"Was it smart to bring that airplane here, Dick?" he asked evenly.
"I didn't have any choice," Canidy said. "When I went to Wincanton, the MP at the gate told me that once I went on the base, I was restricted to it until December 26. Something to do with keeping the barbarians away from the natives at Christmas."
"I thought this field was unsafe," Stevens said.
UI wouldn't want to try to take off with a load of bombs," Canidy said, "but empty, it's all right." Stevens reminded himself then that Canidy was not a fool. Not only that, he was an aeronautical engineer who fully understood the "flight envelope" of B-25 aircraft. Before he had decided to land the B-25 at Whitbey House, he had convinced himself that it could be done safely. Flight safety restrictions were based on the worst scenario, a fully loaded aircraft piloted by an aviator of no more than ordinary skill and experience.
According to the book, Canidy had made an unauthorized flight for personal reasons (which, making it worse, included aiding and abetting an officer to go AWOL), during which he had landed an aircraft on a field he knew had been officially declared unsafe. And he had brought with him an officer who was not (at least yet) cleared to visit Whitbey House.
According to the book, he should be tried by court-martial, if for no other reason than to set an example pour les autres.
There was another way to look at it, A highly skilled pilot had made a short hop to pick up a buddy, a buddy who had lost thirteen of the twenty-eight young pilots he had led on a suicidal assault on the German submarine pens at Saint-Lazare. Stevens decided, therefore, to forget the whole thing.
And so far as young Joe Kennedy was concerned, he was to have been told on Friday anyhow that overall responsibility for the flying bomb project had been assigned to the OSS.
"I'm dying to know what's going on in this place, Colonel," Kennedy said, "but I'm afraid to ask."
E I "We were going to bring you here on Friday anyway," Stevens said.
"Canidy just pushed up the schedule a little." UCAN I ask what's here'?"
"Whitbey House is under the office of Strategic Services," Stevens said, "which is under your father's old pal Colonel Bill Donovan." "And I was to be brought here, you said?"
"OSS has taken over the take out the Saint-Lazare sub pens' project," Stevens said, "to settle the squabble between the Air Corps and the Navy about who should do it and how. Canidy's the action officer." That was the official version, but it wasn't the entire truth.
Canidy had gone to Stevens and told him he had heard about the flying bomb project, There was no question in his mind that when the Germans started to produce jet aircraft engines, they would do so in plants as well-protected as the submarine pens. Which meant that he wanted to get in on the ground floor of the project.
Stevens had agreed with that and taken the proposal to David Bruce.
Bruce had gone to Eisenhower that same afternoon, and Ike, over the objections of the Navy and the Air Corps, had turned the flying-bomb project over to the OSS.
"So that's how you knew so much about me," Kennedy said to Canidy.
"I liked it better when you thought maybe I really was omniscient, 7 Canidy said. He looked at his watch. UWE've got an hour or so before dinner.
You want to talk now, or would you rather wait until we're a little drunk, and stuffed with the roast beef of Merrie Olde England?" UNOW, " Kennedy said.
Douglass shrugged, accepting the inevitable.
One of the trainees had found the piano. Over the murmur of conversation, "O Little Town of Bethlehem" could be faintly heard.
"Kennedy," Canidy saidxaw hen Doug tells you what you're facing at Saintlazare, and when you tell Doug about your B-17s full of Torpex"--a new, very powerful British-developed explosive--"you both may wish you were soused." "Christ!" Kennedy said softly.
"Something wrong, Joe?" Stevens asked.
"I guess I'm just surprised to hear discussed so openly what I thought was a secret," Kennedy said.
"I'm glad you brought that up," Stevens said.
"Sir?"
"Although he certainly has given you cause to think otherwise, " Stevens said, "Canidy is not a complete fool, nor does he play footloose and fancy free with security. Every one within hearing is involved in this project, and cleared appropriately. But no one else here is. You understand?"
"Yes, sir," Kennedy said.
"And you understand, of course, Kennedy," Canidy said, "that that was a none-too-subtle reprimand?"
"Don't push your luck, Dick!" Stevens snapped. UDAMN it, sometimes you go too far!" Stevens held Canidy in an icy glance for a long moment, until Canidy said, "I'm sorry, Colonel. I guess I do."
"Guess?" Stevens snapped.
Here was another icy pause, then Stevens said, "I suppose the best place to talk is in your apartment, Dick. Shall we go there?" "Yes, sir," Canidy said. He sounded genuinely contrite.
As they started out of the room, Stevens became aware that conversation in the hall had died down and that the trainees were now singing along with the piano. Eyes were on them, and he thought he saw disappointment--and perhaps displeasure--in them that the brass was walking out on the Christmas carols.
He put his hand on Canidy's arm.
"Don't say anything smart, Dick," he said softly. "Just turn around and sing." Canidy met his eyes for a moment and nodded.
They sang "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and
"Good King Wenceslaus," and as they were singing "Away in a Manger, "Ann Chambers, in her war correspondent's uniform, came into the refectory, walked up to Canidy, kissed him on the mouth (which introduced applause into the caroling), and then stood with her arm around him.
They sang until it was time for dinner.
After dinner they went to Canidy's apartment and discussed killing the enemy.
SHREE] Sehlons Steighofqn He-n, Aermany 28 December 1942 Beatrice, Countess Batthyany and Baroness von Steighofen, woke shivering, her arms wrapped over her large, dark-nippled breasts for warmth.
In her sleep, she had kicked the sheets and blankets off. She reached down for them, dragged them over her, and glanced at the other side of the bed. It was empty.
She had not, she concluded, taken the captain of the honor escort into her bed. She reconstructed the end of the evening, The captain had been the perfect German officer and gentleman. His training and standards had not permitted him to believe that sexual congress between himself and the widow of his late commanding officer, in the familial Schloss and on the eve of a memorial service to the late Oberstleutnant Baron Manfried von Steighofen, could possibly take place.
Beatrice was now pleased that sexual congress had not, in fact, taken place. It had seemed like a splendid idea around midnight, but in the cold light of morning, she was glad to avoid the consequent awkwardness.
She rolled on her side and looked at the clock on the bedside table.
It was not the cold light of morning. It was the cold light of almost two o'clock in the afternoon. With a sudden movement, she kicked the bedclothes down and swung her feet out of bed. She searched with her feet for her bedroom slippers for a moment. When she could not immediately find them, she stood up and walked to the window.
The apartment Manfried had built in the Schloss (with her money) looked down upon the snow-covered fields outside the Schloss wall.
It was a beautiful day, clear and bright. She liked cold, crisp, clear days. What she would do was take a ride, perhaps even a fast ride, a gallop, if the paths were not icy. It would sweat the cognac out of her, and then she would return and take a long bath.
She walked to her chest of drawers and took out a rather unattractive pair of underpants. No one was going to see her in them anyway, she thought, so it wouldnxt matter that the heavy cotton underpants concealed the curves of her belly and buttocks and hung down nearly to her knees. They would absorb the sweat of her ride. She put on riding breeches and sat on the floor to tug on English-made, knee-high riding boots.
She glanced
at herself in a mirror as she walked to another chest of drawers for a blouse. In riding breeches and boots, and naked above the waist, she looked like a character in a blue movie she had been shown in Budapest. All she needed to complete the costume was a whip and a black mask over her eyes.
She put on a white cotton blouse and tucked it into her breeches.
Her nipples pushed against the thin material, making them clearly visible. She was going to have to wear either a brassiere or a sweater, or face the disapproval of the servants and the captain (whose name, she realized, she could not remember) if she took off her tweed riding jacket.
She opted for the sweater, taking a tan woolen pullover from a closet and pulling it over her head.
Then she realized that she wasn't going to be able to make it to the stables, much less mount a horse, without help.
She went to the bedside table and poured two inches of Remy Martin cognac (about the last cognac here, and she had not remembered to bring any from the house in Vienna) into a glass and drank it straight down.
She held her breath as she felt the brandy burn her throat and stomach, and then exhaled as the warmth spread through her body.
After that she left the apartment, which was like stepping from the present into the past. A few years ago, she had hired a Berlin architect to do it over. The Bauhaus School was now frowned upon by the Bohemian corporal and his sycophants, but the architect had studied there, and that was obvious in what he'd done to this wing of the Schloss.
Outside the door she was back in the Dark Ages. The Cold Ages would have been a better term, she thought. The walls were stone, the floors wide oaken planks. There had been no way to install electricity except by bolting conduits to the walls. Crossed lances and crossed swords, ancient battle flags, and dark portraits of the Barons von Steighofen and their women hung on the walls above the conduits. A narrow carpet ran down the center of the corridor, but it did nothing to take the chill from the place, either physically or aesthetically.
There was no grand staircase, either. One moved from floor to floor in the Schloss via one of five semicircular sandstone staircases.
A handrail fixed to the wall was a recent--say, around 1820--improvement.
She descended three floors to the level of the courtyard, entered it, and walked across the cobblestones to the stable door. The stables, too, were a recent improvement to the Schloss. Sometime in the early 1800s, these had been constructed outside the Schloss wall, and a hole forced through for access to them.
The smell of the horses was pleasant and reassuring. A groom was working on a saddle, which he had put onto a dummy. What he was doing, Beatrice realized, was working on Manfried's saddle. She remembered Captain Whatshisname telling her about that. Manfried's'caparisoned stallion' would be part of the memorial ceremony, standing there with Manfried's cavalryman's boots reversed in the stirrups, while they did whatever they were going to do to mark Manfried's passage into Valhalla.
The groom got to his feet and bobbed his head to her, obviously surprised to see her dressed as she was.
"Bring the Arabian for me, will you? What's his name, Voltan?" UVOLTAN, Baroness?" the groom asked disapprovingly.
"I'll get him," she said. "You go find me a saddle and a blanket."
"Yes, of course, Baroness." She decided not to correct him about her rank. So far as he was concerned, she was and would forever be the wife of the Baron, and thus the Baroness. It would be of little interest to him that, because she was his widow, she was no longer the wife of the Baron or that, in those circumstances, the title would pass to Manfried's nearest surviving male relative.
Which meant that she was the UBARONESS" only by courtesy. He would be even less interested to know that in the circumstances, she had reverted to being in her own right what she had been before she married Manfried, the Countess Batthyany.
She pulled open the heavy wooden door to Voltan's stall, pulled him out of it, and led him to the stable yard. The groom came out a moment later carrying a saddle and a blanket. She took the blanket from him and threw it onvoltan, and then, after the groom had put the saddle in place and tightened the girth, she mounted the horse and directed the adjustment of the stirrups.
Satisfied, she rode out of the stable yard, walking Voltan long enough to start his blood flowing. Then, touching her heels to his sides, she put him into a canter. He would like to have been given his head, put into a gallop, she sensed, but she didn't think that was wise. There might be ice under the layer of snow.
She allowed herself to think of nothing but the chill wind in her face, the drumbeat of hooves, and the animal beneath her until his heartbeat against her inner thighs told her that he had had enough.
She turned his head then and started to walk him back toward the Schloss.
It was only then that she could begin to face the day ahead of her. She would much rather not have come to the Schloss at all. She had wept when they told her in Budapest that Manfried had been killed.
Manny had been a good man, and he had died too young. He was--had been--thirty. She was twenty-nine. They had been married not quite seven years and she had come to like, even admire him. And he had loved her, which had been very sweet indeed. She mourned him in her own way, and that should have been enough.
But, of course, it was not. Manny had been Oberstleutnant Baron von Steighofen, and there would have to be a public memorial for the people on his lands, for the soldiers of his regiment, and for what Der Fuhrer
"Das Volk" of the "Thousand-Year Reich." And she was the Countess Batthyany and realized the obligations of her birth. In public, she would be the grieved aristocrat whose husband had made the supreme sacrifice for his country, his Fuhrer, et cetera, et cetera.
An assortment of Manfried's relatives (none of hers, she had no living close relatives) headed by his cousin the Baron von Fulmar would be at the Schloss. Plus an assortment of dignitaries, local and from Berlin.
They included Helmut von Heurten-Mitnitz, representing the Foreign Ministry, and two Standartenfuhrers of the SS-SD. One of these, Kramer, was the SS-SD man for Hesse, and the other, representing the Reichsfuhrer-SS, was a peasant named Muller.
Muller had arrived with von Heurten-Mitnitz, which the Countess had thought a little odd, until Kramer had announced at cocktails that the two of them had been together in Morocco and had barely managed to escape when the Americans had invaded North Africa.
War, like politics, makes strange bedfellows, the Countess thought wryly.
She rather liked von Heurten-Mitnitz, the little she'd seen of him.
There were two kinds of Pomeranians, the ugly kind and the other kind--lean, lithe, leopard-like. This one was the other kind. It was a shame that under current circumstances there would be no opportunity to get to know him better.
On the other hand, if he could procure an assignment in Budapest, as now seemed likely-When there had been hints in Berlin that such an assignment might be available, he had made it as clear as he could that he was prepared to make whatever sacrifice asked of him.
"I was rather afraid, my dear Countess, that if I suggested in any way how pleased I would be to return to Budapest, they would send me to Helsinki.
Or Tokyo." She'd laughed, not because she was expected to, but because she liked his humor. She hoped he would be assigned to Budapest.
"If the Gods smile on me," von Heurten-Mitnitz said, "might I call?"
"I would be pleased to receive you," she said.
She had a strange feeling, Did his desire to call upon her have anything to do with her? Or was there something official in his interest?
When she returned to the Schloss--tired, sweaty, and in desperate need of a drink and a bath--she saw von Heurten-Mitnitz having a conversation in the formal drawing room with Baron von Fulmar. The Baron was visibly uncomfortable, which made the Countess wonder again if there was more to Herr von Heurten-Mitnitz's friendship with Standartenfuhrer Muller than their escape from North Africa.
; Two days before, Helmut von Heurten-Mitnitz had telephoned Baron Karl von Fulmar in his offices at Hoescht am Main, an industrial suburb of Frankfurt am Main.
Von Heurten-Mitnitz expressed his condolences then over the death of Oberstleutnant Baron von Steighofen and announced that the press of other duties made it impossible for the Foreign Minister to personally attend the Baron's memorial service. Thus he had been delegated as the Foreign Minister's personal representative.
"The family will be honored, Herr von Heurten-Mitnitz," Baron Fulmar had replied.
"I deeply regret intruding on your grief, Herr Baron," von Heurtenmitnitz went on, "but do you think that while I am in Hesse, you might spare me, say, an hour of your time?" The Baron von Fulmar hesitated.
W E B Griffin - Men at War 3 - The Soldier Spies Page 14