"Can I bring something else, General?" Mrs. Cavendish asked.
"Would you please make a fresh pot of-"
"It's already through," she interrupted.
"And then leave us for a while? And if Koffler is out there, send him home."
"Certainly, Sir."
Sessions desperately wanted to climb into bed and the shower, and not necessarily in that order; but he knew that would have to wait until Pickering finished whatever he had in mind. Pickering puffed thoughtfully on his cigar until the coffee was delivered and the buffet and dirty dishes removed.
"Are you going to want me for this, Sir?" McCoy asked, starting to rise out of his chair.
"Stick around, Ken, and you, too, George."
McCoy lowered himself back into his chair and reached for the silver cof-feepot.
"One more time, Ed," Pickering said to Sessions. "Both you and Rickabee are favorably impressed with Major Brownlee?"
"Yes, Sir. I suppose you could say he's everything Captain Macklin is not."
"I would have liked to make the judgment on my own," Pickering said.
"But your opinion, and Colonel Rickabee's, is the next-best thing. And I want this in place before they get here. You said tomorrow morning, right?"
"Yes, Sir. They had seats on today's plane. But maybe sooner, if Major Brownlee was able to get the Army Air Corps to carry them on a B-17."
"OK. The participation of the OSS-which means Major Brownlee and Captain Macklin-in the mission to have a look at General Fertig and his guer-rilla operation has been directed. That's a given. That poses certain problems, but also resolves some."
"Yes, Sir?"
"For one thing, it may solve the radio operator problem. Against my better judgment, I agreed to let Koffler go with McCoy." He looked at McCoy and saw in his eyes that he didn't like that at all. "He's a hell of a radio operator, Ken. And there is apparently some way one radio operator can recognize an-other radio operator. I think they say every operator has 'a hand' that's unlike anyone else's."
McCoy exhaled audibly and shrugged his acceptance of that. That was valuable. If the Japanese captured the new encryption device, and they at-tempted to send deceptive information-for example, ordering the submarine to appear at a location where it would find a Japanese destroyer waiting for it-the receiving operator would be immediately suspicious if the correctly en-crypted message was not in Koffler's hand.
"I have discussed this mission with General MacArthur, including the par-ticipation of the OSS," Pickering went on. He saw the surprise in Sessions's eyes. "That surprises you, Ed?"
"Yes, Sir," Sessions said.
"Because you believe that Colonel Donovan, and for that matter Secretary Knox, and for all we know, the President himself, would prefer that General MacArthur had no knowledge of OSS participation until the mission is over?"
"Yes, Sir. I saw the Special Channel Personal from Secretary Knox to you, Sir. With respect, Sir, they seemed to spell that out pretty clearly."
"I'm just a simple civilian in uniform, Captain Sessions, a former enlisted man. If it was bad judgment on my part to make the Supreme Commander, SWPOA, aware of a mission contemplated for execution within his area of responsibility, and if this comes to the attention of Secretary Knox-I don't give much of a damn whether Bill Donovan likes it or not-then the Secretary will have to take the action against me that he deems appropriate."
"Yes, Sir, " Sessions said.
"General MacArthur graciously offered any assistance he personally and Supreme Headquarters, SWPOA, can provide to help me in the execution of this mission. And I intend to ask him for a qualified high-speed radio operator. It seems entirely likely to me that among those who escaped from the Philip-pines, there should be such a person, probably a senior noncommissioned offi-cer who also speaks Spanish, and thus would be even more highly qualified than our own Staff Sergeant Koffler."
Pickering now saw approval in McCoy's eyes.
"I have also decided to remove Lieutenant McCoy from the roster of offi-cers who will participate in this mission. I have several reasons for so doing, which I am of course prepared to defend to Secretary Knox. For one thing, there is the consideration of space available on the submarine. The fewer per-sonnel, obviously, the more medical supplies the initial party can take with them. And finally, Lieutenant McCoy is not only the junior of the officers, but he has not been able to avail himself of the splendid training Bill Donovan provides for his agents."
"General," Ed Sessions said, smiling broadly, "at the risk of sounding like a toady, may I say that I wholeheartedly agree with the General's reason-ing?"
"Yes, you may," Pickering said, chuckling, and then turned to McCoy.
"You have any problems with this, Ken?"
"Three, Sir," McCoy said immediately, surprising Pickering.
"OK," Pickering said, making a let's have them gesture with his hand.
"From personal experience, and I think Captain Sessions will go along with me on this, Macklin is a hell of a load to put on this major's shoulders."
Sessions's smile vanished.
"Captain Macklin has to go, Ken," Pickering said. "That's out of my hands."
McCoy nodded, then said, "Zimmerman. It's a dirty trick to play on Zim-merman."
"Christ!" Sessions said. He had not thought of Zimmerman.
"First of all," Pickering said, "no one seems to know where Gunny Zim-merman is, except with the 2nd Raider Battalion somewhere behind the Jap lines on Guadalcanal. It's entirely possible that he won't arrive in Australia until after this mission has been mounted. And if he does show up, it is entirely possible that he will be suffering from malaria. I have been informed that seventy-odd percent of the First Marine Division has it. And if that's true, he will of course require hospitalization, and for a month or six weeks. By then the mission will have been mounted."
McCoy shrugged and nodded, and then went on. "Fertig. Sending Mack-lin seems to be a dirty trick to play on him."
"I've thought about that. That's out of my hands, too. Anyway, if Major Brownlee is as good as Sessions and Rickabee seem to think, he should be able to handle Captain Macklin. Anything else?"
"No, Sir," McCoy said.
"You're not getting out of hazardous service, Ken, if that's what you're thinking. As soon as we do-you do-everything possible to ensure that Major Brownlee has everything he needs, and this mission is under way, I'm going to send you back to the States to rejoin the Mongolia Operation."
"Aye, aye, Sir," McCoy said.
"OK," Pickering said. "Unless anyone has something else, that's it. You get some sleep, Ed, you obviously need it. And you, Ken, start doing what has to be done to help Major Brownlee."
[TWO]
Water Lily Cottage
Brisbane, Australia
1305 Hours 24 November 1942
"This thing is really primitive, isn't it?" Major Hon Song Do, Signal Corps, USA, said wonderingly, as he examined the Device, Cryptographic, M94 on the dining-room table.
Sitting around the table were Colonel Jack (NMI) Stecker, Major Hon, Captain Edward Sessions, First Lieutenant Kenneth R. McCoy, Second Lieu-tenant John Marston Moore, and Staff Sergeant Stephen M. Koffler. Everyone was equipped with a pad of notepaper, pencils, and a coffee cup and saucer. In the middle of the table were two silver coffeepots.
McCoy was puffing-blowing smoke rings-on a thin, black cigar. Hon thought it was a symbol-unconscious on McCoy's part-of where he stood in the estimation of General Pickering. Good cigars were in very short sup-ply in Australia. Pickering had obtained two dozen boxes of first-class, long, thin, black Philippine cigars from the master of a Pacific & Far East freighter that had called at Brisbane. They were being smoked by the Supreme Com-mander, SWPOA, General Pickering himself, and First Lieutenant K. R. McCoy.
"You really never saw one of them before, Sir?" Captain Edward Ses-sions, USMC, asked, surprised.
"Not even in a museum," Pluto replied. "And you can-what is it you jarhea
ds say, McCoy, 'belay'?-belay that 'Sir' business."
"Watch that 'jarhead' business, Major!" Colonel Stecker said sternly, but with a smile.
"Screw you, Major Dogface, Sir," McCoy said.
Stecker laughed out loud.
"OK," Pluto said. "Just to set the priorities. The expert here is Koffler, since he has been on the receiving end of a homemade SOI before." (A Signal Operating Instruction specified which one of a large number of available codes was to be used at specific times and dates.)
"I don't know what you're talking about, Pluto," Stecker said. "What's a 'homemade SOI?"
"In any SOI," Pluto said, "it is presumed both parties to the encryption processes have access to the same symbols...."
"Symbols? What symbols?" McCoy asked, confused.
"When 'A' equals 'X,"A' is the symbol for 'X.' OK?"
"Got it."
"Colonel," Pluto said, "to resume the answer I was giving before being so rudely interrupted by Lieutenant McCoy: Before we sent McCoy and Hart into Buka, we had to presume (a) that the Japanese were intercepting the radio traffic between here and Buka; (b) that the SOI that Koffler was using was no longer secure; and it followed, that (c) the Japanese were decrypting our traffic. It followed from that that if we used the existing SOI to inform Buka when and where we were going to land McCoy and Hart on Buka, we would also be informing the Japanese. So we had to get Koffler a new SOI-which meant a homemade SOI."
"How did you do that?" Stecker asked. Hon waved at Second Lieutenant Moore.
"We devised a simple code, Colonel, using symbols known to both us and the Coastwatchers on Buka, but not to the Japanese," Moore explained. "Spe-cifically, we used some-rather intimate-biographical data."
"And that worked, Koffler, right?" Pluto asked.
"It worked. We had a hell of a hard time figuring some of it out, but it worked."
"What does that mean, 'intimate biographical data'?" Stecker asked.
"Take a look at these, Colonel," Moore said, as he dug in his briefcase and came up with a thin sheaf of three-by-five-inch cards.
He walked around the table to Stecker and laid the cards before Stecker. Koffler got up and went to Stecker; and after a moment, so did McCoy and Sessions. A moment later they were all looking over Stecker's shoulder.
"The first card is the first paragraph of the message we sent to Koffler," Moore explained. "We used the old code, because we didn't want to admit to the Japanese we knew they had broken it."
USE AS SIMPLE SUBSTITUTION X JULIETS NAME X ROMBOS NAME X WHAT SHE THOUGHT HE HAD WHEN THEY MET X NAME OF TEST X RE-SULT OF TEST X
"What's this Romeo and Juliet business?" Stecker asked.
Pluto turned from helping himself to a cup of coffee.
"As we understood it, Colonel," he said, dry amusement in his thick Bos-ton/MIT accent, "the great romance between Lieutenant Howard-Romeo- and Juliet-Lieutenant (j.g.) Barbara Cotter, of the Navy Nurse Corps-began at the Navy Hospital, San Diego, when he went for a blood test. The Marine Corps wanted to make sure he did not have syphilis before they made him an officer. Since Miss Cotter, to whom he went to be tested, did not at first know the purpose of the Wasserman test, she treated him accordingly. As a social pariah, so to speak. But Love At First Sight triumphed in the end."
Stecker laughed.
"Really?"
"We believed it was an occasion he would remember," Pluto said.
"What you do for simple substitution," Moore went on, "is write the symbols, without spaces, in a line." He exposed the second three-by-five card. "Under a line of numbers from which the decimal digit after the first nine digits has been dropped."
12345678901234567890123456789012345678
BARBARAJOSEPHSYPHILISWASSERMANNEGATIVE
"OK," Stecker said.
"Card Three is the simple substitution encrypted message," Moore said,
and flipped it over.
18X19X09X37X11
15X23X08X09X11
01X02X03X04X05
06X07X23X31X05
"Card Four shows the decryption," Moore said, and flipped the last card over. "It was obviously of a personal nature."
18x19x09x37x11
I 1 o v e
15x23x08x09x11
y a j o e
01x02x03x04x05
b a r b a
06x07x23x31x05
r a a n a
10x23x28x32x10
S A M E S
35x38x37x38x01
T E V E B
02x12x13x30x38
A P H N E
"So I see," Stecker said, smiling.
"What we're going to try to do here today is set up the same sort of thing to communicate with General Fertig," Pluto said. "So that we can let him know to expect the people from the OSS, and possibly-General Pickering wants to talk about this to Commander Feldt and Colonel DePress before he decides-when and where they will land from the submarine."
"OK," Stecker said.
"There's an additional problem here," Pluto said. "We only have 'inti-mate' personal data on General Fertig himself. We have virtually nothing on the Army officers with him. Not only were their records apparently destroyed at the time of surrender, but any dependents are now either dead or interned. In any event, they are not available to help-as Mrs. Fertig is in Colorado. In the presumption that the Japanese will break our simple substitution rather quickly, we are reluctant to use more of General Fertig's personal data than we absolutely have to. If we do, the Japanese will be able to build a dossier on him we don't want them to have."
"What about the Marines?" Stecker asked.
"We have their names..." Pluto said.
"Right here," Moore chimed in, dipping into his briefcase again.
"... but they're not of much use," Pluto continued. "With the exception of the pilot, they're all former enlisted members of the Fourth Marines. All unmarried, according to the Marine Corps in Washington, and all of them have listed their official home of record as 'c/o Headquarters, USMC, Washington, D.C.' I found that a little strange."
"You do that, Pluto, if you don't have a home," McCoy said. "Or you have a home you'd just as soon forget."
Hon had the sudden insight that the official records of Lieutenant K. R. McCoy listed 'c/o Headquarters, USMC, Washington, D.C as his home of record.
"What about the pilot?" Stecker asked. "They generally keep more ex-tensive records on officers than they do on enlisted men."
"Unmarried," Moore interjected, consulting a sheet of paper. "His par-ents are dead. He listed his next of kin as an aunt. ONI contacted her. She hasn't seen him in ten years."
"You have the names of the enlisted men?" McCoy asked. "I used to be in the Fourth."
"So did I," Colonel Stecker said, and put out his hand.
Moore handed him two typewritten sheets of paper. He ran his finger down the names on one page, and then turned to the second.
"I know this character," he said. "Professional private. Hell of a Marine twenty-eight days a month. Then forget him for three days until he's blown his pay."
"Do you think he has a family?" Pluto asked.
"No." Stecker chuckled wryly. "And I really doubt if he'd remember me."
He handed the sheets of paper to McCoy.
Almost immediately, McCoy said, "I know this guy. Mean sonofabitch."
"You're sure, Ken?"
"There aren't very many Marines named Percy," McCoy said, and then his memory cleared. "Christ, if I'm right, this guy worked for Banning after I left China." He raised his eyes to Pluto. "How quick could we get an answer from Banning if we asked him?"
"Using the special channel, we can have an answer in twenty-four hours, maybe less," Moore said.
"How often are we in contact with Fertig?" McCoy asked.
"Once a day in the morning," Pluto said. "But I think they monitor all the time. You want to try to call them?"
"I want to ask Banning if this is the same Percy," McCoy said. "And try to talk to... Percy."
"I'm sure General Pickering will authorize use of the special channel,"
Colonel Stecker said.
"You mean now, Ken?" Pluto asked. "Before we go on with this?"
McCoy didn't answer. He walked back to his seat, picked up his pencil, and began to print characters on the pad of paper.
W E B Griffin - Corp 07 - Behind the Lines Page 33