The Double Agents

by W. E. B Griffin

  The mechanic who’d hit his head grinned and added, “Better than okay, if you get him and his surprises out of here.”

  “Surprises?” Canidy said. “I’d call them little tests. They’re good for you. Didn’t your mother ever tell you ‘Never let your guard down’ or ‘Watch your back’?”

  “How about ‘Payback is hell’?” Darmstadter said to Canidy with a grin.

  The mechanics smiled as they went back to work.

  Darmstadter said, “Get that bird fixed, guys, and we’ll be back in a bit.”

  Darmstadter turned to Canidy and looked at the duffel on his shoulder.

  “You look ready to go,” he said, then nodded toward the Nissen hut. “Let me go inside and get my flight bag, then we’re out of here. Okay?”

  He opened the door to the Nissen hut, and Canidy could see inside. There was a single lightbulb hanging above four bunks built of raw lumber. The shelving that held army field manuals and a few other books had been constructed from old ammo crates.

  Canidy nodded.

  “Sure,” he said. “I think that while you’re doing that, I’d better see to my bladder.”

  “Piss tube’s over there in the shadow of the Fokker.”

  “Taking leaks on the Krauts, are we?”

  “It was someone else’s idea, but seemed fitting enough to me,” Darmstadter said, then went inside the hut, the door slamming shut on its spring behind him.

  The crew who had been in the other Gooney Bird, readying it for flight, had not been disappointed with Darmstadter’s announcement that he was taking their aircraft and that they could have the other one when it was fixed in an hour or so.

  As Darmstadter worked out those details, and made the preflight walk-around inspection of the aircraft, Canidy had made his way forward and strapped himself into the copilot seat.

  When Darmstadter appeared in the cockpit and found him there, he said, “What? You don’t want to fly left seat?”

  “I thought you knew that I only fly the ones that can breathe fire,” Canidy said.

  Darmstadter glared at him.

  Canidy went on, “You know, ones that go rat-a-tat-tat and boom-boom? I leave the operation of airborne buses to those pilots whose lips tend to move when they read the checklist.”

  Darmstadter shook his head as he settled into the pilot seat and retrieved the checklist.

  He said, “With all due respect, Major, you can be such an ass sometimes.”

  Canidy smiled smugly.

  The C-47 taxied to the threshold of runway 32, stuck its nose into the prevailing light wind coming off the sea, then, after engine run-up, roared down the strip and went wheels-up for the sixty-kilometer flight to Dellys. All the while, Canidy watched Darmstadter with the critical eye of the flight instructor he once had been at Naval Air Station Pensacola.

  The C-47 copilot usually handled the business of putting the gear up and down, setting the flaps, running the radios. Darmstadter never asked Canidy to lift a finger. He effortlessly covered all the tasks.

  And he didn’t even move his lips when the read the checklist.

  Despite the fact that it was safer to have the copilot read the checklist and work the panel, leaving the flying itself to the pilot, Canidy took no offense. He knew it was not a case of him not trusting Canidy, or of him showing off, or even of him being reckless.

  Darmstadter simply loved to fly, to truly be pilot in command.

  And as Canidy looked coolly out of the airplane, casually following Darmstadter’s movements and being quietly impressed, Canidy was reminded how fine a pilot Darmstadter was, and how he almost missed the chance to become one.

  Because he sure as hell had not started out as one.

  The fact—not to mention the irony—was that Darmstadter, Henry, Lieutenant, United States Army Air Forces, almost wound up as a navigator, a bombardier, an aerial gunner—anything but a pilot in command of an aircraft.

  Reason: The then nineteen-year-old had damn near flunked out of basic flight training. Despite his genuine enthusiasm to fly, his skills as a pilot had been rather rough, and compounding that problem were his bad bouts of airsickness.

  What had saved his ass was a combination of two things. One, there had been a severe shortage of pilots. Two, there had not been a shortage of rough-around-the-edges fledgling flyboys in Darmstadter’s class who also suffered from airsickness.

  If the AAF elimination board had resorted to disqualifying everyone with less-than-polished skills or with airsickness—or with both—and declared them unfit to fly, then the result would have been a great number of empty cockpits…and thus grounded aircraft.

  Resigned to the fact that they had to fill slots, the elimination board took another look—a long, hard book—at each candidate who had a problem with airsickness. (The ones left, that is. Half a dozen guys had simply gotten sick of being sick and quit to pursue other land-based assignments.) And the elimination board had then decided that Darmstadter held the dubious honor of being the least bad of a bad class.

  They gave him another chance. They said that if during his probation period he could show he could perform aerobatic maneuvers without getting disoriented—or airsick—then they would see that he would earn his wings to fly, say, two-place, single-engine Piper Cubs. Fighters and bombers clearly being beyond his scope of competence.

  The enthusiastic Darmstadter was determined.

  Turning the phrase what goes up must come down on its head, he figured what doesn’t go down can’t come up and stopped eating on the days he knew he was going to fly. The result had been that he still got a little light-headed, but the throwing up was history. And with that resolved, he’d been able to successfully complete the aerobatic maneuvers.

  The board made good on its condition of probation, and he soon pinned on his wings and butter bar and headed for advanced training.

  It was there that he found the board also meant what it had said about what he would be flying—or not flying.

  He had been sent to learn to fly the small twin-engine transport C-45.

  Not a problem, he’d thought. He still would get to fly.

  But then, just as he was about to graduate, he dumped one. Taking off solo in a C-45, he lost an engine. Miraculously, he’d had barely enough altitude to pull a three-sixty and, despite landing downwind, get the plane back in one piece on the runway—where he lost the other engine.

  No sooner had he escaped the fuselage and made it across the tarmac than the fuel ignited and the aircraft exploded in a magnificent fireball.

  And he found himself in front of the elimination board again.

  The seven members debated his actions in his presence. One declared that he should have followed Standard Operating Procedures, including adjusting the aircraft to fly on a single engine and to circle the field until able to land properly, into the wind. Another member gave him the benefit of the doubt, saying no one but Darmstadter really knew what had happened, and how could it really be a pilot’s fault when both of his engines crap out?

  The elimination board voted in secret, and Darmstadter (by a single yea, he later learned) passed. He then transitioned to learn how to fly the C-47, and, following his successful graduation from that course, had been sent to England to fly Gooney Birds.

  But not in the left seat.

  His place was in the copilot seat. And there, he’d spent countless hours picking up time—and skills—with superior pilots in command, as they practiced low-level flights for dropping parachutists, towing gliders, and such. In the process, he’d also picked up—on top of an automatic time-in-grade promotion to first lieutenant—enough flight hours, plus landings and takeoffs, to qualify as an aircraft commander.

  Then one day his troop carrier wing commander had made an announcement to the pilots he’d gathered in the maintenance hangar. Eighth Air Force needed volunteer pilots, the commander said, for a “classified mission involving great personal risk.”

  Two of the Gooney Bird pilots there
wanted nothing more than to be fighter pilots—and knew that towing gliders and dropping parachutists was not the career path for them. They jumped at the opportunity.

  Hank Darmstadter admitted that he (1) would have loved being a fighter pilot but (2) knew that, with his history, did not for a minute stand a chance of becoming one. Nor did he really believe, as might the other two pilots, that this dangerous mission would put him in at the controls of a fighter plane.

  But, he’d thought, sounds interesting. What the hell? Why not apply? Probably won’t make it, anyway….

  Just when enough time had passed since he’d filled out the questionnaire that he knew he’d been passed over, though, sure as hell an order had arrived that said for him to immediately report to Eighth Air Force.

  And, very shortly, he discovered that he’d very likely done a dumb goddamn thing by volunteering for this secret outfit called the Office of Strategic Services.

  The mission—smuggling some important people out from under the noses of the damn Nazis—had been dangerous. But it had also been exciting, far more than tugging gliders through the sky. And in the process he’d saved the ass of one Major Richard M. Canidy.

  Darmstadter got Canidy’s attention when he pulled back on the throttles of the C-47’s Twin Wasp engines. It was exactly half an hour after they’d gone wheels-up. He tapped Canidy on the shoulder, then pointed directly ahead of them toward the coastline, where the green hills led down and met the emerald sea.

  “Dellys,” Darmstadter’s voice said in Canidy’s headset.

  Canidy looked and nodded. He saw the small city of low white buildings set into the hillside, with a small, semicircular harbor at the bottom, and thought that Dellys did indeed look as Stan Fine had said, “a miniature version of Algiers.”

  Canidy glanced at the altimeter and watched the needles creep counterclockwise as the aircraft settled into a slow descent.

  They had been flying at a thousand feet above ground level (AGL), which he knew was considered the standard height from which to drop paratroops—Once again, Canidy thought, Hank proves old habits are hard to break—although he was more than aware that in certain conditions AGL altitudes of five hundred and six hundred feet were quite common.

  The closer you drop men to the ground, the less time they spend in the sky floating to earth as easy targets.

  He noted, too, that the airspeed indicator showed one hundred forty miles per hour. That of course was the target speed for turning the jump light from red to green.

  Darmstadter’s consistent. He still flies like they trained him, before we snagged him. Which, of course, is why we snagged him…to drop agents by parachute.

  Saving our ass in Hungary was just icing on the cake.

  Canidy sat back and relaxed as Darmstadter maneuvered the aircraft to just shy of the western edge of the city, then made a gentle, flat turn out over the sea, and then turned again to roughly parallel the coast.

  They were at a little more than a hundred feet off the deck and coming up on the shoreline somewhat quickly.

  Canidy wasn’t concerned; he knew Darmstadter could skim the bird along the tops of the waves and still land with his wheels dry. But Canidy did wonder where the hell he was going to put down. There wasn’t a flat spot anywhere he could see that would be big enough to accommodate the Gooney Bird.

  And, right now, with the peak elevation above Dellys looking to be at about a thousand feet above sea level, they presently were on a direct vector into the side of the land rise.

  Darmstadter, showing no apparent concern, pointed toward the eastern end of Dellys.

  Again his voice came through Canidy’s headset: “There’s the Sandbox.”

  Canidy followed to where he was pointing and found at the edge of town, right along the seawall, a compound that covered a whole block. It had a one-story tan-colored building that looked like a schoolhouse. The compound was ringed by a high wall built of white stone. There was a large courtyard, and in the half of the courtyard that was dirt Canidy saw lines of men going through what looked like hand-to-hand combat.

  The Gooney Bird buzzed the compound. Then, with the Twin Wasps roaring from Darmstadter’s big push on the throttles, the aircraft quickly gained altitude, then turned to the south and easily hopped the ridge.

  Barely a moment later—just as Canidy made out a small, crude dirt strip dug out on the backside of the ridge, with a Nissen hut at one end and a jeep parked under a tarp strung alongside the hut—Darmstadter, in a flash of hands, slightly retarded the throttles, extended the full flaps for landing, and dropped and locked the landing gear.

  They were on the ground in no time and taxiing toward the Nissen hut and jeep. Canidy noticed that an armed guard was standing in the shade of the tarp.

  After Darmstadter had shut down the Twin Wasps, Canidy undid his seat harness.

  “Hank,” he said, patting him on the shoulder, “I was going to try to make up for my apparently offensive comment earlier and tell you that that just now wasn’t half-bad flying.”

  “Thank—” Darmstadter began.

  “But,” Canidy continued, holding up his hands to stop him, “I’m afraid the compliment would probably go right to your head. And then you’d go do something dumb, like dump another plane, and I’d feel responsible for having let you feel overly confident.”

  Darmstadter looked at Canidy and laughed appreciatively.

  Then he gave him the finger.

  [THREE]

  OSS Dellys Station Dellys, Algeria 1655 30 March 1943

  The drive over the hill into town took about twenty minutes. Darmstadter, having left the C-47 under the watch of the guard, steered the jeep though the narrow cobblestone streets of Dellys. When he came to the driveway of the compound, he brought the vehicle to a screeching stop in front of a massive wooden gate in the tall stone wall.

  Without Darmstadter tapping on the horn or making any other effort to signal, the closed gate began slowly to swing open. Canidy wondered why, but when he looked around, and then up, he was not surprised to see a sentry in what had to be an emplacement hidden atop the compound wall.

  Darmstadter stepped on the accelerator pedal, popped the clutch, and shot the jeep through the opening. The gate, moved manually by a young man in fatigues, was closed behind them.

  Darmstadter looked at Canidy.

  “Welcome to the Sandbox,” he said over the whine of the jeep.

  “What was it before?” Canidy said. “Some government facility?”

  “Close. A Catholic missionary boarding school for boys. Some French folks thought they could save some local orphans while spreading the divine message. Don’t know how successful they were….”

  Canidy grunted.

  “That explains the high walls,” he said. “Keeps out those prying eyes wondering what the infidels are up to.”

  As they rolled through the compound, toward the main building, Canidy saw in the courtyard the lines of men he’d seen from the airplane. Close up, most looked to be Frenchmen in their twenties and thirties, with a few appearing to be American or Franco-American.

  Maybe first-generation Americans? Canidy thought.

  The instructors, somewhat older, looked decidedly American.

  In the courtyard, confirming what Canidy had thought when they had flown overhead, the lines of men were practicing hand-to-hand combat.

  Elsewhere throughout the compound, men were engaged in various activities. There was one group of ten agents, sweat-soaked and with bulging backpacks, that was running along the perimeter wall. Gathered in the shade at the base of a tree, six men, in three teams, were bent over open suitcases. Canidy recognized that they were working on Morse code skills, and that each two-man team had a SSTR-1 set—the “suitcase radio,” an ordinary-looking green suitcase with a receiver, transmitter, and power supply hidden inside.

  The jeep turned a corner, and Canidy saw that across the drive from the main entrance to the building was a telephone pole some twenty-five feet
tall. It bristled with climbing spikes and was topped by a six-by-six-foot wooden platform. A parachute harness was tethered by parachute cord tied to two heavy-duty steel springs bolted to an overhead beam. The landing zone (LZ) was a pit of loose sand directly below.

  Two men were at the top, standing on the platform, one helping the other adjust the parachute harness. The fit and muscular helper, by all appearances the instructor, made some hand motions, then yanked on the harness straps to test them. Then he gave the somewhat-overweight jumper—who had the soft features of perhaps a banker or other businessman more at home at a desk than a guerrilla training camp—an encouraging pat on the back.

  The jeep pulled into a parking area alongside another jeep and Canidy and Darmstadter got out.

  Canidy stopped at the front bumper, looked up at the platform, and watched the jumper.

  The man in the harness hesitantly stepped to the edge of the platform.

  He peered over it.

  He looked back at the instructor, who motioned casually with his head, as if to say, Go on, you can do it.

  The jumper peered back over the edge.

  He closed his eyes…and stepped off.

  He dropped like a rock, wailing as he went.

  Then the tethered line snapped taut, and the jumper bobbed a few times under the tension of the springs before coming to a rest, gently swinging three feet above the sandpit LZ.

  “Nice jump, Pierre!” the instructor called down. He had an American accent. “Next time, though, lose the scream, huh?”

  Pierre, hanging his head with relief while staring at the sand LZ, didn’t reply.

  Canidy then heard a voice with a slight Italian accent call behind him, “We’ve been expecting you.”

  Canidy turned. He saw two men in Army fatigues without insignia coming down the stone steps at the building’s main entrance. Both had dark olive skin and close-cropped black hair and bushy black mustaches; one was about six feet tall, the other a head shorter. He recognized the short one as Max Corvo.