W E B Griffin - Men at War 4 - The Fighting Agents

by The Fighting Agents(Lit)

  "Uncle Frank, I talked on the radio this afternoon with two of my men."

  "What do you mean, your' men

  "When MacArthur ordered me from Luzon to Corregidor, I gave my wristwatch to my sergeant, a guy named George Withers. And I told him when Luzon fell, he should make his way, him and the Philippine Scouts I had, to Mindanao. I talked to him and to one of the Philippine Scouts this afternoon.

  They're on Mindanao and waiting for help."

  "And they said what their Japanese captors told them to say."

  "There is no way the Japanese could know what they used to call me and I used to call them," Whittaker said.

  "They're on Mindanao, and they're free, and God damn it, we have a duty to help them."

  "You mean, send them the million dollars?"

  "And a radio, and quinine, and ammunition," Whittaker said.

  "They have a radio," Roosevelt said.

  "You talked to them."

  "They need an encryption device," Whittaker said.

  "So the Japs won't be able to listen in."

  "Bill?" the President asked.

  "We need to send somebody in there who can separate fact from fantasy, and then come out armed with facts on which further decisions can be made," Donovan said.

  "The basic fact of guerrilla warfare is that one guerrilla can tie down at least seven troops...."

  "So you keep telling me," Roosevelt said.

  "And you think Jimmy is the man to go to the Philippines, have a look around, and then come out?"

  "Yes," Donovan said.

  "And since the Japanese are listening to the guerrilla radio, and since there is no way we can code what we are sending, how do you propose to let the people in the Philippines know where and when he's coming? With the Japanese listening in, I mean?"

  "We're working on that, Franklin," Donovan said.

  "The translation of which is/we hope to think of something'?"

  Donovan didn't reply.

  "And you're willing to put your neck in the noose again, Jimmy?" Roosevelt asked.

  "Being very cold-blooded about it," Whittaker said, "I seem to be the round peg for that round hole."

  "You already escaped once from the Philippines," Roosevelt said.

  "How often do you think you can do that?"

  "I hear that Jimmy nearly got himself blown away during the Makin Island Raid," Whittaker replied.

  '"Blown away?"" Roosevelt said.

  "Interesting euphemism." It was obvious that he was making his decision.

  "All right," he said finally.

  "Do it. I'll avoid telling George Marshall as long as I can. And I don't think we should tell Douglas MacArthur until you come out."

  "Thank you, Mr. President," Donovan said.

  Roosevelt was not through.

  "And come out you will. Jimmy. You understand that? You will go in there, and have a look around, and come out. You may consider that a direct order."

  "I suppose that means I'll have to go freeze my ass learning how to get into a rubber boat from a submarine?" Whittaker asked.

  Roosevelt and Donovan chuckled.

  "Now we get down to price," Whittaker said.

  "I have a price."

  "Everybody else seems to," Roosevelt said dryly.

  "What's yours?"

  "Cynthia Chenowith is my control," Whittaker said.

  "Reporting directly to Colonel Donovan."

  "I think I see a hook in there," Roosevelt said.

  "What's all that about?"

  "Cynthia was the control for the Kolwezi operation," Whittaker said.

  "Cynthia is going through the agents' course," Donovan said.

  "That runs against Jimmy's notions of the proper role of women."

  Roosevelt chuckled.

  "Mine, too," he said.

  "Eleanor, maybe. But Cynthia?"

  Whittaker laughed.

  "That would be your decision, of course. Bill," the President said.

  "Okay," Donovan said.

  "You win, Jimmy. I think she'll be furious, Jimmy, but that's your worry."

  "She'll be alive," Whittaker said simply.

  "I would much rather have her pissed and alive than happy, heroic, and dead."

  "Are you getting hungry, Franklin?" Donovan asked.

  "Or would you rather have some more frozen gin?"

  "Why does it have to be either/or?

  "Roosevelt asked, holding his glass up to be refilled.

  Donovan pushed the servant call button twice, then went to refill Roosevelt's glass.

  [FOUR]

  Helene B. Dancy, Captain, WAC (Women's Army Corps), U.S. Army, administrative assistant to London Chief of Station David Bruce, was of two minds about Richard Canidy. When she didn't see him for a while, she began to mirror her boss's opinion of him: that Canidy wasn't a team player, that he was often doing things--going off with Capt. Douglass's son as a fighter pilot was the most recent example--that brought into question the wisdom of his having as much authority and autonomy as he did.

  But when she was with him, most of her disapproval seemed to vanish. It was absurd to think that anything could happen between them--Helene B. Dancy had been commissioned in the WAC from her job as executive secretary to the senior vice president for real estate, the Prudential Insurance Company, thirty-six hours before she turned thirty and became ineligible because of her age--but she privately admitted that Richard Canidy was the most desirable male she had ever seen. And when she'd been with The Rock, she'd seen a large number of desirable men.

  She thought you could tell a lot about a man by his eyes, and when she looked into Canidy's eyes, she saw gentleness and strength and compassion.

  And when she did that, she felt about nineteen years old.

  "Good morning, Dancy," Canidy greeted her.

  "What's the latest fire from the dragon's mouth all about?"

  "Good morning, Major Canidy," Capt. Dancy said.

  "Well, have I done something new, or is he still mad from the last time?"

  "You really did put him on a spot with the Air Corps, Major," Capt. Dancy said.

  "I know," Canidy said, smiling at her.

  Helene thought he had very nice teeth, which gave him a very nice smile.

  "White is black, up is down," Canidy went on, "and I am supposed to apologize for taking a shot at the bad guys."

  There is, Helene thought, a certain undeniable logic to what he says.

  You'd think they'd want to give him a medal for shooting down enemy planes, not be furious with him.

  "Major Canidy," she said chastisingly.

  "I let all the pretty girls call me "Dick,"" he said.

  "You are impossible," she said.

  "This is supposed to be a military organization."

  Canidy's face registered great surprise.

  "You're kidding! "he said.

  "Mr. Bruce is down in crypto," she said.

  "You are to wait."

  "And you're not going to tell me what I've done wrong, are you, Dancy?"

  "No," she said, unable to resist smiling back at him.

  "But it may have something to do with this."

  She opened her drawer and took from it a top secret cover sheet.

  As he took it from her, she said softly, "If it doesn't come up, it would probably be better if you didn't mention I'd shown you that."

  Canidy raised the cover sheet and read the partially decrypted message.

  Even if the Germans intercepted the message and succeeded in decrypting the text, they would not know the meaning of the code words.

  EX LAX FOUR PROCEEDING ALL WELL YACHTSMAN

  "Speaking to you both as your military superior, Captain," Canidy said, "and as someone you know has the Need-to-Know, have there been any developments in the Balkans I should know about?"

  Shaking her head and smiling, Capt. Dancy said, "You have it in your hand."

  "Well, now you're off the hook with the dragon," Canidy said.
>
  "I asked you for this. You had no choice but to give it to me."

  She smiled at him. She thought that was nice of him.

  "Have you got a copy of the OP PLAN [Operations Plan] here, or am I going to have to root around in the basement?"

  Capt. Dancy walked to a sturdy safe from which, quite unnecessarily, for the door was ajar, hung a sign reading "Open" and took from it a manila folder with top secret stamped on it.

  Canidy unfolded a map. On it was drawn in grease pencil Eric Fulmar's route into Germany, and his escape route. Along it were marked, in Roman numerals, the stages of the route. There was a I at Marburg an der Latin, in Germany.

  There was a II beside Vienna on the map, and a III beside Budapest. The fourth leg of the route ended at Pecs, in southwest Hungary.

  Pecs was the site of the Batthyany family coal mines. Most of the coal in Hungary is low-grade "brown" coal. The mines at Pecs produced a high-grade anthracite that for hundreds of years had contributed to the Batthyany wealth.

  Now it was of value because one of the heavy, multi wheeled Tatra trucks that had carried bagged anthracite to Budapest (including, through the influence of Helmut von Heurten-Mitnitz, some to Batthyany Palace) had returned to Pecs with Eric Fulmar and Professor Dyer and his daughter concealed in a box under a stack of coal bags.

  Professor Dyer was a physicist. There was a tenuous connection between physics the science and physics as in laxative. Hence, "Ex-Lax." In the planning stages of the operation, when they were picking code names, David Bruce had reluctantly admitted that the Germans would probably be baffled by references to a laxative, although he privately thought Canidy's suggestion was one more indication that Canidy was not as serious as he should be.

  "Yachtsman" was an OSS agent in Hungary. He was a first-generation American from Hamtramck, Michigan, who had learned Hungarian from his mother.

  Equipped with the appropriate forged identity documents, he was employed with relatives as a deckhand on a Danube River barge. It permitted him to move around the country and when necessary to disappear from the barge for a couple of hours, or days.

  Completely decoded, Yachtsman's message meant that Fulmar and the Dyers had made it from Budapest safely to Pecs, and were proceeding to V This leg of the route was by barge.

  "Ex-Lax "would travel down the barge canal built under the auspices of Emperor Franz Josef of Austro-Hungary to transport coal from Pecs to the Danube.

  The barge canal crossed the border between Hungary and Croatia (Yugoslavia) in a sparsely populated region near Ben Manastir, and joined the Danube at Batina. Shortly before reaching Backa Palanka, where the Danube turned east toward Belgrade in another desolate unpopulated area, there would be a signal--in response to lights arranged in a special way on the barge--from the western shore of the Danube.

  The barge would then move close enough to the bank for Fulmar and the Dyers to jump off and pass into the hands of "Postman," the senior of four OSS agents with the guerrilla forces of Colonel Draza Mihajlovic late of the Royal Yugoslav Army.

  Canidy had a little trouble with the bland assurances by radio of Postman--an American of Yugoslavian parentage who had literally been a mail carrier in the States--that this leg of the trip could be safely and conveniently accomplished by truck. According to Postman, the trucks (and the diesel fuel to run them) had been captured by Mihajlovic from the Germans, and the Colonel's warning system was so effective that he ran them up and down forest and mountain roads of Croatia and Bosnia and Hercegovina on regular supply and transport missions as if the Germans weren't there and actively looking for him.

  VI was the town ofMetkovic on the Neretva River, fifteen miles from Neretljanski Kanal, a sheltered, natural body of water that opened onto the Adriatic Sea. At Metkovic, Ex-Lax would be turned over to an agent of the British Special Operations Executive who would arrange for their transport by fishing boat to the island of Vis, VII. The SOE agent's code name, "Saint Peter," was another Canidy suggestion to which David Bruce had somewhat uneasily agreed.

  Vis was entirely in British hands, though the Germans, who made periodic sweeps of the island, did not suspect it. There was a hidden wharf, onto which supplies could be off-loaded from submarines for transshipment to the mainland.

  And, between two hills, there was a 4,900-foot runway. A stream flowing across the field seemed to entirely discount the notion that the long valley could be used as a landing strip. But the stream had been altered. There was a twenty-yard-wide stretch where the water was only a foot deep. To observers both on the ground and in the air, it looked for all intents and purposes to be just an area of turbulent water.

  Exiax will be transported from VII to Cairo, Malta, or such other final destination as the circumstances at the time dictate by U.S. aircraft. In the event this is impossible, Exiax will be evacuated from VII by Royal Havy submarine on a space-available basis.

  "You look deep in thought, Richard," David Bruce said as he came into the office, trailed by It. Col. Edmund T. Stevens, his deputy. Bruce and Stevens

  were tall and erect and well-tailored. There was a West Point ring on Stevens's hand. He had resigned from the Army before the war and had been in England when the war broke out, running his wife's food and wine import-export business.

  "Either of you ever collect stamps when you were kids?" Canidy asked.

  "Ever have any from BosniaHercegovina?"

  "I don't really recall," Bruce said impatiently.

  "They had some that were triangular," Canidy said, "that intrigued me."

  "I remember those," Col. Stevens said.

  "Come on in, Richard," Bruce said.

  "I fear we are about to have another of our arguments."

  "What have I done now?" Canidy asked, folding the map and handing it to Capt. Dancy.

  "I presume you have the Yachtsman message?" Bruce asked, after he'd taken a look at the folder.

  "Captain Dancy gave it to me with great reluctance," Canidy said, "only after I threatened to write her name and phone number in phone booths in pubs all over town."

  "Major Canidy," Capt. Dancy said, "you're impossible." But she was smiling.

  Bruce closed his office door after they were inside.

  "It isn't what you've done... unless, of course, there's something I don't know about yet... it's what you are planning to do."

  "What would that be?"

  "Go to Vis to pick up Ex-Lax yourself," Bruce said.

  "Have you made up your mind about that, or are you open to my reasoning?"

  "I'm always willing to listen," Bruce said with a smile, "even when you make it difficult. But this, you should be forewarned, is coloring my thinking."

  He took a sheet of yellow foolscap from his desk drawer and handed it to Canidy.

  ROUTIME FROM OSS WASH DC FOR OS$ LOMDOM PERSONAL BRUCE

  PLEASE RELAY CAMIDY QUOTE COMGRATULATIOKfS FROM DOUBLE KILL

  UNQUOTE STOP PRBSOMB HE-HAD REASONS FOR BEING WHERE HE WAS

  STOP REGARDS STOP DOMOVAM

  "Looks like he's giving me the benefit of the doubt," Canidy said.

  "In my experience, the Colonel is not at all subtle. That message could just as easily have read, "Ground the sonofabitch.""

  Stevens chuckled, earning himself a dirty look from Bruce.

  "Grounding you might make sense, Richard," Stevens said.

  "From this side of the desk, perceptions are a little different."

  "The arguments I made are still valid," Canidy argued.

  "And to refresh your memory they were (a) that the Air Corps is already bitching about our photo recon missions; and (b) that laying on a mission we would have had to fight over would have called unwanted attention to the Fulmar Werke."

  "So are my counter arguments that you're pretty far up in the scheme of things for us to lose you if you get shot down," Bruce said.

  "But that's over.

  What you have to do now is convince me there are reasons why we should not just tell the Eighth A
ir Force what we need, and have them do it. Or even why it is necessary to bring Ex-Lax out by air at all. Why shouldn't they come out on a British submarine?"