The Spymasters: A Men at War Novel
Page 24
“The General asked me to offer you his warm personal regards,” Owen said officiously. “And this.”
“Thank you,” Fine replied, taking the envelope.
Fine began to sink back into his seat. He did not bother opening the envelope but instead casually tossed it on his desk. He absently motioned for Owen to take the chair before his desk.
Owen’s expression made it clear that he did not want to do anything at the suggestion of a lowly captain, but reluctantly he took the seat and somewhat awkwardly crossed his long legs.
“The General,” Owen then said, snootily, nodding at the envelope, “asked me to hand deliver to you the details of the bombing plans. He’s concerned, of course, about your station there.”
Stan Fine, more out of hunger than thought, automatically reached down and picked up his sandwich. Then he made eye contact with the disapproving Owen.
“Forgive me,” Fine said. “I should have asked if I could interest you in some lunch. We have a very nice kitchen and a terrific chef. I’m told that this tuna was swimming this morning. Now it’s lightly charcoal-grilled—I like my tuna rare—and delicious.”
Fine did not think it necessary to share the information that the fish had arrived at Dellys aboard one of Francisco Nola’s boats—and with three members of Nola’s wife’s family just smuggled out of Sicily. The family members were being interviewed at OSS Dellys.
Fine then saw the look on Owen’s face and wondered if the idea of rare fish did not meet with Owen’s palate.
“They can of course prepare it medium or better—”
“Thank you kindly,” Owen quickly interrupted. “It looks delightful but I am off to luncheon”—he pulled back his left sleeve and checked his wristwatch, which Stan Fine saw he oddly wore with the face down, underneath his wrist, the clasp on top, and decided that was simply another example of Owen’s pretentiousness—“in ten minutes, so you will understand my having to leave momentarily.”
“Of course,” Fine said.
He thought, Thankfully.
Owen nodded again at the envelope and said, “You’re not curious about the plans?”
“No, not immediately. Should I be? I’ll get to them shortly, I’m sure.”
Stan Fine took a big bite of his sandwich and chewed appreciatively.
“But the General was concerned about the station.”
“The station?” Fine said, trying to swallow. “Which station would that be?”
“Your intel station on Corsica.”
“Ah. You’re referring to Pearl Harbor.”
“Yes, that’s the one. The General is quite pleased with it. If you should have any intel from there for the General, I of course would be pleased to personally carry it to him.”
I’m sure you would, you brownnosing sonofabitch.
And, if it meets whatever you think your needs are, you’ll take the credit for it.
If it doesn’t, you’ll see that it’s quietly tossed.
Never mind that my agent is risking his life every goddamn minute while you’re “off to luncheon.”
“I do appreciate that, Colonel Owen,” Fine said. “But right now, nothing. As you know, that could change at any moment.”
Fine took another healthy bite of his grilled tuna sandwich.
“Yes, of course,” Owen said, looking somewhat uncomfortably at Fine’s sandwich, “at any moment.”
Lieutenant Colonel J. Warren Owen then stood.
Fine stayed seated and looked up at him from his sandwich.
“Well, then,” Owen said, “one other thing before I leave. Any chance you might know about a station called ‘Saturn’ or maybe ‘Mars’? Apparently there is rumor that one or both exist, either on or near Sicily. I know that after all the General has said about Sicily being off-limits, it couldn’t be one of ours.”
Fine chewed and swallowed.
Oh, absolutely not one of ours!
“Saturn, you said?”
“And Mars. That’s what I heard.”
Fine looked off in the distance, toward the operational charts hanging from the bookshelves, then looked back at Owen and locked eyes.
“No, I’m afraid not. Never heard of Mars or Saturn.”
Owen nodded, and gestured toward the envelope he’d brought.
“Well, that’s very good, because the early bombing that has begun on Pantelleria soon will move to Corsica—as well as Sicily and other islands. Softening them up. And as much as the General appreciates the intel he’s getting, it would be tragic to take out our own people.”
“Softening?”
“Softening different targets, of course,” Owen confirmed, and said it with an arrogance that suggested he might be doing it all himself, “to confuse Hitler as to what our real target is next.”
“When?”
“June seventeenth is the first sortie. Everything you need to know is in the envelope.”
Fine automatically glanced at his desk, to where he had put the messages from Donovan and Dulles.
Jesus Christ! I’ve got to get Canidy to take out that SS bastard in Messina before we bomb the place? And he just got there.
Fine looked up to respond to J. Warren Owen.
He was gone.
[FOUR]
Palermo, Sicily
0810 31 May 1943
Dick Canidy tried to walk casually along Cristoforo Columbo while scanning the activity in the port. He followed nearly a block behind two men who carried a wooden crate by its rope handles at each end. In the ten blocks he’d just walked, he hadn’t seen even a half-dozen soldiers, which he considered one of the first signs that the message declaring a half-million troops were pouring into Sicily was pure bullshit.
Canidy saw at the nearest dock that at least six stevedores were provisioning two forty-foot-long wooden fishing boats. Moored next to those boats was a rusty-hulled ninety-foot cargo ship.
Like the first one I blew up thinking it had the Tabun.
The cargo vessel had a small main cabin at the bow and a long flat deck with large hatches and a pair of tall booms. Through one of the hatches the booms were lowering stacks of wooden crates, much larger versions of the one the men ahead of him carried. Beyond the cargo ship, Canidy noticed there was a pair of hulking Schnellboots under armed guard. The S-boats were tied up at the end of a T-shaped pier.
That’s a new pier. They finally replaced the one that burned when the cargo ship went up.
I wonder if either of those S-boats was the one that we watched machine-gun the crew of the fishing boat.
And I wonder if any of the fishermen here know that an S-boat did that.
Frank Nola damn sure saw it—“This day I vow to never forget,” he said—and would have said something.
Canidy could not shake the image. They had been en route to Sicily aboard the Casabianca, running on her diesel engines near the surface to make better time while charging the batteries. It had been a clear, mostly moonless night, the sky filled with brilliant stars. Through the periscope, they spotted the S-boat alongside the fishing boat half its size, both silhouetted in the soft light of the night sky.
Nola took a turn at the scope to see if he could tell if it was one of his boats being shaken down—right at the time the Germans machine-gunned the fishermen. Nola became hysterical when the Casabianca’s captain ordered an emergency dive and heard that they could not shoot at the S-boat and risk themselves being fired on—and their mission blown.
At least L’Herminier put a torpedo in the S-boat that was escorting the ship carrying the Tabun that he took out with a second fish.
Two blocks farther down Cristoforo Columbo, he came to the single-story brick building that held Nola’s import-export business office. It was where he had introduced Canidy and Tubes Fuller to the Brothers Buda.
Antonio and Giacomo—aka Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Fucking Dumb.
Canidy turned the corner and realized he now was walking through what at first glance was trash scattered all up and do
wn the street. Then he looked closely at a couple of the eight-by-ten-inch sheets and realized they were familiar. He picked up one for a closer look of its sketch—a German soldier’s helmet on top of a wooden cross and the word “You?”
Hank passed over Palermo all right.
Kauffman should’ve tossed them out a little more slowly so they didn’t all land in almost one spot. Too bad he didn’t dump these directly on the SS over in Quattro Canti Quarter. . . .
Canidy tossed the sheet back to the street and walked up to the door of the building. The weight of his .45 in the small of his back was somewhat reassuring as he stood to the side of the wooden door and rapped on it with his knuckles.
But I’d rather have the Johnny gun that I left with Apollo. . . .
* * *
An hour earlier, Canidy had walked out of the small crapper and found John Craig van der Ploeg struggling to get off his torn mattress. John Craig had pulled off his boots before going to sleep at midnight. His right foot had looked swollen then. Now, in the morning light, it looked both swollen and horribly bruised.
Rising to his left knee, he slowly tried putting weight on the injured foot—and his face contorted with pain.
“Damn it!” he said, shaking his head.
“As much as I hate to say it,” Canidy said, “you’re not going anywhere today. Even if you could manage to walk, you’d draw attention. You just need to give that damn foot time to heal.”
John Craig van der Ploeg glanced over at the radio.
“At least I still can run that.”
“Yeah, and it probably works out better that you do sit on the radio while I go see what I can find this morning. What is the radio schedule?”
“They’re alternating ones. With Neptune, it’s her usual Schedule OE1-0—odd-numbered days she will transmit and be available to receive at fifteen minutes after odd hours. On even-numbered days, it’s fifteen minutes after even hours. With Algiers, it’s Schedule OE3-0, which means we’re available during the same odd/even setup, but it’s fifteen minutes before the hour.”
Canidy glanced at his wristwatch.
“Today’s the thirty-first. And it’s ten after seven. So Neptune should be on the air in five. Think you can raise her?”
John Craig nodded.
“If the Casabianca’s at periscope depth and ready to receive.”
He stood, putting all his weight on his left leg. Sliding his hand along the wall, he started hopping toward the window, almost dragging the bum foot. It took a little effort, and a lot of pain, but he eventually got situated at the radio, carefully keeping clear of the dried pool of blood.
He then went through the ritual of warming up his right hand and wrist.
“Time?” he finally said.
“Sixteen after,” Canidy said.
John Craig then tapped out Morse code alerting Neptune that Jupiter was standing by.
John Craig switched to RECEIVE, picked up the headset and put one of the cans to his ear, then reached into the suitcase and came up with a transcription pad.
Canidy and John Craig then stared at the W/T.
Nothing happened.
After four minutes, Canidy said, “It’s seven-twenty. Try again.”
John Craig nodded and re-sent the code, and threw the switch back to RECEIVE.
Again they stared at a silent W/T.
“Maybe they’re sitting on the bottom,” Canidy offered. “Give it another shot in two hours, I guess.”
A second later, John Craig’s eyebrows went up as the receiver lit. He held the can tightly to his ear and began scribbling on the paper pad. Then he sent a short series of taps acknowledging receipt, and shut it down.
He pulled out his codebook, decrypted the message, then tore it from the pad.
As he handed it to Canidy, he said, “Does that sound good?”
* * *
31MAY 0715
To Jupiter
From Neptune
Expecting 24 hour delay of departure from Pearl Harbor.
Will send ETA when en route.
* * *
Canidy crumpled it into a ball and tossed it back to John Craig. He caught it and put it in his makeshift burn bag.
“Who knows?” Canidy said. “Maybe they just have to stay on station at Corsica another day. Doesn’t really affect us either way right now.”
John Craig then brought the radio back up, switched to SEND, and tapped out another short string of code. Almost immediately after throwing it to RECEIVE, he got a reply. Canidy saw that it was a brief one, because he didn’t bother writing anything before shutting down the W/T.
“Algiers?” Canidy said.
“Yeah. They have nothing for us now. I’ll keep checking back. And I will see what kind of traffic I can create with quote Tubes unquote so that when you bring the gear with the radio direction finder, we might have some signal to home in on.”
“The last contact with Mercury was when?”
“Last week. I think May twenty-sixth. The message that had the half-million-something troops and stuff arriving in Sicily.”
“We’re about to see how much of that is bullshit. This place should be crawling with Krauts if half of it is true. Speaking of whom . . .”
He paused, looked over at the machine guns lying by the mattresses, then walked over to them and took the Sten and put it within reach of John Craig.
“Okay,” he then said, “you should be fine until I get back. If for whatever reason I don’t come back, you’re going to have to be creative.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that because of your bad foot, you’ll have to figure out how to get the hell out of here and to the Casabianca.”
Canidy could see by the look on John Craig’s face that he had not considered that possibility.
He ran his fingers nervously through his mop of black hair as he nodded thoughtfully.
Then he softly said, “How the hell do you do . . . well, do this?” He gestured around the room and up and down. “I mean, torture, killing, living in filth, and with a corpse . . . and God knows what else. Why?”
Canidy grunted.
“Standard answer? I don’t have a damn choice. Last I asked, they won’t let me out of the OSS. Not until we make some certain crazy sonsofbitches in Berlin and Tokyo history.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. You do have a choice. You had all kinds of valid excuses not to put this mission together, starting with Eisenhower declaring Sicily off-limits. And you’re not supposed to be operational. You know too much. Yet . . . here you are.”
Canidy said: “From all the Top Secret messages that you’ve seen in the commo room, you’re not supposed to be operational, either.”
“You’re not answering my question.”
Canidy looked at him a long time, then exhaled audibly.
“What? You want me to wave the flag and hum ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’?” Canidy mimicked waving a tiny flag with his right hand and hummed, Oh say can you see . . . “Sure, there’s patriotism. But it’s really about not letting the bastards win—on a personal level, not letting the cruel sonsofbitches get to our families in the ways we’ve seen them do others.”
He paused, saw John Craig nod his understanding, then went on: “Two years ago, with England on its knees, Churchill spoke at that London boys’ school—what’s it called? Harrow—and said something that’s stuck with me: ‘This is the lesson:’ he said, ‘never give in, never give in, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.’”
John Craig considered that and said, “You mentioned earlier about not taking counsel of your fears.”
Canidy nodded. “Right. There’s no damn time for that. It’s all about ‘This is the lesson.’”
John Craig’s stomach then growled noisily.
“Got your appetite back?” Canidy said.
He reached into the suitcase and pulled out a small paperboard box. It had olive drab print that read: DINNER and US ARMY FIELD RATION TYPE K.
John Craig took the box and tore it open.
“I’m starving. Thanks.”
He dumped the contents on the table beside the radio. He picked through the round tin of ham and cheese and the packets of crackers and sugar and salt and powdered orange drink mix. Then he stuck the Peter Paul Choclettos candies, Dentyne chewing gum, and the four-pack of cigarettes and matches in his pocket.
As he worked the tiny key to open the tin can, Canidy said, “You should stay away from those Chesterfields. I hear smoking cigarettes stunts your growth.”
John Craig grunted. “That’d be the least of my worries right now.”
“You’re right. So, be careful with that radio. You do not want to be found. Where’s your Q-pill?”
John Craig suddenly looked up from the food.
“You’re serious?” he said.
“You’re goddamn right I’m serious.” He gestured at the Sten. “You can shoot your way out only so far. So you either save a couple rounds for yourself, or you bite the pill.”
John Craig dug in his pants pocket and produced the inch-long brass tube that contained the rubber-coated glass vial of cyanide.
Canidy nodded as he held up his tube. “Do I need to remind you about what the bastards did to Mariano?”
* * *
As Canidy knocked again on the wooden door of the brick building, he saw that the padlock hasp was empty and open.
So someone is either in there—or didn’t lock the damn door when they left.
He grabbed the doorknob and tried turning it. It was locked and just barely budged. But he saw that the door did move somewhat, indicating slop in the lock’s tang. He rapped on the door once more, waited a count of fifteen, then pulled out his pocketknife. He slid the knife blade in the crack of the door beside the knob. The blade depressed the tang, pushing it back into the door, and the door swung inward.