The Double Agents

by W. E. B Griffin

  “We spoke daily when Ann Chambers first went missing,” Stevens went on, “then went to weekly. Marks waited as long as he could—ten days—before passing the news to the home office. Read: her father. Marks had had reporters disappear for a few days for any number of reasons and had hoped that that was the case with Ann. He didn’t see any sense in worrying the family and had seen to it that there had been a bureau-wide effort not to draw attention to Ann’s absence. But then it was inevitable that before long someone got suspicious, and Marks said he couldn’t respond with a lie, so he took the bull by the horns….”

  Bruce’s eyebrows rose.

  Stevens quickly added, “I didn’t mean to suggest her father…”

  “It’s all right, Ed,” Bruce said. “I know you didn’t.”

  “Anyway, I feel responsible for where we are now.”

  “How is that?”

  “I told Dick that I would keep on top of what was going on with Ann and let Dick know of any news. I went with Marks to inspect the bombed flat. The Civil Defence rescue crews had combed through the rubble and come up with nothing. Which we felt was better than if they had found her in there. Anyway, we gave them Ann’s name and our names and numbers, and they promised to get in touch….”

  Bruce shook his head slowly. “I know. A long shot.”

  “Marks said he’d have his reporters ask around as they went about their day-to-day duties, covering the city. It seemed sufficient…especially as she hadn’t been found in the rubble…. People turn up all the time.”

  “Assuming that she went off to wherever,” Bruce put in, “it’s curious that she has not sent word she’s fine. That she hasn’t perhaps suggests she’s not. But…it could be anything, Ed, and you shouldn’t take it personally.”

  Both men sat in quiet thought for a moment.

  “You know,” Stevens then said, “I’m surprised that her father didn’t get my name from Marks and then contact me.”

  “I’m not. I’m more surprised that I don’t have a message from Bill Donovan or FDR, instead of a courtesy call from the ambassador. People like Brandon Chambers go right to the top of the food chain.”

  Bruce stood, methodically brushed the creases from his trousers, then walked over to the windows and looked out at the gray day.

  “Knowing that,” Bruce went on, “we had better, as you put it, take the bull by the horns.”

  “Message General Donovan?” Stevens said.

  “Certainly that,” Bruce said, turning and walking back to his desk. “Having the old man talk with Canidy is impossible. So I’d say we need to find Ann, and fast. Certainly before the FBI sticks its nose in it. It seems to be that or have her old man raise enough hell—or spill enough ink—to bring the OSS out of the shadows.”

  “Hoover would love that,” Stevens said.

  John Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had been silently furious when President Roosevelt shared with him his ideas of how the United States should deal with espionage and counterespionage. Hoover believed it to be the purview of his federal police force. But FDR had told him that (a) he was not only giving those duties (worldwide, with the exceptions of the Americas, which remained with the FBI) to what then was the COI (later the OSS), but (b) he was heading it with one of Hoover’s longtime rivals, William Donovan.

  Ever since, Hoover had made every attempt to prove that the President had made a grave error of judgment…and to rub it in, which invariably involved quietly feeding the information to reporters.

  “It would serve as a fine example as to why this should be his territory, not Donovan’s,” Bruce said. “Hoover in a heartbeat would bring in his whole lot of agents—under the auspices of hunting down Nazis and Nazi sympathizers headed for the States—to make us look bad. He knows how fearful FDR is of the fifth column.”

  “We don’t know how much Chambers really knows about the OSS,” Stevens said.

  “No, we don’t. Probably more than we’d like and he’d admit. But I’ve met him. He’s a good man. A veteran. A patriot. He understands the importance of keeping secrets. Yet…when a man is worried about his daughter, all bets are off as to what he will or won’t do. Especially if a man as formidable as Brandon Chambers believes he’s being lied to by the FBI.”

  “So we’re in a race to find Ann,” Stevens said.

  Bruce nodded solemnly.

  “Charity Hoche,” Stevens added suddenly.

  Bruce looked at him a moment.

  “Yes. What about her?”

  “It just came to me. She and Ann were at Bryn Mawr.”

  There was recognition in Bruce’s eyes. He immediately had a mental picture of the tall, radiant, very smart—and very well-built—blonde. Charity Hoche was from the Main Line of Philadelphia, her family well-connected, which, in large part, explained why Wild Bill Donovan personally had approved her recent transfer from OSS Washington.

  And, Bruce thought, she’s a shining example of why some derisively refer to the OSS as Donovan’s Oh So Social club.

  Which isn’t entirely fair, to the OSS in general and to Charity Hoche in particular.

  Charity, connected or not, has a master’s degree in political science, earned summa cum laude . She’s worked hard for Donovan, surprising everyone with her worth to the organization…to the point Donovan says she has the Need to Know here on a par with Ed Stevens’s.

  She’s shown me she’s certainly no wilting lily.

  And, Jesus, those magnificent breasts….

  “Good thinking,” Bruce said. “Put her on it. She’s still out at Whitbey House….”

  “Consider it done. I’ll track her down. And you’ll get me the message for General Donovan?”

  Bruce reached across his desk for a sheet of blank paper, then pulled a pen from his shirt pocket. “Right now. Before I get one from him.”

  Stevens held up the sheet that was in his hand. He nodded at the paper and said, “How do you want to act on Stan Fine’s request?”

  Bruce looked at the paper, his eyes intense.

  “You mean Dick Canidy’s request?” he said pointedly.

  “It’s from Stan Fine.”

  “But it’s Canidy’s. I know it. You know it.”

  “Okay, Canidy’s request,” Stevens said agreeably. “How would you like to respond?”

  “Any idea why he wants to delay that scientist’s travel to the States?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  Bruce looked deep in thought, then said, “It’s really not for us to decide. Professor…Professor…”

  “Rossi,” Stevens furnished.

  “…Professor Rossi is an expert in metals. Through his association with the University of Rome, he’s a contemporary of Professor Dyer, who Canidy pulled out of Germany last month, who now is in the States working on the Manhattan Project.”

  Stevens wondered why Bruce had just gone through the You know it’s Canidy, not Fine song and dance and now was telling him what Bruce knew they both already knew about Rossi and Dyer.

  Then he decided that Bruce was subtly reminding Stevens he was still smarting over another message from OSS Washington—one handwritten by Donovan—that had been personally couriered by Charity Hoche. She’d delivered it on February fourteenth, and ever since had left Bruce somewhat paranoid.

  It had informed him, in the gentle but commanding manner of which Donovan was master, that a mission put on by the President himself was taking place in Bruce’s backyard. Donovan had explained that Bruce had not been told till now because he hadn’t had the Need to Know. Further—and what really had poured salt on the open wound that was Bruce’s badly wounded ego—was that Stevens, Bruce’s subordinate, did have the Need to Know.

  Donovan had attempted to temper that by writing that Stevens had been given only limited details, just enough so that he could act if any actions by Bruce or OSS London Station threatened to blow the presidential mission.

  On one hand, Bruce had more or less understood the logic o
f the mission taking absolute precedence. On the other hand, however, knowing that his deputy had been considered more worthy of having highly classified information than he was made him furious.

  Worse, when he calmed down a little, it had caused him to wonder what other ops there might be that he’d been deemed not worthy of knowing about. And so he felt he was entitled to a little pettiness about being left out of the loop in the past…and now wondering what might be going on under his nose without his knowledge.

  “I’ll relay the request in here,” Bruce said finally, tapping the sheet of paper with his pen. “Let Donovan make the final decision. We know he likes to hold all the cards. Meanwhile, message back to Fine that Rossi can stay, pending approval of OSS Washington.”

  Stevens stood, started for the door, and said, “I’ll get right on—”

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Come!” Bruce called.

  As the wooden door began to swing open, Stevens reached for the doorknob.

  An attractive brunette in her thirties peered through the opening. She had a quizzical look on her face.

  “Sir?” Captain Helene Dancy, Women’s Army Corps, said tentatively.

  “Yes, Helene?” Bruce replied a little impatiently to his administrative assistant.

  Dancy answered: “There’s an unusual call from the Admiralty—”

  “I cannot take it right now, Helene,” Bruce interrupted, tapping impatiently with his pen.

  She looked at Bruce.

  “Not for you, sir,” Dancy said. “It’s from naval intelligence”—she looked at Stevens—“and it’s for you, sir.”

  Stevens heard Bruce stop the tapping…and thought he saw him squint his eyes.

  “It’s a British officer, Colonel Stevens,” she explained. “A Major Niven. Quite a distinctive voice.” She paused. “He sounds very much like the movie star, you know?”

  “David Niven,” Stevens offered.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What does Niven want?” Bruce put in.

  Dancy looked at Bruce, then again at Stevens.

  “Sir, he said that he’s at Admiralty with a Commander Fleming, and that the commander, quote, needs to know straightaway where you wish the cadaver to be delivered as it appears to be thawing, unquote.”

  “‘Cadaver’?” Bruce parroted. “A frozen cadaver?”

  He looked at Stevens, who looked back wordlessly with raised eyebrows.

  [TWO]

  Aéroporte Nationale Algiers Algiers, Algeria 1605 30 March 1943

  Major Richard M. Canidy, USAAF, watched “his” baby blue U.S. Navy P11 staff car leave in a cloud of reddish dust as it drove through the gap in the airport perimeter fencing, then off into the distance. Monsieur Khatim was at the wheel, en route to return the vehicle to AFHQ. They had had no choice but to take the baby blue staff car to the airport—conspicuous or not, and, as it turned out, they’d had no trouble—because when they got to Fine’s car, they found its left rear tire had gone flat.

  Canidy wasn’t sorry to see the Algerian leave. Khatim had avoided any conversation on the drive out, answering Canidy’s casual queries with nods and grunts. But Canidy was sorry to see the car go. He realized that just now was likely the last time he would see it. He looked at the Hamilton Chronograph on his wrist, did the quick math, came up with six hours, and figured this was the first time he had given up a “borrowed” vehicle—car, jeep, aircraft—in so short a time.

  Khatim had dropped him at the very far side of the airport grounds, barely in view of the main base operations of the airport, which itself was little more than an old one-story masonry structure pockmarked by bullets during OPERATION TORCH. On the roof of the building was the rickety control tower. The macadam of the runway and taxiway was a patchwork, the holes blown there temporarily packed with dirt and crushed stone. All of the airport appeared to be in various levels of repair by AFHQ and the local civilians they had hired to handle the manual labor.

  The facility, if that was an applicable description, that served the OSS aircraft was set up behind a boneyard of WWI aircraft—a couple of cannibalized French Spad XIIIs, a rotting German Fokker D.VII resting upside down on what was left of its bent top wing—and assorted worn-out, rusted airfield equipment.

  It was really nothing more than a dusty, sunbaked spot beside a dirt strip that led to the taxiway. It had an old Nissen hut. The two Douglas C-47s were on either side of that, the main wheels of the low-wing tail-dragger transports chocked with what looked like parts scavenged from the Fokker.

  Canidy walked toward the small hut. Designed by the British during the First World War, it was made of corrugated steel bent to form an inverted U. Wooden walls capped the ends, each with a single-man door, two windows, a louvered vent above the door, and three pipe vents in the roof. The cramped quarters accommodated four men.

  As Canidy approached the hut, and the empty fifty-five-gallon drum by its front door, he found in the air the familiar strong smell of aircraft hydraulic fluid. He smiled; the smell triggered more than a few thoughts.

  It was said that with the exception of the two-place, single-engine Piper Cub, the Gooney Bird was the Army Air Force’s most forgiving aircraft. He agreed with that.

  On one level—as that of an aeronautical engineer—he appreciated its fine design. It wasn’t sexy, like a Lockheed P-38 fighter, but it was elegant in its utilitarian simplicity. On another, far more important level—as that of a secret agent stranded in enemy-occupied territory—he genuinely loved the Gooney Bird because it had saved his ass.

  Darmstadter had put one down in an impossibly small spot in Hungary (one that Canidy had enlarged by clearing out its trees with Composition C-2 plastic explosive), then, against all odds, barely got the airplane the hell out of there.

  The C-47 was the AAF’s version of the Douglas DC-3 airliner. They were coming out of the Douglas plant by the thousands, and were being used as personnel transports and cargo aircraft—mostly carrying paratroopers or towing gliders in support of airborne operations. The C-47’s two, twelve-hundred-horsepower Twin Wasp radial piston engines took it to an impressive twenty-three thousand feet.

  Canidy also knew the fuel-efficient Twin Wasps—so named for the engine’s two rows of fourteen cylinders—gave the Gooney Bird a range of more than two thousand miles. That meant without modification—the adding of auxiliary fuel cells, say, which Canidy had done before—it could easily make the trip from Algiers to Sicily and back.

  Though, he thought, the Luftwaffe there on the island might have other ideas.

  Canidy looked at the closest Gooney Bird, the one on the left side of the hut, and saw that there was some motion in the cockpit. The aircraft on the right side of the hut had two men standing on wooden ladders by the starboard wing. They held wrenches and rags and were bent over the opened nacelle of the engine. A third man, stocky, with hands on his hips and his back to Canidy, stood between the fifty-five-gallon drum and wing, looking up at the engine and supervising.

  As Canidy passed the drum, he raised his left hand, then swung it down hard, smacking the lid of the drum. The deep wham! sound that his open palm made when it hit the thin metal of the empty drum was stunning.

  The supervisor came about a foot off of the ground.

  The two mechanics jerked their heads up, one banging his head on the nacelle, the other trying to recover on his wobbly ladder.

  “Sonofabitch!” the mechanic who hit his head exclaimed.

  “Who in hell—” the supervisor began to roar as he turned toward the noise.

  The mechanics watched as a big man in civilian clothing—he looked American but his clothes weren’t—grinned broadly as he walked up with his arms open wide to their boss. In one smooth motion, the man placed his hands on both sides of the boss’s head—and kissed him wetly and noisily on the forehead.

  “It’s me in hell, that’s who!” he said cheerfully, his accent clearly midwestern American. “Miss me?”

  Then he
looked up at the mechanic who was rubbing his head.

  “And a sonofabitch, if you like,” he added. “Sorry about your head. That wasn’t the response I’d hoped for.” He hooked his thumb at the supervisor. “The lieutenant’s here was.”

  Canidy looked at him and laughed loudly.

  “You came about four feet off the ground, Hank!”

  The mechanics on the ladder smiled in appreciation.

  “Jeez, Dick, you sure know how to make an entrance,” First Lieutenant Henry Darmstadter, USAAF, said fondly, wiping the wet kiss from his forehead with his shirtsleeve, then holding out his hand.

  Darmstadter was twenty-two years old and had a friendly, round face.

  “How are you?” Canidy said, shaking the hand.

  “Great. What in hell are you doing here?” Darmstadter said, his tone pleasant.

  “I need a favor. I need your airplane.”

  “You never did beat around the bush,” Darmstadter said, smiling. “But you can’t have this one. Not unless you want to use just the one engine.” He paused. “But, then, you might. And you’re the only pilot I’d trust to do that.”

  “Is it broke bad?” Canidy said.

  Darmstadter stuck out his lower lip and shook his head. “Nah. They think it might just be a magneto.”

  “What about the other one?” Canidy said. “Is it airworthy?”

  Darmstadter studied Canidy.

  “You’re serious about taking a plane, aren’t you?”

  Canidy nodded. “I’m in a helluva hurry. Stan Fine said you could run me out to Dellys, give me a tour, make introductions.”

  Darmstadter considered that, knew better than to ask questions—Canidy would confide if and when it was necessary—then checked his watch.

  “We’ve got some jumpers due here for us to run them out there in two hours,” he said. “Can it wait till then?”

  “I’d really like to get out there and back yesterday,” Canidy said.

  “Okay,” Darmstadter nodded, then turned to the mechanics. “You guys’ll be okay if we make a run?”

  “Yes, sir,” they replied almost in unison.