The Fighting Agents

by W. E. B Griffin

  Darmstadter thought about it, then shook his head.

  “I don’t remember,” he said.

  “What you’re supposed to do, if you’re a general or an admiral and about to enter battle, is decide what ‘asset’ you absolutely have to have if things get tough. Then you squirrel that asset away so it’s ready when you need it. I just sent my asset back for a nap. If anybody can sit this thing down safely on a mountain strip with a stream running across the runway, Dolan can. You follow?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Darmstadter said. He was more than a little uncomfortable. Canidy was obviously a highly skilled B- 25 pilot and comfortable doing things with it that most people would not try (his solo flight of the B-25 through the soup the day Darmstadter had first met him was proof of that). And he had just admitted that he didn’t think he could make the landing on the island of Vis.

  “There is an additional problem,” Canidy said. “Commander Dolan thinks he is still twenty-two years old and that the doctors are dead wrong about the condition of his heart. He will take affront unless handled properly. Kid gloves are required.”

  “I understand, Sir,” Darmstadter said.

  “And I told you before, stop calling me ’Sir,’ ” Canidy said.

  Six hours and fifteen minutes after taking off from Fersfield, the B-25G landed at Casablanca. Darmstadter made the landing. He had to tell himself there was no reason to be nervous. Landing on the wide, concrete runway of a commercial airport on a bright, sunny afternoon should be a snap, compared to landing on the rough, narrow gravel runways at Fersfield. But he was aware that it was sort of a test. Major Canidy was in effect giving him a check ride to see how well Dolan had done as an instructor pilot.

  Darmstadter was enormously pleased and relieved that the landing was a greaser.

  A Follow Me jeep, painted in checkerboard black and white and flying an enormous checkerboard flag, met them at the end of the runway and led them away from the terminal to a remote corner of the field. There was an old hangar there with the legend AIR FRANCE barely legible through a layer of rust.

  As they approached, the doors opened and a ground crewman gave Darmstadter hand signals, directing him to taxi to the doorway and then shut it down. The moment the engines died, a dozen Air Corps ground crewmen manhandled the B-25 inside the hangar and closed the doors.

  2

  THE MARK HOPKINS HOTEL SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA 12 FEBRUARY 1943

  It had been decided in Washington that Whittaker, Hammersmith, and Garvey would spend the night at Mare Island. Cynthia, to avoid the curiosity and comment that a civilian woman in the Mare Island Female Officers’ Quarters would cause, would stay in a San Francisco hotel.

  “I know someone who can get you into the Mark Hopkins, ” Jimmy Whittaker had said, innocently, when the issue of where she would stay in San Francisco came up in Captain Douglass’s office. “What the hell, you might as well go first class.”

  “Go ahead and do it, Jim,” Captain Douglass had answered for her. “Hotel rooms are in damned short supply in San Francisco.”

  When they arrived in San Francisco, by commercial air, they went first to the hotel. Cynthia’s reserved “room” turned out to be the Theodore Roosevelt Suite, four elegantly furnished rooms on an upper floor.

  “It was all they had available,” Jimmy said innocently.

  Cynthia knew that simply wasn’t true. What had happened was that Jimmy had told the hotel something like “I’d like something very nice for a very good friend of mine,” and the hotel had come up with the Theodore Roosevelt Suite. The hotel had been very obliging to Jim Whittaker because Jimmy was a very rich man, and the hotel knew it.

  Jimmy’s father and his two uncles had inherited the Whittaker Construction Company from their father. There was more to it than the construction company, though God knew that was enough. The Whittaker fortune was based in railroads. They had built them before the Civil War, and grown very rich during the war building and operating railroads for the Union Army.

  After the Civil War, there had been more railroads. And harbors, and heavy construction. Whenever they could, which was most often, they took part of their pay in stock of whatever they were building. The company had large real estate holdings in New York City and elsewhere. It was even possible, Cynthia thought, looking around the Theodore Roosevelt Suite, that Jimmy had an interest in the hotel.

  Jimmy’s father had been killed in World War I. And his third of Whittaker Construction had gone to his only son. Both Jimmy’s uncle Jack and his uncle Chesty had died childless. Jack Whittaker’s third would pass to Jimmy on the death of his widow. Jimmy had already inherited the house on Q Street, Northwest, from Chesty, as well as some other property.

  Chesty Whittaker, Jimmy’s uncle and Cynthia’s lover, had told her all about the financial position of James M. B. Whittaker. Not subtly. Chesty had thought she should marry Jimmy.

  “You’ve got to think of the future, my darling,” Chesty had said. “We can’t go on.”

  “Why can’t we?”

  “Well, for one thing, I’m a little long in the tooth. You’ll still be a young woman when I am long gone.”

  “Goddamn you!” she had screamed. “This is obscene. You’re not going to die, and I’m not going to marry Jimmy. Jimmy’s a kid.”

  “There is only three years’ difference—”

  “Four,” she had snapped.

  “Four years,” he’d said. They had looked at each other for a moment, before he went on, “Presumably, you meant it when you said you didn’t want my wife to ever find out about us.”

  “The way I put it was ‘I’d rather die than have her find out,’ ” Cynthia had said. "Yes, of course I meant it.”

  “The reality of our situation is that you are as poor as a church mouse,” Chesty had said. “And what do you think she would think if I made provision for you in my will? In addition to her many other virtues, she is intelligent and perceptive.”

  “Then don’t ‘make provision’ for me,” Cynthia had said.

  “I love you,” he’d said. “I could not not do that.”

  “And the convenient way to do it is to marry me off to Jimmy? Damn you, Chesty.”

  “Jimmy stopped off here on his way to Randolph Field,” Chesty Whittaker had said. “He said that it was his intention, when he graduated, to ask you to marry him, and what did I think of that?”

  “What did you say?” she’d asked.

  “I told him I thought it was a splendid idea,” Chesty’d said. “Actually, what I said, making my little joke, was ‘name the first son after me.’ ”

  “Oh, damn you!” she’d said, and she’d started to cry, and he’d held her.

  Three months after that happened, Chesty Haywood Whittaker had dropped dead. And he had not made provision for her in his will, and she was as poor as a church mouse.

  Cynthia decided not to make an issue of the Theodore Roosevelt Suite. It would be pointless to protest, for one thing, and for another, it wasn’t as if there was a suggestion he would share it with her. He had just made a generous gesture. In the family tradition, she thought. In many ways, Jimmy reminded her of Chesty.

  The Navy sent a Plymouth staff car to carry them from the Mark Hopkins to Mare Island. Waiting for them in a hangar there, guarded by a platoon of Marines under a gunnery sergeant, was a five-foot-high stack of wooden crates that would at 0500 the next morning be loaded aboard the Naval Air Transport Service Douglas C-54 that would carry them to Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands.

  Jimmy, very seriously, ordered Radioman Second Class Joe Garvey to take charge of the guard detail. Cynthia had to restrain a smile at the slight sailor’s obvious feeling of importance at being given the responsibility.

  Garvey’s status was still undecided. Since he had correctly deduced that Whittaker and Hammersmith were going into the Philippines, he could not be simply returned to duty. But on the other hand, it had not been decided that he would go with Whittaker and Hammersmith. For the
meantime, taking him with them to San Francisco and Hawaii would serve two purposes. An extra hand was going to be helpful, and he already knew what was going on. And if he was with them, he was considered to be secure. He could, at any point, be put on ice if it was ultimately decided not to take him to Mindanao.

  They then went to the Mare Island Officers’ Club for dinner. Whittaker ordered a steak dinner with all the trimmings to go, and sent their Navy driver to the hangar to deliver it to Garvey.

  There was an orchestra in the club. After dinner, after first, with great mock courtesy, asking Whittaker’s permission, Greg asked Cynthia to dance. Whittaker graciously gave his permission, then rose and gave a little bow as Greg led her off to the dance floor.

  Then it was Jimmy’s turn to dance with her. Thirty seconds after he had put his arms around her, she had felt his erection stabbing at her stomach. He didn’t grab her and press her close or try to move his hands so they would come against her breasts, but he had an erection, and it was obvious that he was not only not embarrassed by it, but seemed pleased that she had no choice but to be aware of it.

  And since she had learned in a class euphemistically called “Human Hygiene” in college that the male erection was an “involuntary vascular reaction,” she had not been able to tell him to “stop that.”

  He held her hand as they returned to the table.

  Jimmy picked up his glass and, smiling, looked over the rim of it at Greg.

  “I have been thinking, Ronald Reagan—” he began.

  “I saw the furrowed brow,” Hammersmith interrupted, “and it’s ‘Greg Hammer.’ Ronny Reagan is the one they call the ‘Errol Flynn of the B movies.’ ”

  “Right,” Whittaker said. “Hammer, as in the baking soda.”

  “Now you’ve got it,” Hammersmith said. “What have you been thinking, O worthy leader?”

  “That despite my initial unflattering impression of you, you may be reasonably trustworthy after all.”

  “Oh, thank you, Sir.”

  “To the point where I would feel comfortable in leaving you in sole charge of Radioman Garvey while I escort the lady to her hotel.”

  “I can get to the hotel by myself,” Cynthia protested.

  They ignored her.

  “So that you can protect our girl from the unwanted attentions of sailors in the Mark Hopkins?”

  “Correct,” Whittaker said. “I have heard all sorts of tales about sex-starved naval officers making indecent proposals to unaccompanied young ladies such as Miss Chenowith, right in the lobby of the Mark Hopkins.”

  “We couldn’t have that, could we?” Greg replied. “You sneaky sonofabitch.”

  “ ‘You sneaky sonofabitch, Sir,’ ” Whittaker corrected him.

  The two men, pleased with their own wit, smiled at each other, which infuriated Cynthia.

  “I don’t need an escort,” Cynthia said.

  “The way she says that,” Whittaker replied, “you’d think she thinks I have designs on her body, wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t think you’re funny, Jimmy,” she said.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “We have an early day tomorrow.”

  He took her arm when he put her into the Navy car, but as soon as Greg had gotten out at the hangar, he slid away from her on the seat, so that their hips were no longer pressing together. And he did not try to hold her hand, put his arm around her, or kiss her on the way to the hotel.

  He did speak to the driver:

  “How are we going to get Miss Chenowith back out to Mare Island in the morning?”

  “My orders are to stick with you, Sir, until you get on the plane.”

  “All night?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Well, you go get yourself some sleep,” Whittaker ordered. “Be at the hotel at 0400. I’ll catch a cab back out there tonight.”

  “Why don’t you go back out with him?” Cynthia asked.

  Whittaker ignored her for a moment, then somewhat lamely said, “I want to check in with Ellis. I’d rather do that from your room than try to get a long-distance authorization at Mare Island or feed quarters to a pay phone.”

  He might, indeed, actually call Ellis from the Theodore Roosevelt Suite, once he gets there, Cynthia thought, but he obviously just thought up that excuse to get into the room.

  There was also a good chance that the moment he got her behind the closed doors of the Theodore Roosevelt Suite, he would make a play for her, she thought. She really didn’t want that. But she didn’t want to make an issue of it now. If it happened, she could handle him.

  When they got to the suite, he went directly to the telephone on the table in front of the couch and put in a call to Chief Ellis in Washington.

  He seemed genuinely disappointed that Ellis was not immediately available.

  “I’m in Miss Chenowith’s room in the Mark Hopkins,” he said to the telephone. “I’ll wait here for his call.”

  He put the telephone in its cradle.

  “Not there? That’s surprising,” Cynthia said.

  “He would have been there if I had called when I was supposed to,” he said. “I didn’t even think of calling him until I needed an excuse to be alone with you.”

  She smiled at him.

  That should have been my cue, she thought, to say something cutting—“Don’t get any ideas, Jimmy,” something like that. I wonder why I didn’t?

  It was, she decided, because his honesty disarmed her. And then she realized there was more than that. She had tried to force the thought from her mind whenever it had appeared. But that had been hard, and it kept reappearing, as it was doing now.

  The thought was that the clock was running down, like the clock at a basketball game. Very soon, Jimmy and Greg—and maybe even Garvey, whom she thought of as “the boy in the sailor suit”—would get on the submarine and try to establish contact with this man Fertig and his guerrillas in the Philippines. There was a very good chance that they would be caught, and if they were caught, they could count on being executed. Cynthia had seen photographs of Japanese executions of Americans. It was done ritually, according to the Japanese warriors’ code of Bushido, which prescribed execution by beheading.

  And this was followed by another thought, alarming in its implications: There seemed to be little morally wrong with going to bed with a man who stood a very good chance of being executed by beheading in the very near future. It seemed little enough to do for him.

  But that presumed he would be executed. Jimmy, God bless him, seemed to have an incredible ability to stay alive. And if he stayed alive, he would be back. And he would interpret her taking him into her bed as a reciprocation of love. And he would want to marry her.

  There were a number of reasons she couldn’t marry Jimmy. For openers, she was convinced that the love she felt for him was not the sort of love a woman should have for the man she would marry, whose children she would bear. He was younger than she was. And she had been his uncle’s mistress. She sometimes thought that she owed the love she felt for Jimmy simply to his likeness, in so many subtle ways, to Chesty Whittaker. Sometimes, when he looked at her, it was as if Chesty was behind the eyes.

  And she didn’t reciprocate Greg’s affection, either. Greg said it jokingly, but she believed that he thought he loved her. And she didn’t want to sleep with him, either.

  It would be better all around if she were a slut, she thought every so often. Not an absolute, four-star slut, but just a little bit of a slut, like Charity Hoche. The situation Cynthia found herself in would pose no great problems for Charity. If Charity believed that two men like these, both of them handsome and rich, and head and shoulders above most other men, thought they were in love with her, and if she was as fond of both of them as Cynthia was, Charity would sleep with both of them. One at a time, of course, but with both of them.

  “I think we should talk about Joe Garvey,” Cynthia said. “Ellis will want to know when he calls back.”

  Whittaker nodded.

>   “On the one hand, you need a backup for Greg,” Cynthia said, all business.

  “And on the other, Joe Garvey looks and acts as if he should be working the lights for the senior play,” Whittaker said.

  He walked to the bar and made himself a drink, then returned to the couch and sat down, slumped against the rear cushion, his legs stretched out straight in front of him, holding his glass on his stomach.

  “He’s not trained for anything like this,” Cynthia said.

  “Neither am I, according to good old Eldon Baker,” Whittaker said.

  “You’re going out of your way to be difficult, aren’t you?”

  “I’m about to start,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “While I was off in Merry Old England,” Whittaker said, “I was fucking a duchess.”

  “For God’s sake, Jimmy!”

  “Elizabeth Alexander Mary Alexandra, Her Grace the Duchess of Stanfield,” he said. “Her family owns Whitbey House. He’s in the RAF. Missing in action. I’m sure there is a word for what I was doing. And it was my fault, not hers.”

  He met her eyes until she averted them.

  “And then, when I was in Cairo, I was fucking another married woman. Her husband was off with Charles de Gaulle and the Free French.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Cynthia asked. “You think it’s funny?”

  “There’s a punch line,” he said.

  “I don’t think I want to hear it,” she said.

  “I used to ask myself, Cynthia,” Whittaker said, looking at her, “sometimes at very inappropriate moments, ‘Why are you doing this? If you love Cynthia, why the hell are you screwing somebody else?’ ”

  He looked at her as if he expected a response.

  “No answer came, Cynthia,” he said. “The conclusion to be drawn, therefore, is that I am an unprincipled sonofabitch. ”

  “Another possibility is that you don’t really love me,” she said. “Not that way. For God’s sake, Jimmy, we have known each other since we were kids. I used to take care of you when you were a little boy.”