“A security squad is on its way up, Sir. We’ll dig it out for you.”
Spruance glanced around the stage, “Anything here we can’t afford to leave, Maynard?”
“I got most of it, but I wonder--”
“Sir. We should leave now, if you please, Sir?” The Marine propped the battle lantern on a projector table, its beam penetrating the tobacco smoke and throwing a ghostly hue through the auditorium's vastness.
“Oh, what the hell,” muttered Falkenberg.
“The exercise will do us good, gentlemen,” said Spruance. “Let's go.”
There was a collective groan. Nobody could keep up with Spruance who walked three miles a day. Muttering and grumbling, they passed through the door, following Spruance down the hall.
The double doors swung shut. With their voices trailing off, the auditorium fell into silence.
After a few seconds, a solitary figure slowly moved from behind the curtains. Dezhnev’s heart beat fast. He was taking a terrible chance. Sixty seconds at the most. He headed for the blackboard and swung the blanket over the top, exposing the chart. They hadn’t had time to take that.
His skin tingled as he read the casualty report in the lower left-hand corner. The Japanese had sunk three American cruisers and one Australian cruiser and one destroyer at Savo Island, not just two cruisers as Beria had supposed.
What else? He quickly replaced the blanket, walked to the table and scanned the notebooks scattered about. Falkenberg’s loose-leaf folder was atop something, he saw. Easing the folder aside, he saw that it was stamped TOP SECRET and labeled: TORPEDO FAILURES: MARK 13, MARK 14, MARK, 15. Quickly flipping pages, he noted columns of figures, some having a common label: Failure Rates. His heart skipped a beat when he saw that the torpedo failure rates exceeded sixty percent in some cases.
He checked his watch. Twenty two seconds.
Dezhnev kept browsing, wishing he’d brought his Minox. He tried to figure if--
“Sir?”
Dezhnev spun. Babcock!
“You forgot to write the date in, Sir. My chief is a stickler on dates. Could you--? Say, where is everybody?”
Dezhnev closed the report, grabbed his cane and thumped down the steps to Babcock. “They had to evacuate. I came back for my notes.” With a flourish, he scooped his hat off a seat. “We’d better go, too. Quick now.”
Babcock squinted as he drew close, “Holy Toledo. Aren’t you...?”
Dezhnev smiled at the kid with the pimples. “That’s right, er, Babcock? I was backstage picking my notes off the floor when the lights went kapoof! Let’s go.”
Together, they walked up the aisle. Dezhnev exaggerated his limp, letting Babcock get a little ahead. His grip tightened on his cane as his mind raced. Should he do it?
They went through the first set of doors and into the empty lobby. Babcock leading the way, walking ahead to hold the outer door for Dezhnev.
Dezhnev was going to raise his cane and whack Babcock across the throat but for some reason, hesitated. Just then, the door slipped from Babcock’s hand.
“Oh, sorry Sir.” Babcock fumbled and re-opened the door, letting Dezhnev through.
Dezhnev squinted in the half light. “Your head’s still bleeding. Come on in here and let me fix it for you.” He walked toward the men’s room door.
Babcock dabbed the cut with a handkerchief. “Later, Sir. Gotta run.” He quickly walked down the hall and through the fire exit at the other end.
Damnit! Dezhnev banged open the men’s room door with an open palm and walked in. What the hell to do? He stood against the marble wall to think, the sounds of the City drifting through an open window.
“Lieutenant Dezhnev?” DeWitt’s Texas accent caromed through the hallway.
Shit.
“Hello?” DeWitt’s voice echoed.
Do something. “In here, Major,” Dezhnev yelled, unzipping his pants. He backed into one of the open stalls and flushed the toilet.
DeWitt rushed in, with Ingram just behind. “Thought we’d lost you.” he shouted.
The toilet gurgled convincingly as Dezhnev stood before Major Otis DeWitt and pasted on his best sheepish grin. His voice echoed on the black and white tiles as he pulled up his trousers. “Looks like I got caught with my pants down.”
“Oh, damn! Sorry,” wheezed DeWitt. He leaned against the wall out of breath.
Ingram said, “We were worried as hell. Got down to the fourth floor before we realized you weren’t with us.”
Dezhnev raised his eyebrows. “What’s going on?”
DeWitt replied, “It’s this damned building. Load’s always tripping out. They gave orders to evacuate. You never can tell when--”
The lights went on.
“Well, how do ya like that?” DeWitt jammed his hands on his hips.
Dezhnev finished arranging his clothes, walked to the mirror and ran a comb through his hair.
Ingram led the way into the hall.
DeWitt followed was the last and asked, “Elevator, anybody?”
“If it’s all the same to you, Major, I’d rather not risk another power failure today. Besides, I need some exercise.” Dezhnev walked through the doors marked ‘EXIT’ and started shuffling down the stairwell thankful this was the West stairwell. Babcock had taken the East stairwell, making it unlikely he would have run into DeWitt or Ingram when they ran back up. But still, it nagged at his mind. Had Babcock seen anything in the auditorium’s darkness? How long had he been standing there?
DeWitt walked through the door. “You all right with that cane?”
“You will be surprised.” Dezhnev began to hobble his way down, supporting his left side with his left arm, doing fairly well. As DeWitt and Ingram clattered behind, he still wondered what to do about Babcock.
At eight o’clock that evening, the Soviet duty radio operator in Moscow Center took traffic from the San Francisco consulate. One message, double encoded, was routed to Dzerzhinskiy Square and the Lubyanka Prison, where it found its way to Vasiliy Laptev's office on the second floor. Laptev was slender, totally bald, and wore the green flashes of an NKVD lieutenant colonel on his dark olive uniform.
Having been up since five, Laptev was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to go home. Yet here was a message to decrypt. And his staff, knowing he would be irritable at day’s end, stepped quickly past his open door with exaggerated purpose. It took three tries spinning the safe’s dials to open the damned door and extract the code-books. Laptev smashed the volumes on his desk and began his decryption in earnest. Twenty-five minutes later, he was finished. He bristled when he saw that it was from Starshiy-Leytenant Sergei Zenit, the man forever contaminated with the Dzhurma fiasco.
No matter. There was business to conduct. Time to see the man. He un-buckled his holster, hung it on a peg behind the door, grabbed his cap and walked out, two privates in tow, their uniforms trimmed in the same green NKVD insignia, PPSh sub-machine guns slung over their shoulders.
It took three minutes to walk the distance to the East wing of the Lubyanka. Eventually, they entered a large lobby with a shiny green linoleum floor. Two guards admitted Laptev and his entourage through double doors and into a small carpeted anteroom.
As usual, Karachek sat at his desk, stamping papers with an enormous rubber stamp. Karachek looked at the guards, then back to Laptev.
Laptev turned and excused his guards with a wave of his hand. “Top secret KOMET message from San Francisco.”
“I see.” Karachek picked up a phone and dialed. After a moment he looked up. “He’ll see you. Are you armed?”
It was plain Laptev wasn’t wearing his holster. “No.”
Karachek’ s eyes lingered on Laptev for a long moment. “Very well.”
Laptev knocked on the door and was admitted by Dmitry, a rail-thin, pock-marked man, who wore a dark suit with a plain yellow tie. As Laptev stepped in, Dmitry kept his eyes on every move Laptev made. Compared to Laptev’s modest office in the West wing, this one was eno
rmous. It was perhaps eight meters square, painted a pale yellow, its four-meter high ceiling trimmed with scrolled crown moldings and finished in a light green pastel. Victorian furniture, Persian rugs, and original French art was tastefully arranged in the room. To his left was an ornate partner’s desk while directly ahead, a log burned in a two meter high fireplace. Casting a yellowish-gold glow, it was the room’s only light, except for a small reading lamp on one end of the couch.
And there sat Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, NKVD Commissar, second only to Premier Josef Stalin, reading from a thick folder, pages tumbling about him and onto the floor. Beria took his time, more papers scattering to the floor as he sipped coffee from a fine china cup, while the fire crackled and Dmitry’s eyes drilled though the back of Laptev’s head. As long as Laptev had known Beria, the Georgia-born man outwardly seemed quiet and inner-directed. He never smoked or drank, and his voice was a soft baritone. He stood at five-ten, weighed nearly two hundred, was balding, and this evening wore a light brown suit with a neutral tie.
Beria turned an oval face to Laptev, displaying deep-set light-blue eyes shielded by rimless, gold-framed glasses. He held out a hand, palm up. “You have a VOSTOK message?”
“No, Sir. Just a KOMET message from San Francisco.” Laptev handed the flimsy over.
“Ah, yes.” Beria adjusted his glasses and read:
TOP SECRET ---- OPERATION KOMET ---- TOP SECRET
TO: L. P BERIA
FROM: S. ZENIT, KAPT3R, SAN FRANCISCO
19 AUGUST, 1942
DEZHNEV REPORTS CHIEFS OF STAFF CONFERENCE PENETRATED. BE ADVISED: USN LOSSES BATTLE OF SAVO ISLAND THREE, REPEAT THREE CRUISERS, I.E.: ASTORIA, VINCENNES, QUINCY, AND DESTROYER JARVIS. AUSTRALIANS ALSO LOST HEAVY CRUISER CANBERRA. JAPANESE TORPEDOES FAR MORE SUCCESSFUL THAN WE BELIEVED. ALSO, AMERICANS HAVING MAJOR TORPEDO FAILURE PROBLEMS. MESSAGE ENDS.
ZENIT
Beria looked over his shoulder. “Dezhnev, the one from Bykovo?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Make sure Tatekawa gets this in its entirety.” General Yoshitsugu Tatekawa was the Japanese Ambassador to Russia.
“Yes, Sir.”
“Any word on VOSTOK?”
“No, Sir.”
“We may have to put Zenit on that one too. Think about it.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Beria picked up a document then pivoted his whole body, his eyes boring into Laptev, “Didn’t we pick Dezhnev for VOSTOK West Coast?”
“Yes, Sir.”
Beria kept his eyes on Laptev for a whole three seconds. The he returned to his reading. “I see.”
Laptev headed for the door, avoiding Dmitri’s eyes. Tomorrow, he would think about Zenit. Tonight, he would sleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
21 August, 1942
Ramona, California
The afternoon’s heat embraced Ingram as he drove the deep sky-blue convertible coupe into the filling station. Pulling the brake handle, he stepped out, noticing the thermometer dial in the station’s window read 98 degrees. He'd been on the road since yesterday, the trip to Northeastern San Diego County taking far longer than he had planned. Even so, he took solace that the heat was dry, not the humidity-soaked, near-saturated hell of the Philippines in summer. And as he looked around, it seemed the only thing alive here was a long-haired sheep-dog snoozing under the shade of an oak tree, forty feet away.
A stooped attendant walked out and leaned against the doorway. “Nice jalopy. Cadillac?”
“Packard.”
“Oh, yeah? And lookie that: four doors. You don’t see many of them around. Brand new, huh?”
“Actually, I think it’s a 1940.”
“Ain’t it yours?”
The car belonged to Oliver Toliver III, a born-to-the-purple shipmate. “A friend.”
The attendant stepped out and walked around the car, running a gnarled hand along the fenders. In greasy coveralls, the scarecrow-shaped man looked like a panhandler in B Westerns. His name was stitched above the pocket: Ed. He stooped, squinted at the license plate, then took out a pencil stub and wrote the number, 92 M 288 on the back of a match box. Then Ed rose and noting a sticker on the rear window. “All the way from San Francisco, eh?” It sounded like an accusation.
“Yes.”
“Fill 'er up?”
“Please.”
Ed was soon pumping gas, checking the oil, and wiping the Packard's windows. After being paid, he gave change. “Anything else? How ‘bout the tires?”
“No thanks. But say, how do I find the Durand Ranch?” Ingram blurted. He wondered if he shouldn’t turn around and head back to San Francisco. But he’d put this off for so long.
“Which one?” Ed smacked his lips and spat thick juice into the dust.
“I don’t know.” He opened the top two buttons on his shirt, wishing he hadn't come. A crooked finger pointed down the road. “Frank Durand's spread is that way. He raises avocados.” Then his thumb jabbed in the opposite direction. “Lamar Durand is back there.”
Ingram waited. Finally, a fly buzzed at his neck. In frustration, he slapped at it saying, “What's he raise?”
“Lamar Durand raises alfalfa.” Ed’s eyes narrowed.
“Where does Helen Durand live?”
“Ooooooh.” Ed stepped away from the Packard and looked it up and down. Hands on his hips. “Who wants to know?”
Damnit! He snapped open his billfold and flashed his U.S. Navy ID card. “Lieutenant Todd Ingram. War Department. Official business. “Then he looked from side to side, lowered his voice and covered his mouth. “Office of Naval Intelligence. She's been helping us out and now we need to talk to her mom and dad.”
Ed's mouth dropped. “You mean spies?” he almost shouted.
“Shhhhh.”
Ed’s voice dropped obligingly. “Where's your uniform?”
“How can I catch spies if the enemy sees me walking down the street in dress blues?”
Ed pondered that for a moment. “If it's spies you're looking for, you otta check on old Steiner over there.” He swung his arm and lined up a forefinger finger on a shop across the street where a sign announced, Steiner's Clock Repair. “I swear, the bastard's sending messages to them Nazi’s every day. Look at the damned place. Shades all drawn. Probably in there right now with Gerta takin' notes and tapping out code to that there Schicklegruber--”
“Helen?” He pasted on his best smile.
Ed was unstoppable. After Steiner, he ranted on about neighbors Betz, Bugg, Frankenberg, and Althoff, spies all of them, whose daily actions, indeed their drawing of each breath, were activities gravely prejudicial to the security of the United States of America. Then Ed’s eyes narrowed again. “Say, what’s your name?”
“I told you. Todd Ingram.”
“Mmmmm.” Ed rubbed his chin.
“It’s English. My ancestors sailed with Sir Francis Drake.” Ingram had no idea who his ancestors consorted with.
That seemed to satisfy Ed, for he took a deep breath and gave Ingram directions to the Durand Ranch which turned out to be the one where Frank and Katy lived; the one who raised avocados.
“Helen's been gone for near two years,” Ed added as Ingram got into the Packard.
“I know.”
“Hold on.” With a conspiratorial wink, Ed dashed in his little office, rattled around for a moment, then came out with a frosted coke. Popping the cap off, he handed it to Ingram. “On the house, Sonny. Just keep rounding up them Nazis.” His arm swept across Ramona's main drag toward Steiner’s clock repair.
“Thanks.” Ingram took the Coke gratefully, jammed the Packard into gear and turned around. Soon he was bumping down a potholed single-lane road with the asphalt giving way to dirt. The afternoon had grown hotter, and Ingram mopped his brow as the coupe bumped and thumped over the washer-board lane. But the neatly planted trees were tall and green and they seemed, in a way, to suck the heat out of the air, and there was a sweet scent, although he couldn't place it. Soon he pulled to a d
rive-way where the mail box read ‘Durand.’ The house was a low, brick, rambling ranch style with a long porch surrounded by walnut trees, their trunks painted white. A combination work-shed and garage stood off to the side, empty, its doors gaping open.
As soon as he pulled up, a woman walked out and stood on the porch. In her late forties or early fifties, her hair was dark-ebony and grey-streaked. Yet her face was well-defined and she had Helen’s eyes, with the same crinkles in the corners that conveyed humor and patience and a tinge of temper. She wore a simple short-sleeve dress with an apron and held a long, wooden spoon, mashed potatoes clinging to it.
He stepped from the Packard. “Hello, I’m Todd Ingram.” He tried to appear relaxed, but with another look at the woman, Ingram felt light-headed again. She looked so much like Helen.
“Navy?”
“Well, er, yes.” Amazing. Helen had just about said the same thing to him when they’d first met on Corregidor.
“You’ve come about Helen,” the woman grabbed her wrist.
“How did you know?”
“She’s my daughter. I’m Kate Durand.”
This is going badly, thought Ingram. “She’s alive,” he blurted.
“I know that.” She closed her eyes for a moment and exhaled. “But I’ll tell you. We’ve been worried sick since Corregidor fell.”
My God. She really does know. “She’s fine. She really is.”
Kate walked up and stood close, her eyes searching. “How do you know?”
“I was there. I was with her.” Ingram felt like taking Kate into his arms.
“Thank God. Then...then, where is she?”
“Mindanao.”
“What’s that?”
“Big island in the Southern Philippines. About five hundred miles south of Corregidor.”
“Oh.” She paused for a moment. “The Japs have that too, don’t they?”
Ingram stepped in the shade of the porch and rubbed a hand over his face. “I’m afraid so. But she’s fine. She’s with the resistance.”
“You mean she’s living in the weeds?”
A CODE FOR TOMORROW: A Ingram Novel (The Todd Ingram Series Book 2) Page 6
