The Fighting Agents

by W. E. B Griffin

  Some Army full-bull colonel, a silver-haired Irishman wearing the blue-starred ribbon of the Medal of Honor (the first one Staley had ever seen actually being worn), came to the estate just before they were through with the course and shook their hands; Staley was able to figure out from that that whatever was going on involved more than one service.

  Two days before, the cadre had loaded them all in station wagons, taken them to Washington, and handed them $300 and a list of “recommended civilian clothing.” Staley had bought two suits, six shirts, a pair of shoes, and some neckties.

  The night before, one at a time, Baker had called everybody in and given them their orders, which they were not to discuss with anyone else. Staley didn’t know what to make of his. He was ordered to report in civilian clothing to the National Institutes of Health, in Washington, D.C.

  They had brought him there in one of the station wagons.

  There was a receptionist in the lobby, and a couple of cops.

  He went to the receptionist, not sure what to do about his orders. They were stamped SECRET, and you don’t go around showing SECRET orders to every dame behind a plate-glass window with a hole in it.

  “I was told to report here,” Staley said, when she finally looked at him.

  “May I have your name, Sir?” she asked.

  When he gave it to her, she looked at a typewritten list, then handed him a cardboard badge with VISITOR printed on it and an alligator clip on the back of it so that he could pin it to the lapel of his new suit. Then she called one of the cops over.

  “Would you take Mr. Staley to Chief Ellis, please?” she said.

  The cop smiled and made a come with me gesture with his hand. Staley followed him to an elevator, and they rode up in it and then went down a corridor until they came to a door with a little sign reading “Director.” Inside that door was an office with a couple of women clerks pushing typewriters, an older woman who was obviously in charge, and a door with another sign reading “Director” on it.

  “This is Mr. Staley,” the cop said.

  “The Chief expects him,” the gray-haired woman said with a smile. Then she looked at Staley. “Go on in,” she said.

  Staley stopped at the door and, conditioned by long habit of the proper way to report to a commanding officer, knocked and waited to be told to enter.

  “Come in,” a male voice called.

  There was another office beyond that door, furnished with a large, glistening desk, a red leather couch, and two red leather chairs. Sitting at the desk, sidewards, so he could rest his feet on the open lower drawer of the desk, was a chief boatswain’s mate, USN, smoking a cigar and reading a newspaper.

  “Whaddayasay, Staley?” the Chief said. “Getting any lately?”

  It took a moment before Staley was sure who the Chief was, then he said, “Jesus H. Christ! Ellis!”

  Ellis swung around in his high-backed chair and pushed a lever on an intercom box.

  “Could somebody bring us some coffee?” he asked. Then he turned to Staley and gestured toward the red leather couch. “Sit down,” he said. “Take a load off.”

  Chief Boatswain’s Mate J. R. Ellis, USN, was wearing a brand-new uniform. There were twenty-four years’ worth of hash marks on the sleeve. The uniform was his Christmas present to himself. It was custom-made. He had had custom-made uniforms before, but in China, when he’d been with the Yangtze River Patrol. But he hadn’t been a chief then, and custom-made uniforms cost a hell of a lot less in China than they did in the States. Chief Ellis had figured, what the hell, he had never even expected that he would make chief, why the hell not get a stateside custom-made uniform. He could afford it.

  The last time Staley had seen Ellis had been in Shanghai, and Ellis had been right on the edge of getting busted from bosun’s mate first and maybe even getting his ass kicked out of the Navy. Ellis had been on the Panay when the Japs sank it in December 1937. After he’d swum away from the burning Panay, Ellis just hadn’t given much of a damn for anything. Staley understood that: How the hell could you take pride in being a sailor if your government didn’t do a goddamn thing to the goddamn Japs after they sank a U.S. man-of-war and killed a lot of sailors while they were at it?

  But he had never expected to see Ellis as a chief, and certainly not in a billet where he was obviously some kind of a big wheel.

  One of the typists came in with two cups of coffee, in nice cups and saucers, not mugs.

  “There’s cream and sugar,” she said, smiling at Staley, "but Chief Ellis never uses what he calls ‘canned cow.’ ”

  “Black’s just fine, Ma’am,” Staley said.

  When she left, curiosity got the better of him.

  “What the hell is going on around here, Ellis?” he asked.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you that,” Ellis said. “I guess the quickest way is the chain of command.”

  “Huh?”

  “Tell me about the chain of command.”

  Staley looked at him in confusion. Ellis was obviously dead serious.

  “Tell me,” Ellis repeated.

  “Well,” Staley said, “I’m first class, and you’re a chief, so I report to you, and you report to some officer, and he reports to some senior officer, and it works its way to the top, all the way, I suppose, to the Chief of Naval Operations. ”

  “All the way to the President,” Ellis corrected him. “The Chief of Naval Operations reports to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he reports to the President, who is Commander-in-Chief.”

  “So?” Staley said.

  “The way it is here,” Ellis said, “is that you report to me, and I report to the Colonel . . . you met him, he was out to look things over in Virginia. . . .”

  “The guy with the Medal of Honor?”

  “Colonel William J. Donovan,” Ellis said. “I work for him, and he works for the President. I mean, directly. He gets his orders from the President. Nobody else can tell him what to do.”

  Staley said, “No shit?”

  “You’re going to have to learn to watch your language around here, Charley,” Ellis said, almost primly.

  “Sorry,” Staley said. “Where do I fit in around here?”

  “You’re going to be the Colonel’s driver,” Ellis said. “And don’t look down your nose at it. There’s more to it than driving a car.”

  “Such as?”

  “There’s a lot of people would like to see him dead, for one thing. Your first job is to see that don’t happen.”

  “Like a bodyguard, you mean? Is that what all that crap in Virginia was for?”

  Ellis nodded, but then explained. “Baker got to the Colonel,” he said. “Everybody who comes into the OSS gets run through that school. For a while, I thought they were going to make me go.”

  “What exactly is this ‘OSS’?”

  "It stands for ‘Office of Strategic Services,’ ” Ellis said. “It’s sort of like the FBI and Office of Naval Intelligence put together, plus Errol Flynn in one of them war movies where he parachutes behind enemy lines and takes on the whole Jap army by himself.”

  “Give me a for example,” Staley said.

  “The school was supposed to teach you Rule One around here,” Ellis said. “You don’t ask questions. If they figure you should know something, they’ll tell you. You ask the wrong questions around here, and you’ll wind up counting snowballs on Attu.”

  “Can I ask what you do around here?” Staley asked.

  “I’m on the books as ‘Special Assistant to the Director, ’ ” Ellis said. “What that means is that I do everything and anything that makes life easier for him, and keeps him from wasting his time. And what you’re going to do is help me do that.”

  “Plus being a bodyguard, you said,” Staley said.

  “We don’t talk about that,” Ellis said. “He’s got body-guards, mostly ex-FBI guys and ex-Secret Service guys. And he ducks away from them whenever he can. That’s when you cover him. Get the picture
?”

  Staley nodded. “I get the feeling you get along pretty good with him.”

  “I never met anybody smarter or nicer,” Ellis said flatly. “Or who works harder.”

  “How come I got this job?”

  “The Colonel came in here about two weeks ago,” Ellis said, “and found me working about midnight. And he said, ‘I thought I told you to get some help.’ And he sounded like he meant it. So I asked myself, Do I want some FBI guy who looks down his nose at a sailor and is going to be pissed when he has to take orders from me? And unless I could think of something else, that’s what was going to happen. So I called the Navy, BuPers, and told them to find me ex-China Sailors in the States.”

  “You told the Navy?” Staley asked.

  Ellis, grunting, took a small leather wallet from his hip pocket and handed it to Staley.

  “It means what it says on there,” he said. “You carry one of those things, everybody in the government, civilian agencies, as well as any military, has got to give you what you ask for. If they don’t like it, they can bitch, later, after they give you what you ask for.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Staley said, and handed the OSS credentials back.

  “You’re going to get one of those,” Ellis said. “You fuck up with it, Charley, we’ll send you someplace that’ll make Portsmouth navy prison look like heaven. And no second chances. You read me?”

  “Loud and clear, Chief,” Staley said.

  “You’re also going to get a badge and credentials saying you’re a deputy U.S. marshal. That’s in case anybody asks why you’re carrying a gun. You try to get by with that. I mean, you don’t show the OSS credentials until you don’t have any other choice. You understand?”

  Staley nodded.

  “Same thing applies to the marshal’s credentials. Fuck up with them once, and you’re finished.”

  “Okay, okay,” Staley said.

  “So like I was saying, the Navy found you in Great Lakes, and I remembered that we always got along pretty good, and that you weren’t as dumb as you look, so I told them to see if you would volunteer. And you did. And you got through the school all right, and here you are.”

  “Yeah,” Staley said. “Here I am.”

  “You can walk out of here right now, Charley,” Ellis said. “I’ll get you any billet you want in the Navy. But if you stay, you’re here for good. And there’s liable to be more to it before we’re done than driving the Colonel’s Buick.”

  He looked at Staley and waited for a response.

  “I’m in, Chief,” Staley said.

  Ellis nodded and then dialed one of the three telephones on his desk.

  “I’m sending a guy named Staley down there,” he said. “Get him credentials, and take him by the arms room and get him a .45 and a shoulder holster, and then take him over to the house.”

  He hung the phone up.

  “You’ll get a rations and quarters allowance from the Navy,” Ellis said, “and a rations and quarters allowance from us. Otherwise you would wind up sleeping on a park bench and starving. Until you can find someplace to live, we’ll put you up in the garage at the house.”

  “The house?”

  “It’s a mansion over in Rock Creek we have,” Ellis explained. “There’s a couple of apartments over the garage. Nice. Get yourself settled, and then come back here in the morning. I probably shouldn’t have to tell you this, but I will. There’s two women at the house. They’re absolutely off-limits.”

  “Got it,” Staley said.

  “You fixed all right for money?” Ellis asked.

  “Fine.”

  Ellis pushed a lever on the intercom.

  “Will you have somebody take Staley to the photolab, please?” he said, then gestured for Staley to leave.

  Ellis was pleased with the way things had turned out with Staley. It had been a risk, recruiting him. But he’d done well in the school (that sonofabitch Baker had even been impressed; he’d called and said he had a job for Staley if what he was going to do in Washington was “relatively unimportant”), and now that Ellis had talked to him, he thought he could handle what was expected of him here, and, very important, that he would get along with the Colonel. He hadn’t been worried about how Staley would get along with Captain Peter Douglass, Sr., USN, Donovan’s deputy (a Navy petty officer and a Navy officer would understand each other), but the Colonel might have been a problem.

  Colonel “Wild Bill” Donovan had been one hell of a soldier in his day. He’d won the Medal of Honor in France with the “Fighting 69th,” the National Guard regiment from New York City. Between wars, he’d been a rich and powerful lawyer in New York City and Washington. He had little patience for people he decided were fools. But Staley was no fool. The way he’d handled himself at the school and the way he acted now had proved that. He would fit in.

  Ellis thought of his responsibilities—now to be shared with Staley and maybe even a couple of others, if he could find the right men—rather simply: It was his job to make things easier for the Colonel. Sometimes that meant he would fry up ham and eggs in the kitchen of the Colonel’s Georgetown town house. And sometimes it meant that he went around the world with the Colonel, serving as bodyguard and confidant and sort of private secretary and transportation officer. You name it, he did it.

  And he got to learn a lot. He was supposed to read everything the Colonel read, so that if he had to do something for the Colonel, the Colonel wouldn’t have to waste his time explaining things. Some of the stuff he had to read was really pretty dull, but sometimes it was interesting. As far as he had been able to figure out, there was only one secret the Colonel knew that he didn’t. Ellis had concluded that Captain Douglass knew that secret, because when Ellis had started getting nosy, Douglass got his back up.

  That secret had something to do with what an Army brigadier general named Leslie Groves was doing at a secret base in the Tennessee mountains with something called uranium. That’s what he’d asked Captain Douglass, “What’s uranium?”

  That’s what had gotten Douglass’s back up.

  “Now hear this clearly, Chief. You don’t ask that question. You don’t mention the word ‘uranium’ to me, or to Colonel Donovan, and certainly not to anyone else. You understand that?”

  “Aye, aye, Sir.”

  Ellis was confident that when the time came, he would find out what uranium was, and what General Groves was doing with it.

  Some of the interesting things that came with the job had nothing to do with secrets.

  What he had been doing when Staley had reported in, for example. He had been reading the Mainichi. He didn’t think there were very many other people who got to do that. The Mainichi was the English-language newspaper published in Tokyo. The edition he had in his hands was only ten days old. Ellis wondered how the hell they managed to get one in ten days halfway around the world from the Jap capital. But they did. And they did it regularly.

  It was full of bullshit, of course.

  For example, there was a story in the Mainichi today that troops under some Jap general with an unpronounceable name had destroyed the headquarters of Major General Fertig on Mindanao, killed General Fertig, and sent the rest of his troops running off to the mountains to starve.

  The reason Ellis knew the story was pure bullshit was that he had been at a briefing in the situation room when guerrilla activity in the Philippines had been discussed. A full-bull colonel—a guy who had gotten out of the Philippines with MacArthur and then had been sent to Washington as a liaison officer and who should know what he was talking about—had said that while there was a chance that small units of a dozen or so men could evade Japanese capture for as long as several months, there was no possibility of organized “militarily significant” guerrilla activity in the Philippines.

  And there was no General Fertig. Ellis had checked that out himself. The only guy named Fertig in the Philippines was a light colonel, a reserve officer reliably reported to have blown himself up taking down a br
idge.

  According to the Mainichi, this nonexistent general had at least a regiment, which the Japs wiped out to the last man at least once a week.

  The messenger appeared in Chief Ellis’s office with the distribution. The messenger was an Army warrant officer in civilian clothes. There was no love lost between them. The warrant officer naturally wondered how come he was wandering around the halls of the National Institutes of Health, delivering the mail like a PFC clerk, while this swab-jockey got to sit around with his feet on a desk reading a newspaper.

  Ellis signed his name twenty-seven times, acknowledging receipt of twenty-seven Top Secret documents, each of which had to be accounted for separately, and then signed twice more for a batch of Secret, and Confidential, Files.

  When the messenger had gone, he scanned the titles of the Top Secret documents. He recognized every one of them. They had been here before. Then he read the titles of the Secret documents and scanned through the half dozen he had not seen before. Finally, he turned to the Confidential titles and saw nothing of interest except the regular of-possible -interest memorandum, which Ellis thought of as the “What-the-Hell-Is-This? List.”

  This was a compilation of intelligence data that didn’t fit into any of the established categories. A report that the Germans had bought a ferryboat in Spain, for example. Or that the Italian Gendarmerie had lost another battle against the Mafia in Sicily. It had come to someone’s attention in one of the intelligence agencies. He hadn’t known what to do with it, but maybe somebody else could make something of it. When that happened, it was circulated on the of-possible-interest memorandum.

  Ellis read it faithfully. And his eyebrows went up when he came to item six: