The Fighting Agents

by W. E. B Griffin

  And then, just before he was to go back to Hungary, he broke his goddamned ankle.

  “Hey, Freddy!” an officer called in disgust from across the room. “Jesus Christ!”

  It took Freddy János just a moment to understand the nature of the complaint. Lost in thought, wallowing in self-pity over his enforced celibacy, he had without thinking gone from Gershwin to Prokofiev. He listened to what his subconscious had selected for him to play. He smiled. It was the Sonatina in G Minor, Opus 54, Number Two, from “Visions Fugitives.” Very appropriate.

  “You just ain’t got no couth, Sanderson,” Freddy called back, and then segued into “I’m Gonna Buy a Paper Doll.”

  He smiled at the two women leaning on the piano.

  And then he looked beyond them to the bar. Captain the Duchess Stanfield was walking up to it, and she was not alone.

  Absolutely gorgeous! God was obviously feeling good when he made that one!

  And an officer! No restrictions!

  What he would do, Freddy decided, was wait until they got their drinks and sat down someplace. Then he would just wander over and say, “Hi!”

  It was too much to hope that they would come by the piano, where he would have a chance to dazzle the absolutely ravishing blonde with some piano pyrotechnics and then smile sadly at her.

  But they did just that.

  God is on my side! Virtue is its own reward!

  “Hello, Freddy,” the Duchess said as she hopped onto the piano itself.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Charity, this is Freddy János,” the Duchess said.

  “Hello,” Charity said, smiling at him, giving him her hand, meeting his eyes.

  “I’m overcome,” Freddy said, taking her hand, marveling at the softness of it, the warmth, the utter femininity of it.

  “Freddy has a broken ankle,” the Duchess said. “I’d get my hand back if I were you, but after that you’re fairly safe; he can’t run at all well.”

  “How did you break your ankle?” Charity asked, compassion and sympathy in her eyes and voice.

  And where there is compassion and sympathy, can passion be far behind?

  “Small accident, landing by parachute,” Freddy said, with a smile and what he thought was just the right touch of becoming modesty.

  “Oh, Jesus!” Charity breathed.

  Freddy hadn’t expected quite that reaction and looked at her in surprise. She wasn’t looking at him, but over his shoulder at the door.

  A flyboy had come into the bar. Freddy had seen him before. He was a buddy of Canidy, the headman. It was rumored that he was the son of some big shot in the higher echelons of the OSS. He was also supposed to be an ex- Flying Tiger. He was also pretty goddamned young to be a lieutenant colonel.

  He headed straight for the bar, without looking toward the piano.

  “Doug!” the absolutely stunning blonde called. Or tried to call. She seemed to be having trouble with her voice.

  He didn’t hear her.

  “Colonel Douglass!” the Duchess called in her clear, crisp voice.

  The flyboy looked for her, found her, and waved casually, dismissing her.

  And then did a double take.

  Then he walked to the piano, right to the blonde. He didn’t look at anyone else, and he didn’t speak.

  He put his hand up, very slowly, very carefully, as if afraid when he made contact that the apparition would disappear, as does a soap bubble when touched, and touched the blonde’s cheek.

  “Doug,” the blonde said again, as if she was about to cry.

  The flyboy took his fingers from the blonde’s cheek and reached down and caught her hand, and led her wordlessly out of the room.

  “Sorry about that,” the Duchess said. “I saw your eyes light up.”

  “One gathers they have met before,” Freddy said.

  The Duchess chuckled.

  “Did my eyes really light up?” he asked.

  “Yes, they did,” she said.

  “Why are you so sure they didn’t light up for you?”

  She met his eyes.

  “Sorry, Freddy,” the Duchess said.

  She had sad eyes, he saw. There was something in them that made him want to comfort her. Really comfort her, not screw her. Well, maybe both, but first comfort her. And then he saw in her eyes that she was neither going to let him comfort her nor screw her.

  “Me, too,” Freddy said.

  4

  THE ISLAND OF VIS 0525 HOURS 17 FEBRUARY 1943

  Canidy was sitting on a ten-foot-tall boulder, half buried in the side of the valley, his legs dangling over the side, sipping coffee from a gray pottery mug. Ferniany was sitting beside him, and Capt. Hughson was standing behind them.

  Canidy winced when the B-25 on its landing roll came to the shallow stream in the middle of the runway and set up an enormous cascade of water.

  But the B-25 did not deviate from its path.

  It rolled another thirty yards, braking hard, so that inertia depressed the piston on the nose gear almost completely. Then it stopped and turned, and began taxiing back down the runway.

  When it passed the boulder, Dolan, in the copilot’s seat, made a “what now?” gesture with his hands, holding them out palms up, and shrugged.

  Canidy made a “take it up” gesture, followed by a “bye-bye” wave. Dolan nodded and smiled, then put his hands over his face in an Oh my God! we’re going to crash! gesture.

  The B-25 reached the inland end of the runway sixty seconds later, turned, ran up its engines, and then started to move. As it passed the boulder, Canidy could see the expressionless face of Gisella Dyer through the Plexiglas window in the fuselage. He waved at her. There was no response.

  There was another eruption of water when the B-25 passed through the stream again, and it visibly slowed. But then it picked up speed again quickly, the nosewheel left the ground, and a moment later it was airborne.

  The wheels went up, and the flaps, and then it climbed steeply.

  Canidy watched for a minute until the plane was barely visible, and then he stood up, draining the coffee mug.

  “Okay, Ferniany,” he said, “let’s get our show on the road.”

  They walked off the top of the boulder where it joined the wall of the valley, then slid rather than walked to the valley floor. A three-wheel German Hanomag truck, sort of an oversize three-wheel motorcycle, was parked there. The Hanomag had a canvas-covered truck bed; Canidy and Ferniany got in the back and closed the canvas tail-curtain over them, then Hughson kicked the engine into life and got behind the steering wheel.

  They made their way about four miles down a path that turned first into a narrow cobblestone road and then into a rough macadam street. In a little while, they turned off onto a steep, narrow dirt path that led them to the water’s edge.

  When Canidy climbed out of the Hanomag, he saw a thirty-eight-foot, high-prowed fishing boat two hundred yards offshore dragging a net to the regular explosive snorting of a two-cylinder diesel engine. Just as he thought he saw the glint of binoculars in the small wheelhouse, the sound of the diesel engine changed pitch, the fishing boat slowed and then went dead in the water, and men started to retrieve the net.

  When it was aboard, the boat headed for the beach in a wide curve.

  “I don’t know how he’s going to like this,” Ferniany said.

  “I hadn’t planned to ask him,” Canidy snapped. “Maybe he’ll be smart enough not to volunteer an opinion.”

  The moment he said it, he was a little sorry. There was something in the chemistry between him and Ferniany that produced dislike without real reason. But that wasn’t why he had snapped at him. The reason for that was that Ferniany was close to the truth. “Saint Peter,” the OSS agent on the fishing boat, was probably not going to like what he was about to learn. Nor would Stevens and Bruce, and if it got that far, Capt. Douglass or Colonel Donovan.

  The OSS agents on the scene would be annoyed both by having their thunder stole
n by a visiting brass hat and by the extra risk his grandstanding would mean. And Stevens and Bruce would bitterly question his decision to go into Hungary himself. First and foremost was the question of his running the risk of falling into German hands. And right on the heels of that was the equally valid question of whether he could do what had to be done any better than Yachtsman and Saint Peter could do it.

  Captain Hughson touched Canidy’s arm.

  “There’s a rock over the water,” he said. “You can jump from it to the boat.”

  He nodded toward it.

  “Would you like to take this with you?” Hughson asked, unslinging his Sten submachine gun from his shoulder and offering it to Canidy.

  “Have you got another one?”

  “Actually,” Hughson said, “there’s a Schmeisser in my cell I’ve been looking for an excuse to carry.”

  “Then thank you, Hughson,” Canidy said, and took the submachine gun from him.

  “You will be a good chap, won’t you, Major, and make an effort to return the Sten to me, in person?” Hughson said.

  “Despite what everybody apparently thinks,” Canidy said, “I am not charging foolhardy into the valley of death.”

  “No, of course you aren’t,” Hughson said. He put out his hand, and Canidy took it.

  The boat nosed in to the rock. First Ferniany and then Canidy jumped onto the deck. Immediately, the boat headed offshore.

  There were two men in the wheelhouse, both dark-haired and dark-skinned, both needing a shave, and both dressed in dark blue fisherman’s trousers and rough brown sweaters. It was only when one of them spoke in English to Ferniany that Canidy had any idea which was the genuine fisherman and which the SOE agent with the code name “Saint Peter.”

  “And what, might one dare inquire, is one supposed to do with this downed, if intrepid, aviator?” Saint Peter asked in an upper-class British accent.

  Ferniany chuckled. “Major Canidy, may I introduce Lieutenant J.V.M. Beane-Williams, late of the Household Cavalry?”

  “How’d’ja do?” Lt. Beane-Williams said with a smile, offering his hand. “I hate to put it to you so bluntly, Major, but you have, so to speak, just entered the ‘Out’ door. England . . . I presume you came from England . . . is in quite the opposite direction.”

  Canidy chuckled. He liked this Englishman.

  “Hughson tells me that you can put us ashore on the mainland,” Canidy said.

  “I presume there is a reason?” Saint Peter said.

  “Someplace where we can make contact with Mihajlović’s guerrillas,” Canidy said. “Our ultimate destination is Budapest, and the sooner we can get there, the better.”

  “Budapest is rather nasty this time of year,” Saint Peter said. “Snow and slush, and ever-increasing numbers of the Boches. But I daresay you’ve already considered that, haven’t you?”

  Without waiting for a reply, he entered into a conversation with the Yugoslavian captain.

  Finally, he turned to Canidy.

  “Tódor suggests we put you ashore at Ploče,” he said. “He has a first cousin twice removed there. Or did he say a ‘second cousin, once removed’? He also asked that I express his practically boundless admiration for your wristwatch. ”

  Canidy looked at the Yugoslavian captain, who was smiling warmly at him, exposing two gold and two missing teeth.

  Then he unstrapped his chronometer and handed it to him.

  The Yugoslavian said something, and Saint Peter translated.

  “He says, ‘Oh, I couldn’t.’ ”

  “Tell him I insist,” Canidy said.

  The Yugoslav unstrapped his cheap watch and handed it to Canidy.

  “He says,” Saint Peter said, “that if you insist . . . ”

  Canidy chuckled.

  “It’s sixty miles, or thereabouts, to Ploče,” Saint Peter said. “If we’re not stopped, it should take us four, perhaps four and a half hours.”

  “And if we’re stopped?”

  “Then none of us will get to visit Ploče’s many historical and cultural attractions,” Saint Peter said.

  X

  1

  CAIRO, EGYPT 1220 HOURS 17 FEBRUARY 1943

  First Lieutenant Hank Darmstadter was riding in the copilot’s seat working the radios when Commander John Dolan suddenly reached over and grasped his upper arm in a very tight grip.

  Startled, Darmstadter looked at him. Dolan’s face was white and beaded with sweat. He seemed to be in pain.

  “Indigestion,” Dolan said with a terrible effort. “There’s a bottle of medicine in my briefcase. Get it, will you?”

  The first thing Darmstadter remembered, as he hastily unfastened his seat and shoulder harness, was that Dolan had been medically retired from the Navy before the war because of a heart condition.

  Jesus, he’s having a heart attack!

  Dolan’s black leather Navy-issue briefcase was on a shelf in the passageway between the cockpit and the auxiliary fuel tanks that had been installed in the bomb bay. Its contents expanded the accordion folds, and Darmstadter grunted with the effort it took to open the catch and the straps that held it closed.

  As he started rummaging through the briefcase, he glanced past the auxiliary fuel tanks into the fuselage. The German girl was looking at him. She had her hair done up in braids, which she had then coiled on the sides of her head. Darmstadter wondered who she was and why getting her and her father out of Germany had been worth all the effort it had cost.

  They had been introduced, and she had politely shaken hands, but had remained silent. From the way her eyes had followed the conversation, however, Darmstadter had known that she at least understood English. And yet she had asked no questions, not even about where they were taking her. He wondered if she was in some kind of emotional shock, or simply acknowledging that for the moment she had no voice whatever in what happened to her.

  Then he had a strange thought. He wondered what she had done during the flight about taking a leak. There was a relief tube in the cockpit, but that wouldn’t have done her any good, even if she had known about it and asked for it.

  He returned his attention to Dolan’s briefcase. There was everything in it, from a copy of TM B-25-1 Flight Operation B-25 Series Aircraft to a change of socks and underwear and a toilet kit. And a pint bottle of a bright red liquid with a label reading “Medical Corps, U.S. Army” and the typewritten message: “Lt. Commander J. B. Dolan, USNR, Take As Required for Indigestion.”

  Darmstadter hurried back to the cockpit.

  Dolan reached for the bottle. Darmstadter unscrewed the cap and handed it to him.

  “Sit down and take the airplane,” Dolan ordered. Then he waited until Darmstadter had gotten back into the copilot’s seat, fastened his seat and shoulder belts again, and nodded to show his readiness to fly the airplane before he put the bottle of bright red liquid to his lips.

  He took a large swallow, hesitated, and then took a second. In a moment, the look of pain on his face went away, and he managed a weak smile.

  Darmstadter looked at the instrument panel. They had been homing in on the Cairo RDF for the past thirty minutes. The needle on the signal-strength gauge was almost at the upper peg. They were flying ten degrees to the left of the direction indicated by the needle on the RDF antenna indicator.

  Darmstadter made the course correction and then looked at Dolan again. The startling paleness was gone from his face.

  “You better start letting down,” Dolan ordered. “Thousand feet a minute.”

  Darmstadter nodded, then reached over his head for the trim wheel and lowered the nose. After that, he retarded the throttle just a hair.

  There was time to reconsider his first alarmed conclusion that Dolan was having a heart attack. That had been, he decided, a fear reaction. What was wrong with Dolan was what Dolan had told him: an attack of indigestion. He probably had them often, for he was carrying the bright red indigestion medicine with him.

  Dolan said something, and Darmsta
dter missed it.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said it must have been Canidy’s goddamned steaks,” Dolan said, leaning over to make himself heard over the roar of the engines. “Every time I eat charred meat, it does it to me.”

  Darmstadter nodded.

  He was right back to Dolan was having, had had, a heart attack. He’d smelled Dolan’s breath when the older man had leaned over. Whatever was in that bottle, bright red or not, usually came in a narrow-necked bottle with a label reading “Sour Mash Bourbon.”

  “You better sit it down,” Dolan said, leaning over again and sending Darmstadter another cloud of bourbon fumes. Then he slumped back against the cushions of the pilot’s seat and took another healthy swallow of “indigestion medicine.”

  Darmstadter reached for the microphone and put it before his lips.

  “Cairo, Army Four Three Three.”

  A voice with the unmistakable tones of Brooklyn came over the earphones.

  “This is Cairo, go ahead, Army Four Three Three.”

  “Army Four Three Three, a B-25 aircraft, is passing through niner thousand about thirty miles north of your station. Request approach and landing.”

  “Four Three Three, Cairo. The winds are from the north at ten, gusting to twenty. Visibility is unlimited. The altimeter is Two Niner Niner Niner. Descend to three thousand feet and report when you have the airfield in sight.”

  “Cairo, Four Three Three. Understand three thousand,” Darmstadter said, and hung his microphone up.

  Then Dolan’s voice came over his earphones, and he turned and saw that he had his microphone in front of his lips.

  “Cairo,” Dolan said. “Four Three Three. Four Three Three is Ninth Air Force flight Four Zero Five. Acknowledge. ”

  Darmstadter wondered what the hell that meant. It didn’t surprise the Cairo tower.

  “Four Three Three,” the operator with the Brooklyn accent said, “Cairo. Roger your Flight Four Zero Five.”