The sun was to their back, a little more than an hour from setting and starting to create long shadows across the ground ahead of them. After a few minutes, Darmstadter pointed in an animated fashion at eleven o’clock out the windscreen.
“There they go,” he said over the intercom. “Headed for the Sandbox.”
Canidy looked out that direction, and saw another C-47. The sunlight set it off in the blue sky.
Canidy saw that it was approaching the western edge of Dellys. Then he saw, in quick succession, eight figures drop from the back of the aircraft—then their parachutes pop open one after another. They floated down, all nicely lit by the sun, and landed somewhat scattered. Then the aircraft disappeared over the ridge, headed in the direction of the dirt strip on the other side.
Canidy looked at Darmstadter and gave a thumbs-up.
Darmstadter nodded, then caused the Gooney Bird to make a slow turn, so that the needle on the compass came to rest on 200 degrees. That would result in a more or less direct vector to the airfield at Algiers.
Canidy went back to looking out the windscreen. Nothing he saw really registered, as he mentally went back over everything that had just happened at the Sandbox.
He was disappointed. He realized—again—that he’d come away from the OSS finishing school with pretty much zip. While the trip had not been a total waste of time—he, of course, had been able to share his talk with the agents there—he desperately had to make some headway of his own here soon….
Suddenly, Darmstadter banked the aircraft. He was turning away from the Algiers airfield, on a course out over the sea.
Canidy looked at him for an answer.
Darmstadter’s voice came over the intercom: “Algiers control is routing me out and around the long way. Not the first time it’s happened. Damn sure won’t be the last.”
Canidy nodded, resigned to the fact that that amounted to yet another small delay for him.
He turned to watch the waves, lost in thought.
Everyone back in that room at the Sandbox is fighting to defeat Hitler—if not exactly for the same honorable reasons.
Donovan told me before sending me into Sicily that to a man everyone is working some angle to come out on top after the war.
Just among the damn Frogs there’s the Communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans; the Organization de la Résistance dans l’Armée, followers of Giraud; De Gaulle’s Forces Française de l’Intérieur; and a deadly mix of other warring subfractions.
Christ knows how many we will deal with in Sicily. But clearly the usual suspects. Including my new friends in the Mafia.
What was it Donovan told Hoover? “I know they’re Communists, Edgar. That’s why I hired them.”
Communists, Fascists, mobsters—the Boss isn’t afraid of working with anyone to win this damn thing.
But then neither are FDR and Churchill.
Just consider that damned Stalin. His belief that “One man’s death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is merely a statistic” doesn’t exactly qualify the sonofabitch for sainthood.
Pulling these various factions together—or at least managing them in our own way—is how Donovan expects to do that.
They’re really on their own side. That’s a given. And most likely why that bearded bastard in the classroom would not look me in the eyes.
But we do have the upper hand. They all need our training and weapons and money. And they all know we can go into every last one of their countries, behind enemy lines, and sabotage anything we don’t want them to have—power plants, heavy factories, railroads—just take out the equipment short-term if they cooperate or, if they don’t, call in the bombers and blow the hell out of everything.
Just like a certain spook blowing up a munitions supply ship full of nerve gas in Palermo.
Shit….
Canidy looked down. He shook his head, hoping to clear it, then looked again out the windscreen.
What the hell?
He put his fingers behind his aviator sunglasses and rubbed his eyes.
Am I seeing things?
Shielding his eyes against the glare of the low sun, he looked down at the surface—and the long shadow cast by a fishing boat down there.
He tapped Darmstadter’s shoulder. Holding his left index finger upright, he made a circling motion.
Darmstader immediately understood, scanned the sky for other aircraft, and stood the Gooney Bird on her starboard wing, putting her belly toward the sun.
That cut the glare, and when Canidy looked out the windscreen, his direct view was now that of the ocean surface.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” he suddenly said.
He motioned to get Darmstadter’s attention, then pointed at the ocean surface, signaling for him to take a closer look.
Darmstadter banked the aircraft a little more for a clearer look, then saw the shape of the small boat and its shadow. He nodded, leveled off, then pushed the yoke forward, the nose instantly dipping.
God does take care of fools and drunks, Canidy thought, and I qualify on both accounts.
Canidy got on the intercom.
“Can you get all the way down on the deck, Hank, so I can be sure?” he said. It was a statement more than a question.
Darmstadter made turns so that the Gooney Bird would approach the fishing boat from the stern, keeping to its port side so that Canidy, in the copilot’s seat, would have an unobstructed view.
As they closed on the aft of the boat, brightly lit by the sun, Canidy could see four people at the transom. They watched the aircraft, and no doubt wondered what the hell it wanted.
“Not too close,” Canidy said over the intercom. “Never know who has an itchy trigger finger.”
Darmstadter raised an eyebrow and nodded.
They flew closer, and Canidy was sure he could make out the tall, solidly built man whom he knew to have an olive complexion, thick black hair and mustache, and a rather large nose. He’d last seen him five days ago, when Canidy and professor Arturo Rossi stepped off that boat and into the submarine.
In a flash, the Gooney Bird caught up to the boat and blew past. Canidy had just enough time to glance at the faces aboard—Yep, that’s Frank Nola, in the flesh—and to read what was painted on the ship’s bow just below the rusty anchor: STEFANIA.
Sweet Jesus, he thought, smiling. They did get out okay.
Or at least look like they’re okay.
Then he raised his left hand so that the palm faced down, rocked it left to right, then with his index finger poked repeatedly toward Algiers.
Darmstadter nodded in understanding.
He waved the wings of the Gooney Bird at the crew of the boat, then gained altitude before heading for the airfield.
[THREE]
OSS Whitbey House Station Kent, England 1655 2 April 1943
It had been a ghastly, mind-numbing day. The weather had turned dreadful and dreary—again—the gray-black clouds rumbling with the threat of rain. Worse, the day’s paperwork had seemed endless. And as twenty-two-year-old Charity Hoche walked quickly down the wide corridor to her bedroom, heels tapping rhythmically on the parquet flooring, she knew that there was only one thing that could even begin to make up for it.
I’ve been working since five o’clock, she thought. I deserve this. Twelve hours is enough.
Charity Hoche was accustomed to getting what Charity Hoche wanted.
And no damn war is going to change that.
She unlocked the sturdy paneled door to the bedroom and entered, then locked the door behind her. After first removing her shoes, then her first lieutenant’s uniform, she took care in slipping off the fine silk stockings, panties, and brassiere. Then Charity pulled on a thick cotton robe, lifted her shoulder-length hair out from under its collar and made a ponytail, then padded barefoot into the adjacent bathroom.
She went directly to the huge black marble bathtub.
She turned on the tap and water began to gurgle into the tub. Then she walked to a cabine
t, opened the door, and removed a jar of Elizabeth Arden bubble bath crystals. She had brought two dozen jars with her when she had come over from the States, not quite two months ago. Her stockpile was down to eighteen, as she had judiciously given jars—and some silk stockings—to the other women at Whitbey House.
She carefully poured two scoops of crystals into the running water, adjusted the taps, then returned the jar to the cabinet. When the tub was about half full, she dipped her right big toe in the water to test the temperature. She winced—it was quite hot at first touch, but then she became accustomed to it—and slid off her robe and stepped both feet into the tub. She slowly lowered herself in the water, the layer of bubbles swallowing every part of her body but her head.
“Ahhh,” she said, contentedly.
A rumble of thunder rattled the windows.
As her body warmed and her muscles began to relax, her mind became less cluttered with the day’s mundane tasks that had driven her to numbness—and settled on the one thing that dogged her.
Charity desperately wanted to be of the frame of mind not to give a damn about what people thought of her.
Like Dick Canidy does, she thought, reaching for the oval bar of Pear’s Soap and the facecloth next to it. He couldn’t care less.
But Charity—reared on a twenty-acre estate in Wallingford, one of the plusher suburbs of Philadelphia, and educated at Bryn Mawr—couldn’t bring herself to do that.
I do care.
And she did not think that having a socialite’s image and being taken seriously had to be mutually exclusive.
It’s not either-or, dammit.
She felt tears welling, told herself they were from exhaustion, and wiped them from her cheek. She rubbed the soap bar in the facecloth, creating a lather, then softly began soaping herself.
Initially, when talk began of her coming to England, it was thought that she would simply do for Whitbey House what she had done so well for the House on Q Street in Washington, D.C.
The House on Q Street was used as an OSS safe house, as well as a hotel of sorts for transients the OSS could not put up elsewhere in D.C. Charity had run it and its staff—while acting as a sort of superhostess—with the precision of a Swiss timepiece, and there was no reason to believe that she could not do the same at Whitbey House.
And Whitbey House—and Bob Jamison—would soon desperately need the help.
First Lieutenant Robert Jamison, a pleasant, red-haired young man, was adjutant, working directly for Dick Canidy. He handled the requisitioning of everything for the OSS station from bedsheets to plywood sheets, laxatives to explosives. And he handled all the paperwork. All Canidy had to do was scribble his name in the signature block authorizing said requisitions—hundreds of them each month. Sometimes, Canidy didn’t have to do that; Jamison occasionally signed Canidy’s name in his absence. Canidy encouraged him to do so, having explained that that was in keeping with the true nature of his job, relieving Canidy of all the administrative burden that he could.
Bob Jamison had performed superbly—perhaps too well. While he was grateful to work for someone as decent (if demanding) as Dick Canidy, he wasn’t exactly thrilled to be stuck ordering laundry soap and such. He longed to contribute something more to the war than being what he called a chief clerk.
He wanted to go operational.
Both Dick Canidy and David Bruce thought that Jamison had the brains and talent for that. He had demonstrated it recently in the setting up of a target for a test of the B-17 drones. That mission had required working with regular military elements (army and navy) who did not have the Need to Know why they had been sent to build massive wooden frameworks on a remote English coastal cliff, nor how it was that almost to the minute the last nail had been hammered home a B-17 “accidentally” crashed into the framework, the aircraft’s “pilots” having safely parachuted out before impact.
Jamison had come up with plausible cover stories—in fact, had put together the whole project for the test of flying an aircraft by remote control into the phony “sub pen.” No one ever questioned the crash as anything but what Jamison had explained.
As more and more such OSS operations were mounted out of Whitbey House Station, someone had to procure—through channels or other unconventional methods—the matériel to carry them out. Jamison, of course, was the man, and, being damn bright, had over time put the details of so many missions together into a larger picture.
And that was what had ruined his chances of going operational.
The Rule One was that no OSS personnel with knowledge of OSS plans other than their own could go operational. And Jamison knew too much about what was going on in and out of Whitbey House Station—the very things that the damn Nazi Sicherheitsdienst gladly would carve him apart, little piece by little piece, in order to learn—and so he was left to do what he did best.
With Canidy disappearing now and again—Canidy being the exception to any rule that Canidy chose, including Rule One—Jamison had simply carried on with his own duties while filling Canidy’s as he was able. What he could not handle or did not have the authority to handle, Lieutenant Colonel Stevens took care of either from his office at OSS London Station or from personal visits to the safe house.
Charity Hoche’s arrival at Whitbey House, with the grand if somewhat vague title of “Deputy Director (Acting),” only served to solidify in Bob Jamison’s mind the fact that he was stuck as chief clerk.
Charity had sensed some friction from the start, particularly when she came to understand that the early word had quickly circulated through Whitbey House that she would be working for Jamison “taking care of the women.”
What followed was a subtle, behind-the-scenes tug-of-war between them for control.
Officially, Canidy was in charge. And, officially, Charity was his acting deputy. Not Jamison. But she made a very real effort—sometimes successful, sometimes not—not to push it. She was smart enough to know that the much-liked Jamison could just as well make her job difficult as he could make it easy.
Charity Hoche and Bob Jamison had gotten along reasonably well as he had showed her the ropes. She liked him, and not only because he hadn’t made things even more awkward by making a pass at her. He was a nice guy, outgoing and agreeable.
And, over time, she came to understand his frustration, especially when he’d told her about being turned down to go operational, and why.
How awful, she’d thought. I wouldn’t want to be told I’ve done so well at my job I can’t do anything else, then have someone brought in above me.
She understood that that was the source of the friction, and so was a little afraid—if that was the right word—that it might turn to resentment for her being put in charge of Whitbey House in Canidy’s absence, even though they both understood how the system worked.
Her rank of first lieutenant did not help. It was an assimilated one, and only recently made, meaning that First Lieutenant Jamison had far more time in rank and thus was technically her superior. But he had also pieced together the information that she held some super–security clearance—he had no idea it was on par with that of Lieutenant Colonel Stevens’s Top Secret–Presidential, but he knew it was up there—and that the way the OSS worked was, Jamison could bloody well be a major general, but if Donovan said she was in charge, then, by God, Major General Jamison—or whoever—was going to cheerfully carry out her orders, even if Donovan had to have her made a lieutenant general for that to happen.
Jamison had been around the Office of Strategic Services long enough to know anything was possible, no matter how the real military world operated.
While Charity took care not to abuse her power, she did understand that there was a distinct difference between being in charge and disliked and being in charge, liked…and ineffectual.
You can’t make everyone happy, she thought, holding the facecloth under the running faucet and rinsing it. You have to break eggs to make the omelet.
From Day One at Whitbey Hou
se, she’d been determined to prove herself, just as she had accomplished proving her worth in Washington to Wild Bill Donovan. He initially had had his own doubts about her when she first arrived at the House on Q Street. And, clearly, the Philly socialite had earned the Boss’s respect.
David Bruce had let Charity read the personal note that Donovan had written to him. In it, the director of the OSS explained how Charity had come to get that security clearance (“I needed a clerk-typist and file clerk with the intellectual ability to comprehend the implications of the project, and to deal with the people involved,” he’d written) and how she came to be in England (“As a result of growth in the project, we cannot risk that something might slip past Ed Stevens’s attention. My decision is to send you Charity, who, on my authority, has the Need to Know on anything there”).
“The project,” of course, was the most important one of the war—the Manhattan Project, the pursuit of the atomic bomb.
She knew that she certainly could “comprehend the implications of the project.” Beyond the simple fact that whoever built the nuclear device first would win this maddening world war, many would die in the quest to achieve it—some of whom she very likely would know.
And would love.
And that brought up “the people involved.”
Quite a few of these people, at one time or another, had come through Whitbey House.
Like Jimmy Whittaker, Charity thought, as she adjusted the faucet and added more hot water to the tub.
She knew that Captain James M. B. Whittaker, U.S. Army Air Forces, had been pulled away from Whitbey House and sent on an OSS mission to the Philippines—but not before getting romantically entwined with the Dutchess.
And likely in this very marble tub, Charity thought, reaching up to undo her ponytail and begin washing her hair.
Captain the Duchess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Stanfield, WRAC, was the liaison officer of His Majesty’s Imperial General Staff to OSS Whitbey House Station. The enormous property belonged to her—and to her husband, an RAF wing commander shot down and more or less presumed dead.
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