The First Wave bbwm-2

by James R Benn

  I had told Harding about the second shipment of penicillin coming through, got something to eat, found this cot, and claimed it. I think I remember taking my boots off, but that was it.

  I was still dead tired, but I didn't have time for any more shut-eye. I put on a fresh pair of socks from my pack and headed to the washroom. There was only cold water, but I dumped a helmet-full over my head, washed up, and managed to shave without massacring my face. I hoped I looked presentable. And that Diana would want to see me, would want to hold my hand, would let me sooth and reassure her. I wanted her to be the Diana with the sparkling eyes full of fun I had known and loved in England, all passion, temper, and tenderness. Not the Diana who had put a gun to her head. Not the Diana who had been… I didn't even want to think about it. But it was all I could think about. I looked at myself in the cracked mirror above the sink. I smiled, and it was the same face that had always smiled back at me. Yet it wasn't. It couldn't be, not with everything that had happened. The smile didn't last, and I looked away from the reflection. Villard's face floated through my mind and he was smiling too, laughing at me. I wondered if I could ever think of Diana without remembering what he'd done to her. How could I hold her without thinking about where his hands had been? It didn't make me proud, but there it was.

  I stashed my gear under the cot and put on my web belt with the. 45 in its holster. I took its grip in my hand and pressed with all my strength until I could feel the little cross-hatchings against my skin. It was some relief. I felt better. I still had ten minutes and decided to drop in on Diana to see if she was awake. As I walked down the hall, past everyone going on shift or off, I realized the real reason I wanted to see her now instead of later. To get it over with. But I didn't like admitting it, even to myself.

  The guard at the door to the ward checked my dogtags and found my name on a list.

  "Okay, Lieutenant, knock and check with the nurse."

  I went up to the closed door and gave a little rap on the frosted glass. I thought for a second that no one was going to answer. I could just go away. The door was opened by Rita, the nurse who had taken a liking to Kaz.

  "Billy, come in," she whispered as she took me by the arm and pulled me into the room. There were four beds against the wall, empty except for the one by the window. Diana was asleep, her blonde hair framing her face. She looked better, now that she was cleaned up and in a fresh white room.

  "She asked for you when she woke up an hour or so ago. Doctor Perrini gave her a sedative. She can't stay awake long. Sit by the bed, I'll let her know you're here."

  "Wait," I said in a low voice. "How is she? Did she have any injuries… internal injuries, or anything?"

  "She was beaten, but not on the face. She's badly bruised. She was a little confused and disoriented from the drugs she'd been injected with, but they're almost all out of her system now."

  "Did she tell you what happened?"

  Rita gave me a probing look, trying to figure out how much to tell me, and if I could take it. I didn't know the answer to that myself.

  "Yes. They gave her chloral hydrate to knock her out when they moved her. That was after she tried to escape."

  "Jesus." I wondered when that was. When I was having breakfast at the St. George Hotel? Or maybe while I was having coffee with Casselli? I went over to the chair by the bed and sat down. I didn't want to hear any more.

  "Miss Seaton," Rita said, taking hold of Diana's hand. "You have a visitor. Can you wake up for me?"

  Diana shook her head, as if she was dreaming, and mumbled something I couldn't understand. I wondered if she was lost in a strange city, too. Then her eyes opened.

  "Billy."

  "I'm here, Diana."

  "Don't go..

  I was about to tell her I had to, when her eyelids drooped and she was asleep again. "I have to go," I said anyway. I reached up and touched her forehead. It was cool, and she smiled, like a child hearing a lullaby as she drifts off to sleep.

  "I do have to go," I said to Rita as I got up. "Tell her… I was here."

  "I'll tell her you'll be back," she said with determination.

  "Yeah, I'll be back. Later. I will."

  "And bring that nice Polish guy with you," she said, the hardness in her eyes gone, the test passed.

  I saw that nice Polish guy a few minutes later sitting with Harding at a corner table in the Officer's Mess. They had a beat up coffee pot, burned black on the bottom, and a plate of doughnuts on the table. The enlisted men's mess and kitchen were just across the hall, and the smell of army powdered eggs, burnt toast, and cigarettes drifting in almost killed what little appetite I had. They hadn't gotten around to whitewashing this part of the hospital, but the floor was clean and the red brick walls gave the room a cool, pleasant feel.

  "Okay, first things first," said Harding as I poured coffee into a chipped mug. Pieces of eggshell floated on top and I dredged them out with my finger. "How's Miss Seaton?"

  "Pretty good, considering," I said, trying to sound confident. "Bruised quite a bit, and still a little woozy."

  I didn't tell them what I hadn't told Rita either. That Diana had been pretty lively back in Bone until she almost blew her brains out. Maybe it had been shock, maybe the drugs, or both. I hoped.

  "She will be all right?" asked Kaz, leaning in and speaking quietly.

  "Yeah, I saw her a few minutes ago. Still groggy, but she'll be fine."

  "Good," declared Harding, closing the subject of personal relationships. I wondered how he and Gloria Morgan were doing. He didn't give me a chance to ask.

  "I notified HQ about the new penicillin shipment. It's traveling by ship to Oran and then by train to Algiers. It's coming by rail because the Luftwaffe has been targeting vessels entering Algiers harbor. It's a big shipment, twenty cases, which is about eighty percent of the entire world supply at the moment."

  Kaz whistled.

  "How much would it be worth?" I asked.

  "It's invaluable," answered Harding. "Which means a lot of money."

  "And no one at this hospital thought it worth mentioning, after the first supply was stolen?" I asked.

  "You find out about that, Boyle, when we're done here. Who knew, and why didn't they speak up?"

  "Yes, sir. I assume you've added security for this shipment?"

  "Damn right. It's being guarded like the crown jewels."

  "And when is it due here?"

  "The train from Oran will arrive at 0300 hours tomorrow morning. A truck will bring the shipment of penicillin from the station to the depot here, to be parceled out to field hospitals the next day. I've got a platoon of Rangers on the train with it now. They'll guard the truck until it leaves here."

  "I think, sir, that we should keep the existence of our extra security quiet for now."

  "Why?" asked Harding.

  "Because someone went to a lot of effort to hide this delivery from us, and maybe from the rest of the hospital staff. Villard may be planning to hit the truck en route. He'd have time to get away with a fortune in penicillin before anyone even knew it was gone."

  "So we let him have a go at it?" Harding asked, as if I had just gone around the bend.

  "We shouldn't tip our hand too soon. We might have a chance to trap him and his accomplices."

  "How?" asked Kaz, as he dumped sugar into his coffee.

  "We keep quiet about the Rangers guarding the penicillin for now. If we let the information out late tonight, whoever is working with

  Villard will try to get word to him. We have to watch the phones, to see if anyone tries to get to the radio, or whether someone leaves the hospital for no reason. Then we'll have them."

  "And if his inside person doesn't manage to get word out, Villard will still try to hit the truck."

  "Yes sir. That's why I want to be in that truck when it makes the pickup."

  Harding eyed me, trying to figure out what was going on. I didn't usually volunteer, and with Diana safe here, he probably thought I'd be anglin
g to stay put. He started to say something but stopped as a couple of officers sat down at the table next to us.

  "I'll think about it," he said in a low voice. "Meantime, we'll keep it zipped about the escort. Lieutenant Kazimierz, you work on this." He produced the notebook that I had given him last night. Kaz flipped through the pages. He frowned.

  "What's the matter?" I asked.

  "I am not certain, but this looks much more complicated than the other code you showed me. That was actually a substitution cipher, really not a code at all."

  "What's the difference?" I asked.

  "Ciphers are different from codes. When you substitute one word for another word or sentence, you have a code. When you mix up or substitute letters, you have a cipher. You can also combine codes and ciphers by substituting one word for another and then mixing up the result. There are two types of ciphers also. Substitution ciphers replace letters with other letters or symbols, keeping the order in which the symbols fall the same. Transposition ciphers keep all of the original letters intact, but mix up the order. Of course, you can use both methods, one after the other, to further confuse anyone who intercepts the message."

  "I'm confused," I admitted. I had stopped following his explanation before he was half done.

  "Look here," said Kaz, warming up to his subject. "These last pages do seem to be the same shorthand cipher we saw before. The words look intact. But here, on these pages, the letters are all in five letter groups. Here, there are just numbers in groups of three, separated by a dash. 45-16-4, 109-22-26, 8-31-38, and so on. No logical order.

  Whoever set this up used a number of different techniques, and then used the substitution cipher for quick messages."

  "When we're done here, find a quiet place and work on it," Harding said.

  He didn't like it and neither did I. We had both thought deciphering the contents of the notebook would be a quick fix to a tough problem. It would allow us to bring evidence to Ike of corruption at high levels within the Vichy French regime here, a reason to clean house. But it wasn't going to be that easy.

  "All right, Boyle, tell us what you found out in Bone," Harding said, leaning back and sipping his coffee.

  I told them about Le Bar Bleu, but not the room upstairs, or the fact that I'd burned the place down. I told them about the depot, finding Diana, and how I got the notebook, but not about shooting Mathenet in the foot. I told them about The Crossroads being the code name for the detention center in the desert, to which Villard now had moved the last of his slave laborers and his hijacked supplies, waiting for the highest bidder. Germans, Arabs, the Mafia, everyone on the wrong side of the war or the law was probably itching to get their hands on the new wonder drug. I didn't tell them about promising Diana I'd get the rest of the prisoners out of his hands, since I had no idea how I could pull that off. By the time I finished figuring out what to leave in and what to leave out, I had only one question left. I refilled my cup with hot coffee and took a doughnut. Reporting is hard work.

  "You know the thing that bothered me was how Villard and Bessette got this smuggling operation set up so quickly, as if they had known ahead of time about the hospital being opened here and even about the penicillin and how valuable it would be."

  "Right," said Harding. "What did you come up with?"

  "I think I have it figured out. Bessette's family is involved in shipping between Algeria, France, and Portugal. I bet they use the ships for smuggling as well. He has a brother, Jules, who lives in Blackpool, England, where the 21st General Hospital was posted before being transported here. It'd be easy for Bessette to send a letter with a sailor going to Portugal with instructions to hand it off there to someone on a neutral vessel headed for England. When that sailor arrives, he simply mails the letter at a local post office."

  "Because the British censor international mail, but not internal mail," Kaz said, nodding his head.

  "What about getting information back to Algiers?" Harding asked. "That wouldn't be so easy."

  "It wouldn't have to be done the same way," said Kaz, quickly. "They could have set up a simple code, word for word. Jules could write back, 'My good friend, John, will be visiting London in three weeks.' That could actually mean someone named John would be in Algiers in six weeks, depending on whatever previous arrangement they made for signifying numbers and places."

  "But even so, how could they have found out? Everything about the invasion was top secret," Harding said.

  "But Major, what does top secret really mean? Just how secret is it?" I asked.

  "Well, a lot of people did have to know," admitted Harding… "Planning staff, logistical staff, civil affairs. As the date got closer, the circle of those in the know grew larger and larger."

  "Would the Medical Corps be in that circle?"

  Harding let that question hang in the air for a minute as he thought.

  "They'd have to be, especially to prepare for the kinds of indigenous diseases they'd have to deal with," he finally said.

  "And certainly if they were involved in the testing of a new miracle drug," added Kaz.

  Harding took more coffee, poured milk into it and tapped his spoon on the edge of the thick ceramic mug. Clink clink clink.

  "I don't like what I'm hearing. You're suggesting that a U.S. Army officer would betray secret plans for the invasion of North Africa for personal gain. But I agree it's possible. Does your speculation fit with Lieutenant Kazimierz's information?" Harding nodded at Kaz.

  "Scotland Yard is quite familiar with Jules Bessette and his associates in Blackpool," Kaz said, leaning forward and lowering his voice, even though the tables around us were empty. "I first called the Provost Marshal's office, and they referred me to Scotland Yard, and I was told that Jules Bessette is suspected of everything from running the black market to murder, but he is very careful. They have no concrete evidence against him or anyone in his organization

  Except…" Kaz stopped and took a sip of coffee. He loved the drama of all this.

  "Okay, I'm hooked," I said. " Except for what?"

  "Except for the case of Sergeant Frederick Hotchkiss, of the 21st General Hospital, who supposedly deserted."

  "He was the supply sergeant before Casselli," I said.

  "Yes. The man who drove off in a jeep one night never to be seen again. But the jeep was, or the engine, at least. It was found in a local garage."

  "Let me guess, a garage owned by Jules Bessette," I said.

  "Exactly!"

  "So why didn't they arrest Bessette?" Harding asked.

  "He owned the garage but was seldom there. Scotland Yard had their eye on it as a link in a black market operation. Vehicles could come and go from a garage without arousing suspicion. Someone reported that Hotchkiss had been seen at the garage the day he deserted. The Provost Marshal's office and Scotland Yard searched the place and found the jeep's engine lying among other auto parts, but no sign of Hotchkiss or the rest of the jeep. The odd thing was, the manager of the garage was found floating face down in Blackpool harbor a few nights later. The investigation went nowhere."

  "Which is exactly what brother Jules wanted," I said, thinking out loud.

  "What do you mean?" asked Harding.

  "I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that Hotchkiss was killed at the garage, and the manager was supposed to dispose of the body and the vehicle. The jeep, intact, would be too hot to try to sell or salvage. But somebody got greedy and thought they could stash the engine away until all the fuss died down."

  "Ah," said Kaz, "so when Jules found out, he had the manager killed, to eliminate the link to him…"

  "And to set an example. Follow orders or else, like in the army."

  "If I threw you in the harbor every time you didn't obey orders, Boyle, you'd still be treading water," said Harding, setting down his coffee mug with a thump on the wooden tabletop. "Anything else?"

  "Yes sir," I said, wanting to sound like an authentic officer to keep Harding from getting any ideas. "I got a look at Ma
thenet's wounds that he supposedly got in the air raid. It wasn't from shrapnel. They were knife wounds."

  "Like we figured the assailant got when he tried to slit Casselli's throat?"

  "Exactly like that. I'm certain Mathenet won't be going anywhere soon, so we can get our hands on him anytime we want. But I'd like to find out who treated him for those wounds. I don't think anyone with medical knowledge would buy the shrapnel story."

  "Go ahead," Harding said, "but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the doctors and nurses here didn't know shrapnel from shinola. This is their first posting in a combat zone. Guy comes in bleeding and said something hit him during the air raid. What are they going to do, give him the third degree?"

  "As long as it's okay with you, I'll ask around."

  "Knock yourself out. Now, with all this new information, who. seems to be our most likely suspect?"

  "Well, who would know both that North Africa was our destination and that penicillin would be sent to this hospital?" I asked.

  "That would be both shipments of penicillin," Kaz added.

  "Yeah. And, who had access to the morphine to give Jerome an overdose?"

  "Hold on," Harding interrupted, holding up his hand. "That happened after the theft, so it could have been anybody. We don't know if the morphine that killed Jerome came from the stolen lot or the remaining supplies."

  "That's right," I said, rapping my fingers on the table. "Some of that stolen stuff could have stayed right here. Which means that it could be anybody-"

  "If they knew about the unit's destination and about the penicillin," said Kaz.