The Fighting Agents
Page 7
But he thought about it in the shower, and he thought about it when he backed the Packard out of the garage. The 1941 Packard 280 convertible coupe had been Chesty’s. Presumably, Chesty and Cynthia had been in it together on many happy occasions. He didn’t think they had made the beast with two backs in the backseat, but it was reasonable to presume that they had held hands, and kissed, and that sort of thing.
Despite the cold, when he was out of the District, he pulled to the side of the road and put the roof down. He had the heater going full blast, and he left the windows up, and it was really rather pleasant.
A quarter of a mile off the state highway into the Virginia property, well out of sight of the highway, a guard post had been erected, and Whittaker learned that Charity had been right about the car. They expected him, but not at the wheel of a car.
“I really don’t know what the hell to say,” the guard, wearing the uniform of a member of the National Park Service police, said. “I got your name on the list, Captain, but as a trainee, and trainees can’t have private cars.”
“But as I’ve shown you, I’m not a trainee,” Whittaker said. “Look, call Baker and tell him I’m here, and driving a car.”
The guard went into his little shack and a moment later came out again, and said, “Mr. Baker says come right to his office, Captain. It’s in the main house. You can’t miss it.”
The road wound through a stand of pine trees, and as he was coming out of it, he passed a group of twelve or fifteen trainees taking a run. They were carrying, in front of them, at “Port Arms,” Springfield Model 1903 caliber .30-06 rifles, not that it was expected they would ever use one, but to make the physical conditioning a little tougher.
He slowed down and glanced out the side window at them as he passed them. And saw Cynthia Chenowith. She had her hair hidden under a GI fatigue habit, and the truth was that he saw her breasts flopping around under her fatigue jacket and marveled at that for a moment before he recognized her.
“Oh, shit!” he said with great disgust, then stepped on the accelerator.
Eldon Baker’s office was in what had been the breakfast room of the mansion, a rather small room whose floor-length doors opened onto a flagstone patio, and beyond that to a flat grassy area that Whittaker remembered as having been a putting green.
Baker was sitting behind a government-issue gray metal desk when Whittaker walked in. He was a pudgy-faced man in his thirties. He was wearing fatigues, but where an officer would have worn the insignia of his rank and branch of service, there was a square insignia embroidered in blue: a triangle within the square, and the letters "U.S.” It was the insignia worn by civilian experts attached to the U.S. Army in the field. Baker had been a State Department intelligence officer before joining the OSS, where he was listed on the OSS Table of Organization as “Chief, Recruitment and Training.” So far as Whittaker knew, he had never been in the service.
“Well, hello, Jim,” Baker said. “We rather expected you last night.”
“You look very military, Eldon,” Whittaker said. “Am I expected to salute?”
“We don’t salute around here,” Baker said. “Neither do we wear insignia of rank or branch of service.”
“Can I ask you a question?” Whittaker asked.
“What are you doing here? Well, that’s very simple. You haven’t gone through the course and . . .”
“What is Cynthia Chenowith doing running around in fatigues and carrying a Springfield?”
“Isn’t that self-evident? She’s going through the course. And doing rather well. Frankly, much better than I expected she would.”
“To what end?” Whittaker asked.
“Again, isn’t that self-evident?”
“You’re out of your fucking mind, Eldon,” Whittaker said matter-of-factly. “What the hell is the matter with you?”
“I had hoped that our relationship would be amicable,” Baker said. “You’re making that difficult.”
“Are you telling me you seriously propose to send that girl out operationally?” Whittaker asked.
“Nothing specific at the moment, but when the opportunity presents itself . . .”
“And Bill Donovan’s going along with that insane notion? ”
“Obviously, it has Colonel Donovan’s approval,” Baker said. “And, as obviously, it’s really none of your business, is it?”
“I’m making it my business,” Whittaker said.
“Have you some explanation for not coming here as you were directed to do?” Baker said. “You will notice I have changed the subject.”
“I don’t have to explain anything to you, Eldon,” Whittaker said. “I don’t work for you. I don’t even know what I’m doing in the States.”
There was more, Whittaker thought, than simple chemistry to explain why he had disliked Eldon Baker from the moment he had met him. He could prepare a long list of Things-Wrong-with-Eldon-Baker, headed by Baker’s ruthlessness, and running down to such items as pompous, overbearing, and the compleat bureaucrat, but it was the chemistry primarily responsible for the inevitable verbal flare-ups whenever they were together.
Baker now chose to tolerate Whittaker.
“There’s a mission envisioned for you,” he said.
“What kind of a mission?”
Baker ignored the question.
“Prior to which it has been decided that you will go through the course.”
“Decided by whom?”
“It’s OSS policy,” Baker said, “that everybody will go through the school.”
“You’re weaseling,” Whittaker said. “Donovan doesn’t know you expect me to go through this school of yours for spies, does he? You were just going to tell me that’s the ‘way it is.’ Screw you, Eldon. That won’t work. Canidy told me that Donovan told him that neither one of us had to do this. For Christ’s sake, I was running the school in England. ”
“You have no training in infiltration by rubber boat from a submarine,” Baker said. “Obviously, it was not my intention to send you through the whole course . . .”
“Oh?”
“And actually, I had planned to ask you to teach a few hours. I thought it would really get and keep the men’s attention if they understood they were being taught by someone who had been operational.”
“If that’s a bone you’re throwing, gnaw on it yourself,” Whittaker said. He started out of the room, then turned and stopped at the door. “I’m going back to Washington,” he said. “And it’s going to take Wild Bill himself to order me back here. And then I may not come.”
“Obviously, there’s no purpose in debating this with you,” Baker said.
When he went outside the building, determined to find Cynthia, Whittaker saw her immediately. In the time it had taken him to go through the confrontation with Baker, her group of trainees had run from where he had seen them on the road to the mansion.
Presumably, he decided, they had run all the way. Cynthia and another woman, both of them red-faced and heaving from the exertion, were sitting on the ground, their backs against a wall.
He walked over to her. She looked up at him but said nothing.
One of the senior trainees walked quickly up to him. He was tall and muscular and very handsome, and looked somehow familiar to Whittaker.
“May I help you, Sir?” he asked.
“Take a walk,” Whittaker said.
He met Cynthia’s eyes. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“What does it look like?” she replied.
“Jesus Christ, if it wasn’t so stupid, it would be funny,” he said.
“Jimmy, why don’t you just turn around and walk away from here?” Cynthia asked.
Instead, he reached down and grabbed her wrist and jerked her to her feet.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she snapped.
He kissed her, moving so quickly there was no time for her to avert her face, and so surprising her that it was a moment before she twisted free.
“What was that all about?” Cynthia said, seeming torn between outrage and tears. “Why did you do that?”
“Two reasons,” he said. “To remind you that you’re a woman. And because I love you.”
“Damn you!” Cynthia said, fighting an infuriating urge to cry.
“Now, just a minute here!” the senior trainee said.
“Greg, don’t!” Cynthia called quickly. “He’s crazy. He’ll kill you!”
The trainee looked at him warily and with great interest.
“Relax,” Whittaker said. “I’m a lover, not a fighter.” Then, feeling very pleased with himself, he walked over to the Packard, got in, and started it up.
III
1
HEADQUARTERS, 344TH FIGHTER GROUP ATCHAM ARMY AIR CORPS STATION, ENGLAND 31 JANUARY 1943
Rank hath its privileges. In this case that meant that the commanding officer of the 344th Fighter Group was driven in a jeep from the final briefing to the revetment where his aircraft was parked. The other pilots rode jammed together in the backs of trucks.
The commanding officer of the 344th Fighter Group, Eighth United States Air Force, was Lieutenant Colonel Peter (“Doug”) Douglass, Jr., USMA ’39, a slight, pleasant -appearing officer who looked, until you saw his eyes, much too young to be either a fighter group commander or a lieutenant colonel. He was, in fact, twenty-five years old.
He was wearing a horsehide A-2 jacket, which had a zipper front and knit cuffs. On its back was painted the flag of the Republic of China and a legend in Chinese stating that the wearer had come to China to fight the Japanese invader, and that a reward in gold would be paid for his safe return in case he fell from the sky.
Doug Douglass had been a member of the American Volunteer Group in China and Burma, a “Flying Tiger,” one of a small group of pilots who, before the United States had entered the war, were recruited from the Army Air Corps, the Marines, and the Navy to fly Curtiss P-40 fighters against the Japanese. On the nose of his P-38F there were painted ten small Japanese flags, called “meatballs, ” each signifying a Japanese kill. There were also painted six swastikas, representing the kills of six German aircraft, and the representation of a submarine.
While attacking the German submarine pens at Saint-Lazare, then-Major Douglass had attempted to skip-bomb a five-hundred-pound aerial bomb into the mouth of the pens. He hadn’t made it. But his bomb had struck, literally by accident, a U-boat tied to a wharf just outside the mouth of the pen. It had penetrated the hull in the forward torpedo room, and what was known as a “sympathetic explosion” had occurred. The explosives in the bomb and in God-alone -knew-how-many torpedoes had combined, and the submarine had simply disappeared, leaving few recognizable pieces.
Douglass and his group had been accompanied on the mission by photo reconnaissance aircraft, and there was a motion picture record of the five-hundred-pound bombs dropping from Douglass’s wings, and of one of them striking the submarine, and of large chunks of the submarine hull floating lazily through the air. There was no question about it, mistakes counted, it was a confirmed kill.
Newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Douglass had given in to the “suggestion” by his division commander that he paint a submarine on the nose of his P-38F not because he considered it a victory but because it signified that he had been on the Saint-Lazare raid. He had lost forty percent of his aircraft—and his pilots—on that raid.
A story made the rounds that after the raid Douglass had walked into Eighth Air Force Headquarters and decked the Plans & Training officer who had ordered the mission. And that the bloody nose he’d given the chair-warmer had given the brass a choice between court-martialing a West Pointer who was a triple ace or promoting him, and they’d opted in favor of the promotion.
Today, there was with him in the jeep as it made its way down the parking ramp at Atcham another pilot wearing an identical A-2 jacket with the Chinese flag and calligraphy painted on its back. He was taller and heavier than Douglass, and, at twenty-six, a year older. His name was Richard Canidy, and he had been Lt. Col. Douglass’s squadron leader in the Flying Tigers.
He was not a member of the 344th Fighter Group, nor, despite the gold leaves of a major pinned to his A-2 jacket epaulets, even an officer of the Army Air Corps. Canidy (BS, Aeronautical Engineering, MIT ’38) had first been recruited from his duty as a lieutenant junior grade, USNR, instructor pilot to be a Flying Tiger, and from the Flying Tigers to be a “technical consultant” to the Office of the Coordinator of Information.
The Office of the Coordinator of Information had been redesignated the Office of Strategic Services, and Canidy was now officer in charge, Whitbey House Station, OSS-England, which made him the third-ranking OSS officer in England. Civilians, in a military environment, attract attention. But little attention is paid, particularly at the upper levels of the military hierarchy, to majors. It had been arranged with the Army Air Corps to issue “Technical Consultant Canidy” an AGO card from the Adjutant General’s Office, identifying him as a major, and to ensure that if inquiries were made at Eighth Air Force or SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force) there would be a record of a Canidy, Major Richard M., USAAC.
Canidy was not supposed to be flying with the 344th Fighter Group on this mission. Indeed, if either he or Lt. Col. Douglass had asked their superiors for permission for him to come along, the request would have been denied.
Douglass wasn’t sure why Canidy wanted to go. He guessed that it had something to do with Jimmy Whittaker getting his ass shipped to Australia, and with Eric Fulmar and Stanley Fine having disappeared suddenly from Whitbey House, destination and purpose unspecified. Canidy’s old gang, with the exception of Lt. Commander Eddie Bitter, USN (another ex-Flying Tiger), and of course Douglass himself, had been broken up. A deal like that, being with your buddies, was of course too good to last.
Once, at Whitbey House, Douglass with most of a quart of Scotch in him, had looked at the others with a sudden wave of warmth: They were good guys, the best, and they were his buddies; he would never, as long as he lived, have better friends. And then he had made what had seemed in his condition to be a profound philosophical observation: “War, like politics, makes strange bedfellows.”
The undisputed leader of the gang, the best natural commander Douglass had ever seen—and the test had been combat—was Canidy. And Canidy was not, like Douglass (West Point) and Bitter (Annapolis), a professional warrior, but almost the antithesis, an MIT-trained aeronautical engineer who made no secret that he found most of the traditions sacred to the professional military hilarious.
The wise man, the philosopher so to speak, of the gang was Captain Stanley S. Fine, a tall ascetic Jew who had been a Hollywood lawyer before he had been recruited for the OSS from command of a B-17 Squadron. If closing with the enemy and killing him with bare hands was the ultimate description of a warrior, then the gang’s most ferocious members were unlikely warriors. Eric Fulmar was the son of a movie star and a German industrialist, and Jimmy Whittaker was a wealthy socialite who addressed the President of the United States as “Uncle Franklin.”
Douglass knew that if coincidence had thrown these men together in any normal military organization, and if, improbably, they had become buddies there, any commanding officer with enough sense to find his ass with both hands would have broken up the gang and transferred them as far from each other as possible—as awesome threats to “good military order and discipline.”
But they weren’t in any normal military organization. They were in the Office of Strategic Services.
Lt. Col. Douglass knew more about the OSS than he had any right to know. He wasn’t even supposed to know about Whitbey House, much less spend most of his free time in the requisitioned mansion, the ancestral home of the Dukes of Stanfield. But he was a special case. Not only had he been Dick Canidy’s wingman in the Flying Tigers, but his father was Captain Peter Douglass, Sr., deputy dire
ctor of the OSS, Colonel Wild Bill Donovan’s number two.
David Bruce, Chief of London Station, and his deputy, Lt. Col. Ed Stevens, simply ignored Douglass’s illegal presence at Whitbey House when they saw him there. Canidy and the others didn’t talk about what they were doing in Douglass’s presence, or tried hard not to, but it was difficult to remember all the time that Douglass didn’t have the Need-to-Know, and things slipped out.
When Canidy had hinted that he wouldn’t mind getting checked out in the P-38F, Douglass had known that the next inevitable step would be for him to go along on a mission. But it would have been difficult to tell his old squadron commander, on whose wing he had first experienced aerial combat, that that was against regulations and therefore impossible. It would have been difficult if he had wanted to say “no,” and he didn’t want to say no.
He was the group commander, and no one asked questions when they saw him personally showing an Air Corps major around a P-38F, or when he scheduled a couple of P- 38Fs for training flights and went along with the major.
If Dick dumped a P-38F while he was learning, Douglass decided, he would just say that he was flying it. That would work unless Canidy killed himself, in which case it wouldn’t matter. That fear turned out to have been academic. Canidy hadn’t had any trouble with the P-38F. He was a good pilot, and an experienced one. He had several thousand hours in the air. Many of Douglass’s pilots had less than two hundred fifty.
When the jeep stopped in front of the revetment in which waited the P-38F that Canidy would fly today, and Canidy started to get out, Douglass touched his arm.
“I’ll fly your wing, if you like, Skipper,” he said.
Canidy smiled at him, touched by the gesture.