The Fighting Agents

by W. E. B Griffin

  “And I know you, as Moses said to the slave girl.”

  “And if he wasn’t, you’d be miserable. And if you didn’t know, you’d be all tense. You’re relaxed and making jokes, and that means that you’ve heard something good.”

  “That’s not why I’m relaxed, as Samson said to Delilah,” Canidy said. “But, yeah, honey, he’s all right. I was a little worried, but the rough part of what he was doing is over.”

  “Oh, baby, I’m happy for you,” she said.

  “And you’re not curious about your roommate?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I don’t have roommates. If I had a roommate, I couldn’t greet you at the door wearing nothing but a sheepskin jacket and a smile. So I don’t want a roommate. Get the idea?”

  “What about good ol’ Chastity?”

  “Charity,” she corrected him automatically. Then, “Charity? She’s coming here?”

  “In the next couple of days,” Canidy said. “What I was thinking was that maybe you could take a couple of days off.”

  “For what purpose?” she asked suspiciously.

  "So she could stay here with Doug Douglass,” Canidy said.

  “If she moved in here, I’d never get rid of her,” Ann said. “How long is she going to be in London, anyway?”

  “Permanently,” he said.

  “Then no, period,” Ann said. “Charity cannot stay here. She would move in, and I wouldn’t have the heart to throw her out, and that would be the end of us making love on the pillows.”

  “In that case, screw her,” Canidy said. “Your logic is irrefutable. ”

  She threw herself at him and nibbled his ear.

  “You keep that up, you know what’s going to happen,” he said.

  “I hope, I hope, I hope,” Ann said. Then she said, “Damn, I’m glad Eric’s all right. I love you when you’re like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Happy and horny,” Ann said. “Where is he?”

  “Ah, come on, Mata Hari,” he said.

  “I was just trying to find out how long you’d be gone, and where you’ll be going.”

  “Eric at this very moment is somewhere on the European landmass, riding down a forest road between towering pines,” he said. “That tell you anything?”

  “No,” she said. “And I don’t really mean to pry.”

  “I know,” he said.

  Eric Fulmar, at that very moment, was walking down a basement corridor in the municipal jail in Pécs, Hungary. He was handcuffed to Professor Friedrich Dyer, and both of them wore chain hobbles.

  A member of the Black Guard, an SS-like organization owing its allegiance to Admiral Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, stopped them by a cell, unlocked the handcuffs, and pushed Professor Dyer inside. Then he pushed Fulmar into motion again, until he came to the next cell door. He retrieved his handcuffs, then pushed Fulmar into the cell.

  V

  1

  OSS VIRGINIA STATION 5 FEBRUARY 1943

  Cynthia Chenowith had elected to skip the evening meal. When she had finished her bath, she would dine on Ritz crackers and canned Vienna sausages and Nescafé from the PX store. The Vienna sausages tasted like soap and would more than likely give her indigestion, and boiling water for the Nescafé (indeed, possessing an electric hot plate) was a specific violation of station regulations for trainees, but she desperately needed a bath, and she didn’t want to go to supper, or for that matter to leave the privacy of her room.

  His name was Horace G. Hammersmith. It had been impossible in the case of Lt. Horace G. Hammersmith, Signal Corps, U.S. Army, to obey either the spirit or the letter of the regulation that forbade any interest in, or discussion of, the private life of fellow trainees. Horace Hammersmith was also known as Greg Hammer, and Greg Hammer was a movie star in private life. He wasn’t up there with Clark Gable or Tyrone Power, but his rough-hewn face, his astonishingly golden wavy hair, and his football player’s build had left no question in any of the trainees’ minds from the moment they first saw him that Lt. Horace G. Hammersmith was really him!

  And from the moment Lt. Hammersmith had seen Miss Chenowith, he had made it plain that he found her fascinating. At first, Cynthia had thought it was simply a case of movie-staritis. Without arrogance, as a simple statement of fact, she realized that she was the best looking of the half-dozen women at Virginia Station. As a movie star accustomed to the adoration of his female fans, Cynthia reasoned, Hammersmith had come to believe that the pick of the herd, or the pride, or the flock, or whatever word fitted the half-dozen women at Virginia Station, was his.

  His Training Group had begun training six weeks before Cynthia’s. The way the school was set up (before she had come to Virginia Station as a trainee, Cynthia had read Eldon Baker’s training syllabus), incoming trainees were placed under the supervision of trainees who had finished their training and were awaiting assignment. The announced purpose was to spare the training staff the mundane work of seeing to the issue of equipment, the first painful hours of calisthenics, the explanation of the rules, and so on. The real reason was so that the training staff could judge how well the “senior” trainees dealt with subordinates—to see if they could inspire cooperation. There was no place on an operational OSS team for someone who antagonized, intentionally or otherwise, the others on the team.

  Lt. Horace G. Hammersmith had been as good and as natural a leader of his peers at Virginia Station as Greg Hammer had been a leader in the movies. Despite herself, Cynthia had come to like him. And she found that her first snap judgment of him had been almost entirely wrong. She had found Hammersmith to be really shy, rather than being arrogant. And she learned that, rather than being awed with himself as a movie star, he thought the whole movie business was rather funny.

  Over the weeks, she had learned that he was an electrical engineer who had been sent to Los Angeles by the Murray Hill division of the Bell Telephone Laboratories to supervise the installation of a recording studio at Continental Studios.

  “Lana Turner,” he told her one afternoon while they were taking a five-minute break on a ten-mile run, “was discovered in Schwab’s Drug Store. I was discovered having dinner with a vice president of Continental Studios, Stan Fine, at the Villa Friscati.”

  “Stanley Fine?” she asked, genuinely surprised.

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  “We’re not supposed to be talking about our private lives, you know,” she said.

  “I know,” he said, “and I also know you know Stan.”

  Then he’d looked at his watch, and the five-minute break was over, and he’d jumped to his feet and blown his whistle, and they’d resumed the ten-mile run. That night, at supper, he had sat down beside her and resumed the conversation where he’d broken it off.

  “Over a steak, which Bell Labs was paying for, I was explaining to Stanley why it was going to cost Continental Studios a bunch of money more than they expected to get what they wanted, when this fat little bald-headed man walked up to the table and said, in an accent you could cut with a knife, ‘So tell me, Stanley, who’s your friend? And vy I haven’t zeen any film?’ ”

  “Max Liebermann,” Cynthia said, laughing at Hammersmith’s apt mimicry of the founder and chairman of the board of Continental Studios.

  “Right,” Hammersmith said. “But I didn’t know who he was. So Stanley said, ‘Uncle Max, he’s the engineer from Bell Telephone.’ ”

  “ ‘What I vant to know is can he ride a horz?’ Max said,” Hammersmith went on. “ ‘If he can ride a horz, I tink he’s Major Porter. We god a hell uf a problem wit dat, Stanley, if I god to tell you.’ ”

  By then, Cynthia was giggling at the mimicry.

  “It didn’t take much to corrupt me,” Hammersmith had gone on. “All it took to get me before the cameras was as much by the week, on a year’s contract, as Bell Labs was paying me by the month. And luckily, I could ride a ’horz.’ ”

  “I saw Calvary Raid,” Cynthia sa
id. “You were very good.”

  “That’s because my only lines were ‘Yes, Sir,’ and ’Sound the Charge!’ ” Hammersmith said. "Anyway, Stan and I became pals. And he got me into this, and he wrote me a letter saying if I got to Washington and desperately needed a place to stay, I should call a Miss Cynthia Chenowith and say I was a friend of his. Unless there is another Cynthia Chenowith?”

  Horace G. Hammersmith had not so much as touched her hand, except in the line of duty. But neither had he for long taken his eyes off her whenever they were around each other.

  And now he was going. He was going operational. She wondered where, and doing what. And she just wasn’t up to spending his last night here with him. In the morning, she would have breakfast with him, and maybe even go to the station wagon with him, and kiss his cheek.

  But she didn’t want to see him tonight. Tonight, there would be just too much of a temptation to give him what he wanted, even if he didn’t ask for it. She didn’t want him to go operational with her on his mind. She didn’t love him, but she really liked him, and she was almost sure he thought he was falling in love with her. Whatever they were going to have him doing, the one thing he didn’t need was her on his mind any more than she already was.

  The bathtub was full. So when Cynthia sensed the water was cooling, she had to let water out before filling it again with hot water. She bent her left leg, in order to get a good look at her foot, then vigorously rubbed away a layer or two on the calluses. Then she repeated the operation on the right foot.

  And finally she stepped out of the tub and toweled herself dry. Then she took the towel and wiped the condensation from the full-length mirror on the door and examined herself in it.

  She “made muscles,” as she had seen men do, and was surprised—and not sure whether she was pleased or disappointed—that she could see no development in her biceps. With all the push-ups and pull-ups she’d done, she had expected some.

  She had bruised, ugly blue areas in several places. The largest area was in her right shoulder, from the recoil of the Springfield rifle, and the Garand rifle, and the Winchester shotgun, and the Thompson submachine gun she had fired on the range. She had fallen twice on the obstacle course. There was a bruised area on her lower stomach, a souvenir of an encounter with a peeled log when she had tripped running up an obstacle, and another on her right leg, just above her knee. She had earned that battle stripe just by stumbling, exhausted, and landing on the goddamned Springfield.

  Finally, there was a raw spot on the web of her right hand, where the Colt .45 automatic pistol had “bitten” her.

  She dried that spot very carefully with a wad of toilet tissue and then applied Merthiolate and a Band-Aid. And then she took a large economy-size tube of Ben-Gay and applied it liberally to all the bruised areas.

  If Greg should come up here, she thought, I will smell like the men’s locker room, and maybe that will dampen his ardor.

  Still naked, she washed and dried her hair, wrapped her head in a towel, and then finally put on what she considered a grossly unfeminine set of pajamas. They were from the PX, too. Flannel, with a particularly ugly red-and-brown pattern. She put a bathrobe over the pajamas, examined herself a final time in the mirror, stuck her tongue out at herself, and then went into her bedroom.

  She sat down at a government-issue gray metal desk, which was conspicuously ugly in comparison to the rest of the furniture, turned on the desk lamp, and took a brown-paper -bound book from a rack. The book was titled U.S. Field Manual, FM 21-10: The Law of Land Warfare.

  There would be a written examination to make sure the trainees knew what the Hague and Geneva Conventions had had to say about where the line was between a soldier, who was entitled to treatment as a prisoner of war, a partisan, and a spy. Under the law of land warfare, partisans and spies could be shot.

  Cynthia had serious doubts that either the Germans or the Japanese were going to pay much attention to the fine print, but the course was a part of the curriculum, and she had to pass it to graduate. And she was determined to graduate.

  Thirty minutes later, just after she had opened a can of Vienna sausages and was trying without much success to get one of the tightly packed little obscenities out of the can, there was a knock at her door.

  She didn’t respond. If it was Horace G. Hammersmith and she didn’t respond to his knock, he might take the hint and go away.

  But after a moment, there was another knock, this time far more demanding.

  “Who is it?”

  “Eldon Baker.”

  “Come on in,” Cynthia called.

  Baker entered the room.

  “Studying,” Cynthia said unnecessarily.

  She saw that Baker had seen the hot plate and the jar of Nescafé and wondered if he would turn her in. He knew that she had a close relationship with Colonel Donovan and Captain Douglass; the other training personnel did not.

  “Have you got a minute so that we can talk?” Baker asked.

  “I should study, Eldon,” she said, “but sure.”

  “Don’t worry about the examination,” he said as he closed the door. “You won’t be taking it.”

  “Oh?”

  “I have just had a telephone call from Chief Ellis,” Baker said. “You are to go to Washington to the house on Q Street with the station wagon in the morning.”

  ’’Oh?” she repeated.

  “You will take your things with you,” Baker said. “According to the Chief, you will not be coming back. At least as a trainee.”

  “What’s this all about?” Cynthia asked.

  She was sure she knew.

  Oh, goddamn you, Jimmy!

  “Chief Ellis did not elect to tell me,” Baker said. “But I think we can both make an educated guess, can’t we?”

  “Whittaker?” Cynthia asked.

  “Doesn’t it seem that way to you?” Baker said. “I can’t tell you how annoyed this makes me.”

  “Why should it bother you? He’s not offering you his unasked-for male protection.”

  “After some thought,” Baker said, “after Captain Whittaker’s visit, I decided I could not overlook it. That, in other words, I had to make an official issue of it.”

  “I don’t think I quite follow you,” Cynthia said.

  “In addition to what he did to you,” Baker said, “he had a run-in with me. He was insubordinate. Technically, I suppose, he’s AWOL. He was ordered to report here for training. He decided, on his own, that he’d really rather not do that. I wrote a letter reporting what had transpired to Colonel Donovan.”

  Cynthia wondered why that bothered her, why she felt a surprising flash of anger. Baker was right. Jimmy Whittaker was an Air Corps officer. Officers do what they are told to do. And there was absolutely no excuse for his having kissed her the way he had, making a fool of her in front of the others.

  “It would appear that the rules which apply to everyone else in the OSS, myself included, do not apply to Captain Whittaker.”

  “We don’t know that’s what’s happened,” she said.

  “I felt sure that Colonel Donovan would understand my motives in making an official report of what happened,” Baker said. “That, rather than trying to get Whittaker in trouble, my concern was for the overall discipline of the organization. I felt confident he would understand that it was not a personality clash between Captain Whittaker and myself, but rather an impersonal incident in which an agent willfully disobeyed his superior, with the result that the authority of the Director of Training was seriously undermined. ”

  He waited for her to respond to that, and then, when she did not, went on, “Obviously, I was wrong. The only response to my letter was the telephone call just now. When Whittaker left here, after telling me that I was ‘out of my mind’ for having you in the school, he said that he was going to see the colonel. I had the impression he meant both about his coming here and about you.”

  “He’s known Colonel Donovan all his life,” Cynthia said softly.<
br />
  “And so have you,” Baker said.

  Cynthia looked at him.

  “You want me to go to Colonel Donovan?” she asked.

  “I thought you might consider it,” Baker said. “For what a fraternal organization would call ‘the good of the order.’ ”

  “I’m going to see Colonel Donovan,” Cynthia said. “I intend to graduate from this school.”

  “I thought perhaps you could make it clear to him why this whole sequence of events is so distressing to me,” Baker said.

  Cynthia’s mind was rushing ahead.

  “If I’m to go to Washington in the morning,” she said, “what do I do about turning in my equipment, settling things?”

  “I’ll take care of that for you myself,” Baker said.

  2

  It had taken a long time for Cynthia to go to sleep, and she had gone to sleep angry.

  And she had awakened still angry, and had grown angrier with the realization that there was not going to be time to pack and dress and eat breakfast, too, and that she was just going to have to miss breakfast.

  There was a small silver lining to the black cloud, she thought. It would be the first time that Greg had seen her dressed up in anything fancier than a skirt and a sweater, or wearing any makeup except a faint touch of lipstick. She had a moment to enjoy that before thinking that it probably would be better if he didn’t get to see her that way. It would fuel what she suspected he felt for her.

  When she carried her luggage downstairs, he was in the entrance foyer. It was the first time she had seen him dressed up, too. He was in his pink-and-green lieutenant’s uniform, wearing his new silver parachutist’s wings.

  He smiled when he saw her.

  “Baker said you would be going to Washington,” he said. “He didn’t say why, and he didn’t tell me how pretty you are in your civilian clothing.”

  “Good morning, Greg,” she said.

  She wondered what his destination was, and when they had passed the checkpoint, she asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he said.