The Fighting Agents

by W. E. B Griffin

  1:6. The Presidio of San Francisco has received from Mare Island Communications Facility an encrypted message transmitted by an unknown station operating in the 20-meter band. The message was encrypted using an apparently captured M94 encryption device.

  The message was addressed to “U.S. Forces in Australia.”

  The decrypted message follows: We Have the Hot Poop from the Hot Yanks in the Phils. Fertig Brig Gen

  The station identified itself with the call letters MFS and reported itself standing by.

  Comment: There is no station with call letters MFS. There is no General officer in the USA or USMC by the name of Fertig. This is therefore presumed to be a Japanese subterfuge. No attempt to contact the calling station has been made.

  Chief Ellis called the office of the adjutant general in the Pentagon, where he ascertained that there was no confirmed report of the death of Lt. Colonel Wendell W. Fertig, or that he had been captured. His status was missing and presumed dead. He got the name and telephone number of Colonel Fertig’s next of kin, Mrs. Mary Fertig, his wife, in Golden, Colorado.

  And then he took a red grease pencil and drew a box around Item 6 on the What-the-Hell-Is-This? List, tore that sheet from the file, and moved it to the top of the stack of Top Secret documents. Then he carefully scissored the clipping about the glorious victory of Japanese forces over Major General Fertig from the Mainichi and stapled that to the What-the-Hell-Is-This? List.

  Twenty minutes later, Colonel William Donovan marched into the office, his face betraying that the morning session at the White House had been difficult.

  “I would kill for a cup of coffee,” he greeted Ellis as he walked past his desk.

  When Ellis carried the coffee into the office, Donovan was dangling the page torn from the What-the-Hell-Is-This? List between his thumb and forefinger.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked.

  “I think it’s interesting,” Ellis said.

  “You want to try to call that station back?” Donovan asked.

  Ellis nodded.

  “Have it done,” Colonel Donovan ordered.

  “Colonel, things get lost in proper channels,” Ellis said.

  Donovan considered that a moment.

  “Meaning you want to go out to California?”

  “I could be back in three days,” Ellis said. “Before it got there through channels.”

  “You have a gut feeling, Chief?” Donovan asked.

  “Yes, Sir, you could put it that way.”

  “Okay,” Donovan said.

  Chief Ellis called the chief at Flight Operations at Anacostia Naval Air Station, on the other side of the District of Columbia.

  “Hey, Chief, how they hanging? This is Chief Ellis.”

  “How’s my favorite China Sailor? What are you trying to beat me out of today?”

  “I need a seat for somebody very important on the next plane to Mare Island.”

  “Is he self-important, or just very important?”

  “Actually, he’s a pretty good guy.”

  “Reason I ask is I got a half-dozen torpedo bombers being ferried from Baltimore to load on a carrier at Mare Island. If this guy’s not too ritzy to ride in a torpedo bomber . . .”

  “From Anacostia or Baltimore?”

  “Here. They’re picking up people here. That’s how I know about it.”

  “When?”

  “How soon can he get here?”

  “He’s on his way.”

  4

  UNITED STATES NAVY BASE, MARE ISLAND SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA 12 JANUARY 1943

  The radioman second had seen the base commander only once before, and then he had been riding by in his Navy gray Packard Clipper with its three-starred vice admiral’s plate.

  And now here he was, in the radio room, looking right at him.

  “Stand at ease, son,” the Admiral said, almost kindly. “This is Chief Ellis, and he wants to ask you some questions. ”

  “You picked up a message from somebody calling themselves MFS, right?”

  “That’s right, Chief.”

  “You heard them again?”

  “They’re on every day, for ten, sometimes twenty minutes, ” the radioman second said. “They were on, oh, hell, twenty minutes ago.”

  “See if you can raise them,” Ellis said.

  The Vice Admiral’s eyes went up, but he said nothing. He had seen the card signed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “Go on,” Ellis repeated. “See if you can raise them.”

  The radioman second turned to his key and moved it quickly.

  “I sent ‘KSF calling MFS,’ ” he replied.

  “I read code,” Ellis said, not arrogantly.

  There was no immediate reply.

  The radioman second tapped his key again. When the transmitter was activated, the receiver was automatically shut down. When he turned the transmitter to standby, the receiver was issuing a series of dots and dashes.

  The radioman second, without thinking, tapped it out on his typewriter. The Vice Admiral leaned over to read:

  MFS STANDING BY FOR KSF

  “Send this,” Ellis said, and handed the radioman a sheet of paper, on which was typed

  KSF TO MFS SEND ENCRYPTED FOLLOWING FIRST NAME OF FERTIG SECOND NEXT OF KIN NAME AND DATE OF BIRTH KSF BY

  “Send it twice, and then wait,” Ellis ordered. “If he’s using one of these things, it’ll take him a minute.”

  He held up a Device, Cryptographic, M94. He’d had a hell of a time finding one and had annoyed the Presidio of San Francisco no end by requisitioning theirs.

  Five minutes later, MFS came back on the air, and the radioman second quickly typed it.

  MFS TO KSF QEWRG SJTRE SDIQN SPIID CVKQJ MFS BY

  It didn’t take Ellis long to work the Device, Cryptographic, M94; there had been one on the Panay.

  “Hot damn!” he said, after a minute. Then he ordered: “Send ‘We are ready for your traffic,’ ” and then he corrected himself. “No, send ‘Welcome to the net, we are ready for your traffic.’ ”

  Then, without asking permission, Chief Ellis picked up the telephone and told the Navy operator to get him Mrs. Mary Fertig in Golden, Colorado.

  The telephone operator said that no long-distance calls could be placed without the authority of the communications officer and an authorization number.

  “I’m going to need an authorization number,” Ellis said to the communications officer.

  The Admiral motioned for Ellis to hand him the telephone.

  “This is Admiral Sendy,” he said to the telephone. “Put the call through.”

  In Golden, Colorado, Mrs. Mary Fertig answered her telephone.

  “Ma’am,” Ellis said. “This is Chief Ellis. You remember me?”

  Of course she remembered him. He had telephoned late the night before and said he couldn’t tell her why he wanted to know, but could she give him the full name and date of birth of her oldest child? He had woken her up, and she hadn’t been thinking too clearly, so she had given it to him. Later, she had worried about it. There were all kinds of nuts and sick people running loose.

  “Yes, I remember you, Chief,” Mrs. Fertig said somewhat warily. “What do you want now?”

  “Ma’am,” the salty old chief bosun’s mate said, “we’re in contact with your husband. I thought maybe you’d want to say something to him.”

  “Where is he?” she asked, very softly.

  “Somewhere in the Philippines, that’s all we know,” Ellis said. Then he said, “Wait a minute.”

  The radioman second had handed him a brief decrypted message.

  FOR MRS FERTIG QUOTE PINEAPPLES FOR

  BREAKFAST LOVE END QUOTE

  Ellis read it over the telephone.

  It took Mrs. Fertig a moment to reply, and then, when she spoke, it was with an audible effort to control her voice.

  “My husband, Chief Ellis,” she said, “is on the island of Mindanao. We used to go there t
o play golf at the course on the Dole Plantation. And we ate pineapples for breakfast. ”

  II

  1

  SHEPHEARD’S HOTEL CAIRO, EGYPT 23 JANUARY 1943

  Captain James M. B. Whittaker, U.S. Army Air Corps, was twenty-five years old. He was tall, pale blond, and slender, with leopard-like moves. He was wearing a superbly tailored pink-and-green uniform and half Wellington boots. The uniform and the boots had both come from Savile Row in London. The boots had cost just about as much money as the Air Corps paid Captain Whittaker each month, and the uniform had cost a little more than the boots.

  Whittaker had never considered what the uniform and boots had cost, mostly because he really had no idea how much money he had. Whatever his civilian income was, it was more than he could spend. There was a lawyer in New York who looked after his affairs and saw to it that there was always a comfortable balance in his Hanover Trust checking account.

  This is not to suggest that Whittaker was simply a rich young man who happened to be in uniform. There were silver pilot’s wings on the breast of his green blouse. He was checked out (qualified to fly) in fighter, bomber, and transport aircraft. Beneath the wings were ribbons representing the award of the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, several lesser awards for valor, and brightly colored ribbons indicating that he had had overseas service in both the European and Pacific Theaters of Operation.

  At the moment, Captain James M. B. Whittaker, Harvard University ’39, was solemnly considering what he believed to be irrefutable evidence that he was a miserable, amoral, good-for-nothing sonofabitch.

  This solemn consideration sometimes came upon him when he’d taken a drink or two more than he should have. When he had a load on (and he had been drinking, more or less steadily, for the last three days), truth raised its ugly head, and he could see things with a painful clarity.

  He had started drinking before he’d boarded the MATS (Military Air Transport Service) C-54 at London’s Croydon Airfield.

  Taking leave of Liz Stanfield had been very painful. He loved Liz and she loved him, and there were certain problems with that. For one thing, Captain Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, the Duchess of Stanfield, WRAC (Women’s Royal Army Corps), a pale-skinned, splendidly bosomed, lithe woman in her middle thirties, was not really free to love him. There was a husband, Wing Commander the Duke Stanfield, RAF. He was down somewhere, “missing in action, ” the poor sonofabitch.

  Only a miserable, amoral, good-for-nothing sonofabitch, such as himself, Capt. Whittaker reasoned, would carry on the way he had with a married woman whose husband was missing in action, and a fellow airman to boot. That was really low and rotten.

  And it wasn’t as if he was free, either. He was in love himself. Her name was Cynthia Chenowith, and he had loved her from the time he was thirteen and she was eighteen, and he had gotten a look at her naked breast as she hauled herself out of his uncle Chesty’s swimming pool at the winter place in Palm Beach.

  It didn’t matter that Cynthia professed not to love him (that was the age difference, he had concluded): He loved her. And a man who loves a woman with his entire soul, who wants to spend the rest of his life with her, caring for her, making babies, is not supposed to go around fucking married women. Unless, of course, he is a miserable, good-for -nothing sonofabitch.

  Capt. Whittaker had had the foresight to bring with him on the MATS C-54 three quart bottles of single-malt Scotch whiskey. Half of one had gotten him to Casablanca, and the other half had sustained him from Casablanca to Cairo.

  Since he had been in Cairo, he’d worked his way through all of the second bottle and one quarter of the third. The airplane was broken. The pilot had told Capt. Whittaker, as a courtesy to a fellow flyer, that he’d lost oil pressure on Number Three and had no intention of taking off again until they had replaced—rather than repaired— the faulty pump. One was being flown in from England. When it had been installed, they would continue on their flight, which would ultimately terminate in Brisbane, Australia.

  Until the airplane was repaired, there was a good deal to see and do in Cairo.

  Madame Jeanine d’Autrey-Lascal—who was thirty, tall for a French woman, blond, blue-eyed, and who saw no need to wear a brassiere—leaned close to Capt. Whittaker and laid her hand on his.

  Madame d’Autrey-Lascal had been left behind in Cairo when her husband, who had been managing director of the Banc d’Egypte et Nord Afrique, had gone off to fight with the Free French under General Charles de Gaulle. She had been in the bank lobby when Capt. Whittaker had appeared to change money and to see if the bank, with which his family’s firm had had a long relationship, could do something about getting him into a decent hotel. He had spent the previous night in the transient officers’ quarters at the airfield and really didn’t want to do that again.

  They had been introduced quite properly, after which it had seemed to Madame d’Autrey-Lascal simply the courteous thing to do to offer to drive him to Shepheard’s Hotel. The bank would call in as many favors as it could to get him accommodation in Shepheard’s. No promises. The place was always jammed.

  The assistant manager who greeted them said that he would try to find something. No promises. But perhaps if the Captain would not mind waiting for a bit in the bar . . .

  It had seemed to Madame d’Autrey-Lascal that simple courtesy dictated that she not just leave him stranded high and dry in the bar at Shepheard’s. If the bank’s influence could not get him into Shepheard’s, then something else would have to be arranged.

  Capt. Whittaker spoke French, which was unexpected of an American, and they chatted pleasantly. She told him that her husband was off with General de Gaulle, and he told her a story about de Gaulle that took her a moment to understand. It seemed that General de Gaulle had declined an invitation to visit with President Roosevelt, on the grounds that it was too long a walk.

  But finally she understood and laughed, and then he told her about London. She hadn’t been in London since 1939, and she found what he told her very interesting.

  By the time they had had three drinks from his bottle of single-malt Scotch whiskey, it occurred to Madame d’Autrey-Lascal that it didn’t look as though the assistant manager was going to be able to find a room for him in Shepheard’s (and if he did, it would be little more than a closet), and that there was absolutely no reason she couldn’t put him up overnight, or for a day or two, at her house.

  The first time she suggested this, Capt. Whittaker smiled at her (and she noticed his fine, even teeth) and told her that she was very kind, but he wouldn’t think of imposing.

  She told him it would be no imposition at all; the house was large, and at the moment empty, for her children were spending the night with friends.

  He repeated that he wouldn’t think of imposing. And then he lapsed into silence, broken only when she laid her hand on his.

  “Sorry,” Whittaker said. “I was thousands of miles away.”

  “Thousands of miles away, you would probably have a hotel room,” Madame Jeanine d’Autrey-Lascal said. “Here, you don’t. I think you are very sweet for not wanting to impose on me, and very foolish for not believing me when I say it will not be an imposition.”

  He turned his hand over and caught hers in it.

  “And you are very kind to a lonely traveler,” he said.

  And I knew the moment I saw you in the bank manager’s office that you had an itch in your britches, and miserable, amoral, no-good sonofabitch that I am, given half a chance, that I would wind up scratching it.

  “You have such sad eyes,” Madame d’Autrey-Lascal said, very softly, as she looked into them.

  And then, finally, she reclaimed her hand and stood up.

  “Shall we go?” she asked.

  Whittaker followed her out of the crowded bar. As they walked across the lobby, she took his arm.

  2

  OSS STATION CAIRO SAVOY HOTEL, OPERA SQUARE 24 JANUARY 1943

  The Chief, Cairo Station, was Ernest J.
Wilkins, thirty-six, a roly-poly man whose face darkened considerably whenever he was upset. He was upset now, and smart enough to know that he was. Before speaking, he went to his window and looked out at the statue of Ibrahim, sitting on his horse in the middle of Opera Square. And then he looked at the Opera building itself, until he was sure he had his temper under control.

  Then he turned and faced the three men standing in front of his desk. They were his deputy, his administrative officer, and his liaison officer to the British.

  “Well, where the hell could he be?” he asked.

  “I think,” his administrative officer said, “that we can no longer overlook the possibility of foul play.”

  “Horseshit,” Wilkins snapped. “If anything had happened to him, we would have heard it by now. And since nobody knew he was coming, how the hell could they get anything like that going so quick?”

  His administrative officer had no response to that and said nothing. Wilkins had hoped that he would say something, so that he could jump his ass.

  Wilkins lost his temper again.

  “Jesus Christ,” he flared. “Do you realize how goddamned inept this makes us look?” He saw the message on his desk and picked it up and read it aloud:

  URGENT

  FROM OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR WASHINGTON

  TO CAIRO FOR WILKINS

  INTERCEPT CAPTAIN JAMES M. B. WHITTAKER USAAC EN

  ROUTE LONDON TO BRISBANE VIA MATS FLIGHT 216

  STOP REDIRECT WASHINGTON FIRST AVAILABLE AIR

  TRANSPORT STOP ADVISE COMPLIANCE AND ETA

  WASHINGTON STOP DONOVAN

  “You’ll notice,” Wilkins said, “that it’s signed ‘Donovan. ’ Not ‘Douglass for Donovan,’ or ‘Chenowith for Donovan,’ or even ‘Ellis for Donovan.’ ‘Donovan’ himself, goddamnit. And what he’s asked us to do isn’t going to be written up in a history of intelligence triumphs of the Second World War. All Colonel Donovan asks is that we find some Air Corps captain that he knows is on a MATS flight and send the sonofabitch to Washington.”