of communicating with each other on matters having nothing to do with MAGIC material. And it had the added bonus of being far speedier than standard Army or Navy communications. Sixty percent of total Special Channel traffic now had nothing to do with MAGIC.

  As Special Channel users proliferated, Albright grew increasingly worried that the necessary close control of the Special Channel would be lost. Brass worldwide would inevitably become aware of its existence, and come up with arguments why they, too, should be authorized access to MAGIC material and the Special Channel. Experience had taught him that the more people w
ith access to a secret, the greater its chances of being compromised.

  But once Eisenhower and Bedell Smith were included on the MAGIC list, Admiral Leahy had drawn the line and refused all further requests for MAGIC access. After that, few other MAGIC devices were actually needed. The ones operating in CINCPAC headquarters in Hawaii, Supreme Headquarters, Southwest Pacific Ocean Area in Brisbane, and in the Navy Communications facility in Washington all had backup devices in case of equipment failure. So did the one recently sent to London. There were also four other devices. Two of these were under constant evaluation at the Signal Laboratories, and two were used for training, one at a secret Signal facility on a farm in Virginia, and the other now at the OSS training base in Maryland.

  With the drying up of demand, Albright had been able to shut down the production line at the Factory at Fort Monmouth. He had six MAGIC devices “on the shelf” (actually, in a bank-type vault in the Pentagon), and that was going to be enough.

  Or so he thought until the President overrode Admiral Leahy: Generalissimmo Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist Chinese leader, and Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Allied Commander for China, Burma, and India, were to be brought into the MAGIC loop. That meant that a MAGIC device, with a necessary backup, had to be transported to them and set in operation.

  Giving a device to the Chinese and the Brits, in Colonel Albright’s view, was tantamount to taking out a full-page advertisement in the Washington Star to announce to the world that some of the most secret Japanese messages were being read in Washington, Pearl Harbor, and Brisbane. But he was fully aware that it wasn’t his responsibility to decide who received a MAGIC device, it was the President’s. His responsibility was limited to making sure that the devices reached Chungking and New Delhi, and were set up and put into operation without problems.

  The immediate priority was to get devices to Chungking—under, of course, the close supervision of Major General Charles M. Adamson, USA, Secretary to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.