W E B Griffin - Men at War 2 - Secret Warriors

by Secret Warriors(Lit)

  He hasn't looked at me yet. I wonder if something like what happened to me has happened to him, something that made him lose his interest in the opposite sex? When they were up in the air about as high as they were apparently going to fly, the stewardess came down and offered coffee, tea, or Coca Cola to the passengers. When she got to them, the young man raised his head from his puzzle long enough to ask for Scotch and water.

  "I'm sorry, Sir," the stewardess said.

  "There is no cocktail service on this flight."

  "Why not?"

  "I don't make the rules, Sir," the stewardess said. "In that case, bring me two glasses of ice water, please," the young man said. And in that moment, with his face turned to look up at the stewardess, Roberta Whatley recognized him. He looked at her, too, but with neither interest nor recognition. But now she was sure. He was a Navy officer, a naval aviator like Tom. The last time she had seen him was at Pensacola, and he had been wearing a high-collared white uniform with golden wings pinned to the breast. She stole another glance at him to be sure. it was him, all right. His name was Richard Canidy, and he was a bachelor with a terrible reputation. if the stories could be believed, he had carried on with half the unmarried women at Pensacola-and some of the married ones. A dangerous man, a real wolf. down the little table The stewardess appeared with a tray, He folded the back of the seat in front of him and put the glasses of ice water on on the b it while Roberta did the same thing with her Coca-Cola.

  After the stewardess had gone back down the aisle, Richard Canidy took a swallow of his water, then took a silver flask from his pocket and poured whiskey into the glass.

  I know it's him! Tom had known Canidy's roommate, Lieutenant (j.g.) Edwin H, they'd had Ed Bitter to supper, even at Annapolis; and his escapades. the men-had been upset at Canidy's romantic As if he sensed her looking at him, he looked at her.

  "Would you like a little taste?" he asked. "No, thank you," Roberta said primly.

  "I think it's against the rules."

  "It's the only way to fly," Canidy said. And then he returned to his puzzle. He looked at me. If I recognized him, he should have recognized me. I@You're Lieutenant Canidy," Roberta accused. o look right He looked at her. He had very dark eyes. They seemed t inside her. "I'm used-to-be-Lieutenant Canidy," he said.

  "Do I know you?"

  "I'm Tom Whatley's wife," Roberta blurted." Oh," he said." And we've met? " "At Pensacola," she said.

  "I didn't mean that "You didn't mean what?"

  "I'm not Tom's wife," she said.

  "Not anymore, I mean. We were divorced. just now. That's what I was doing in Chicago." 't have a little nip?

  "Oh," he said.

  "In that case, are you sure you won't Either to celebrate or the reverse?" didn't stop him. He reached for the flask, and she so Rule One' had worked, Dick Canidy decided. When he had seen this one walking out to the airplane, and knew because it was the only vacant seat that she would be sitting beside him, he decided he would have a shot at her, if for no other reason than that it would make the Chicago Cleveland-Washington flight pass more quickly. Now it looked as if he might strike gold. His experience was that divorced women had a hunger to prove to themselves that they were still desirable. It followed that that particular flame would burn especially bright a few days after a divorce. "Just now divorced, you said?" Canidy asked. "I'd rather not talk about it," Roberta said. Bingo! "You said 'used-to-be' Lieutenant?"

  Roberta asked. "I'd rather not talk about it," Canidy said. "Sorry," she said. "I'm out of the Navy," Canidy said.

  "I got out about a year ago."

  "I didn't know they were letting officers resign," she said. "It was decided I would be of more value as an engineer than as an airplane driver," he said.

  "And I wasn't a very good aviator anyway and a worse naval officer."

  "You don't mind not being in the service?"

  "They're shooting at naval aviators these days," he said. "Haven't you heard?" I like that, Roberta Whatley decided. Not only is it exactly opposite from what Tom would say, but it's honest. "And you like what you're doing now?"

  "It's all right," he said. "What exactly are you doing?"

  "Research, in airfoil design for Boeing," he said. "I don't know what that means," she said. "An airfoil is a wing," he said, "As a wing approaches the speed of sound, strange things happen. We're trying to find out exactly what and why. "You mean you're a test pilot?"

  "Rule One: The way to attract an attractive woman who is used to attention is to ignore her.

  TEE SECRET WARRIORS M 13

  "The only thing I fly is a slapstick," Canidy said.

  "Behind a desk."

  "Oh," she said. "What happened between you and Tom?" Canidy asked.

  "If you don't mind my asking."

  "I don't like to talk about it," she said. "Excuse me," he said. "He wasn't at Great Lakes three weeks before he started running around," she said. "That's hard to believe," Canidy said. "Why is it hard to believe?" Roberta asked. "Look in the mirror," Canidy said. She blushed.

  By the time the City of Birmingham landed at Cleveland, Canidy' silver s flask was almost empty. They had a drink waiting for the plane to be refueled, and he was able to refill it at the bar in the airport terminal. Between Cleveland and Washington, she told him all about how Tom had been a rotten sonofabitch almost from the beginning. And he seemed to understand. He patted her hand comfortingly. When they got to Washington, he confessed that he didn't know where he was going to stay, but that he would call her when he found a hotel room someplace.

  She replied that he didn't have any idea how hard it was to find a hotel room in Washington these days, and that should do was come with her to her apartment and use her what he phone to call around.

  Otherwise, he might wind up sleeping on a park bench. While he was calling around to the hotels, she told him she certainly didn't want him to get the wrong idea, but she absolutely had to have a shower and get into something comfortable. She was not surprised when he came into the bathroom and got into the shower with her. The only thing that surprised her was that she didn't even pretend to be furious.

  When she thought about it later, she decided it was all the Scotch she'd had on the airplane. Plus the fact that she had left Tom six months before, and she had the usual needs of a human being. Plus, in a flash of real honesty, she admitted that she had found it really exciting when she saw him naked.

  THREE

  The St. Regis Hotel New York City April 4, 1942

  When the ten gentlemen-the group known as the Disciples-gathered to brief and be briefed by Colonel William Donovan, they found him in pain in bed in his suite at the hotel. He had a glass dark with Scotch in his hand, and there was a Scotch bottle on his bedside table. Though Colonel Donovan, a stocky, silver-haired, ruddy-faced Irishman, was not a professional soldier, neither was he a Kentucky colonel, nor the commanding officer of a National Guard regiment. He had earned both his silver eagle and the Medal of Honor for valor on the battlefields of France in World War I. Between wars, he had become a very successful-and, it logically followed, very wealthy-attorney in New York City, and a power behind the scenes in the Democratic Party, not only in New York but, even perhaps especially, in Washington. He was again in government employ, this time at an annual stipend of one dollar, as the Coordinator of Information, which meant he ran a relatively new government agency. Donovan reported directly to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Most people, to Donovan's joy, believed the COI was the United States government's answer to Joseph Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry. COI did, in fact, have an "information" function-in the propaganda sense-headed by the distinguished playwright Robert Sherwood.

  But it also had another "information" function, headed by Donovan himself, which had absolutely nothing to do with whipping the American people into the kind of patriotic frenzy that would impel them, for the sake of the war effort," to abandon "pleasure driving" and donate their aluminum pans to be converted into bomb
ers. The kind of information that Donovan was charged with coordinating is more accurately described as intelligence.

  Each of the military services had intelligence-gathering operations, as did the State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and federal government like the Departments of Labor, Commerce, Treasury, and Interior.

  Despite sincerely made claims of absolute objectivity, President Roosevelt realized that when, say, the Chief of Naval Intelligence made a report on a problem together with a proposal for a solution, that solution generally involved the use of the U.S. Navy. Similarly, the Army seldom recommended naval bombardment of a target. Heavy Army Air Corps bomber aircraft were obviously better suited for that.

  It was the Coordinator of Information's duty-which is to say Colonel William J. Donovan's-to examine the intelligence gathered by all relevant agencies, and then to evaluate that intelligence against the global war effort. If asked, he would also recommend a course of action.

  This course of action might well be implemented by an agency different from the one providing the original intelligence.

  To assist him in this task, Donovan intended to gather around him a dozen men, each of extraordinary intelligence and competence in his area of expertise. Like Donovan, they would offer to the government for one dollar per annum services that in the private sector would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because there were supposed to be twelve of these men (he had managed to recruit only ten) and because they were answerable only to Donovan, it was natural that they came to be known as the Disciples. Donovan was Christ, answerable only to God-Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Donovan's and his Disciples' mandate pleased virtually no one in the intelligence community. The Army and Navy were especially outraged that amateurs would oversee what their long-service professionals had developed. Their disapproval, however, meant very little as long as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had come to believe that Donovan's original suggestion was one of his own brilliant ideas, was pleased with the way things were going. He conferred at least twice a week with Donovan. One of those meetings had occurred the day before, which was why the Disciples filing into Donovan's St. Regis Hotel suite found him in bed in his pajamas. On his way to Union Station in Washington, where he had gone to catch the 11:55 to New York, the White House car carrying Donovan had been struck broadside by a taxicab.

  Though his knee was severely-and painfully-hurt in the impact, he managed to catch the train. In his compartment, the pain grew intense, and he had the conductor fetch a bucket of ice cubes from the dining car. He wrapped some in a towel and applied it to his knee. That helped, but when he began to experience pain in his chest as well, he knew he had a more serious problem than a bruised knee. After he got to New York and taxied to the St. Regis, he stopped in the lobby and asked the manager to send him a doctor. The doctor listened to Donovan list his symptoms, prodded the knee, and then announced he was going to call an ambulance and transport Donovan to St. Vincent's Hospital.

  What he had, the doctor told Colonel Donovan, was a blood clot caused by the injury to his knee. The clot had moved to his lung, which was why he had chest pains. The term for this condition was "embolism," the doctor continued. If the clot completely blocked the flow of blood to his lungs, or if it moved to his heart or to the artery supplying the brain, he would drop dead. In a hospital, he would be given medicine intravenously that would thin the blood. If he was lucky, in a month or six weeks the clot would dissolve. Reluctantly-and after pressure-the doctor told the colonel that the medicine which would be used to thin his blood was also available in a pill form. It was, Donovan was fascinated to learn, a pharmaceutical version of rat poison.

  The doctor also reluctantly admitted that giving him this medicine-and bed rest-was about all the treatment the hospital could offer. "I can do that here," Donovan announced.

  "I can't go to the hospital now. The doctor couldn't argue with that.

  So he had a pharmacy deliver the blood-thinning medicine, then watched as Donovan took a strong first dose. "Take a couple of good stiff drinks, too," the doctor said. Donovan asked the natural question: "I thought you weren t supposed to mix drugs with alcohol?"

  "This is the exception," the doctor replied.

  "Drink all you want. Alcohol thins the blood. just stay in bed, and don't get excited." Donovan was normally a teetotaler, but since whiskey was less repugnant than rat poison, he ordered up a bottle of Scotch.

  After they had gathered in his room, Donovan told the Disciples how he had damaged his knee, but not about the blood clot. The first item on the agenda, as always, was the super bomb. The Science Disciple, who was on leave from the Department of Physics of the University of California at Berkeley, reported that there was no question that the Germans were methodically, if not rapidly, engaged in nuclear re search. As one proof of this, they had granted the same immunity-"for scientific contributions to the German State"-to Jewish physicists and mathematicians involved in such research as they had to Jews involved in rocket propulsion. And further, a German delegation had not long before returned from a visit to a plant in Denmark that had been engaged in research into a substance called heavy water. This substance, he explained-until it became apparent that no one else either understood or much cared about it-was water to whose molecular structure had been appended another hydrogen atom. The Germans were apparently trying to cause a chain-or explosive-effect by releasing the extra hydrogen atom so appended. The Science Disciple then argued that it would be useful to "persuade" scientists engaged in German atomic research to come to this country-or, 4( persuasion" failing, to kidnap them. Though he was not convinced that these people would be able to make a contribution to the American nuclear effort, it was inarguable that if they were here, they could not contribute to the German effort.

  The problem, Donovan said, was that if German nuclear people started disappearing, it would alert the Germans to American interest in the subject. Roosevelt himself had decided that the one American war plan that most had to be concealed from the Axis was the attempt to develop an atomic bomb. "Even in the case of that obscure mining engineer we just brought out of North Africa," Donovan went on, we thought about that long and hard before we went for him. In the end, because we need the uraninite ore from the Belgian Congo, we decided we had to have him. In other words, we'll have to go very carefully with this. As a general rule of thumb, anybody we got out would have to be very important. So come up with a list, and rate them twice: how important they are to the Germans and how important they are to our program."

  The second item on the agenda was political: the question of Vice Admiral d'escadre Jean-Philippe de Verbey, French Navy, retired. Not just for organizational but for personal reasons. This affair was the business of C. Holds worth Martin, Jr." the Disciple who dealt with France and French colonies. Like Donovan, Martin had served with the American Expeditionary Forces in the First World War. After the war, he had been appointed to the Armistice Commission. A civil engineer, he had met and married a French officer's widow, and had subsequently taken over the running of "I her late husband's construction firm.

  This he had turned from a middle size, reasonably successful business into a large, extremely profitable corporation. His wife's social position (she was a member of the deposed nobility) and his wealth had then combined to permit them to move in the highest social circles. C.

  Holds worth Martin, Jr." brought his wife and children to New York after the fall of France in 1940, purchased an apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park, and promptly enraged the Franco-American community and large numbers of sympathetic Americans by proclaiming whenever the opportunity arose that French stupidity, cowardice, and corruption, and not German military prowess, had caused France to go down to such a quick and humiliating defeat. Even more outrageously, he made no secret of his belief that millions of middle and upper-class Frenchmen indeed preferred Hitler to Blum,' and had every intention of cooperating with Hitler's New Order for Europe.

&
nbsp; One of the few people who agreed with any of this was Colonel William Donovan. And so far as Donovan was concerned, C. Holds worth Martin, Jr." was the ideal man to be Disciple for France. He had spent more than twenty years there, knew the country and its leaders better than most Frenchmen, and, with very few exceptions, cordially detested most of them.

  Over luncheon and golf, Donovan had learned from him that Martin detested most of the French as much for their chauvinism as for their inept army. His success with his wife's firm, because it was an "American" and not a "French" success, earned him more jealousy than respect among his French peers. His wife's late husband's family, for instance, referred t him as "le gigolo Am,@ricain. On January 11, 1942, C. Holds worth Martin, Jr." entered the service of the United States government, at the usual remuneration of one dollar per annum, as a consultant to the Office of the Coordinator of Information. Three days later, C. Holds worth Martin III, a 1940 graduate of the Ecole Poly technique in Paris, by enlisting in the U.S. Army as a private "Leon Blum, First Socialist Premier of France, 1936-1938. soldier, entered the service of the United States government at a remuneration of twenty-one dollars per month. Although he acted, and sounded, like a French boulevardier, C. Holds worth Martin, Jr." was almost belligerently an American. Now C. Holds worth Martin, Jr." was engaged in a description of what he referred to as "I'affaire du vieux amir al vicieux" ("the old, vicious admiral"), by which he meant Vice Admiral d'escadrejean-Philippe de Verbey. When the war broke out, Admiral de Verbey was recalled from retirement. He was assigned to the French naval staff in Casablanca, Morocco, and had there suffered a heart attack, which nearly killed him. By the time he'd spent nine months in the hospital, France had fallen and an upstart, six-foot-six brigadier general of tanks, Charles de Gaulle, who had gotten out of France at the last minute, had appointed himself chief of the French government in exile and commander in chief of its armed forces. The majority of French officers still on French sod considered themselves honor-bound to accept the defeat of France and the authority of Marshal P6tain, the aged "Hero of Ver dun" who now headed the French government in Vichy. Admiral de Verbey did not. He considered it his duty as a French officer to continue to fight. He managed to pass word to de Gaulle in London that he approved of de Gaulle's actions. He announced further that as soon as he could arrange transportation (in other words, escape house arrest in Casablanca), it was his intention to come to London and assume command of French military and naval forces in exile.