The Fighting Agents Part 13

"When MacArthur ordered me from Luzon to Corregidor, I gave my wrist.w.a.tch 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 j.a.panese captors told them to say."

"There is no way the j.a.panese 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 G.o.d d.a.m.n 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 have a radio," Roosevelt said. "You talked to them." a radio," Roosevelt said. "You talked to them."

"They need an encryption device," Whittaker said. "So the j.a.ps 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 a.s.s 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 p.i.s.sed 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 gla.s.s up to be refilled.

Donovan pushed the servant call b.u.t.ton twice, then went to refill Roosevelt's gla.s.s.

4.

OSS LONDON STATION BERKELEY SQUARE LONDON, ENGLAND 5 FEBRUARY 1943.

Helene B. Dancy, Captain, WAC (Women's Army Corps), U.S. Army, administrative a.s.sistant 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. Dougla.s.s'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 compa.s.sion. 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, 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. 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 'd.i.c.k,' " 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.

EXLAX FOUR PROCEEDING ALL WELL YACHTSMAN.

"Speaking to you both as your military superior, Captain, " Canidy said, "and as someone you know know has the Need-to-Know, have there been any developments in the Balkans I should know about?" 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 asked you for this. You had no choice but to give it to me." 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 OPPLAN [Operations Plan] here, or am I going to have to root around in the bas.e.m.e.nt? "

Capt. Dancy walked to a st.u.r.dy 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 Lahn, 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, multiwheeled 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 ident.i.ty doc.u.ments, 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 ca.n.a.l built under the auspices of Emperor Franz Josef of Austro-Hungary to transport coal from Pecs to the Danube.

The barge ca.n.a.l crossed the border between Hungary and Croatia (Yugoslavia) in a spa.r.s.ely populated region near Ben Manastir, and joined the Danube at Batina. Shortly before reaching Baka 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 sh.o.r.e of the Danube.

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

Canidy had a little trouble with the bland a.s.surances 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 Mihajlovi 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 of Metkovi on the Neretva River, fifteen miles from Neretljanski Ka.n.a.l, a sheltered, natural body of water that opened onto the Adriatic Sea. At Metkovi, Ex-Lax would be turned over to an agent of the British Special Operations Executive who would arrange for their transport by fis.h.i.+ng 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 transs.h.i.+pment 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.

Exlax will be transported from VII to Cairo, Malta, or such other final destination as the circ.u.mstances at the time dictate by U.S. aircraft. In the event this is impossible, Exlax will be evacuated from VII by Royal Navy submarine on a s.p.a.ce-available basis.

"You look deep in thought, Richard," David Bruce said as he came into the office, trailed by Lt. 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 Bosnia-Hercegovina? "

"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."