“Those are my orders,” he said.
“Why didn’t you give them to Lieutenant Jamison?” Canidy asked.
“I was told to present myself to the commanding officer,” the colonel said.
“For the future, Colonel, Lieutenant Jamison is my adjutant,” Canidy said. “Captain Whittaker is my executive officer.”
“I understand,” the colonel said.
“Jamison, give Colonel Innes the map,” Canidy said.
“Yes, Sir,” Jamison said crisply.
“I authorize you herewith, Colonel,” Canidy said, “to make the contents of this map known to such officers, in the grade of captain or above, as you deem necessary. I would like your thoughts about the fences, together with an estimate of materials and construction time, by, say, zero eight hundred hours tomorrow. Can you do that?”
“Yes, Sir,” the colonel said.
That’s what I was waiting for. Now I don’t think you’ll give me any trouble.
“When things get under control, Colonel,” Canidy said, “perhaps you would join me for dinner. But right now there’s a good bit to do, and precious little time to do it in, so I’ll have to ask you to excuse me.”
“I understand, Sir,” Colonel Innes said.
Canidy marched purposefully down the long hall and passed through a door, with Jamison on his heels.
“Where are you going?” Jamison asked when he stopped.
“Damned if I know,” Canidy confessed. “I just thought a purposeful march seemed called for.”
2
HEADQUARTERS
FREE FRENCH FORCES
LONDON, ENGLAND
1305 HOURS
AUGUST 12, 1942
The deputy chief of the Deuxième Bureau of Free French Forces was responsible for the most delicate intelligence function: gathering information from allies. Because the consequences of discovery while conducting such operations were not pleasant to consider, these consequences had to be constantly kept in mind.
Spying on one’s friends, especially when one is drawing one’s entire financial and logistical support from them, has a considerably different flavor from spying on the Boches. One can accept the loss of compromised agents to a German firing squad. It is quite another thing—quite impossible—to accept the penalties that would likely result from the compromise of a mission against one’s allies.
As he made his way to le Général’s office, the deputy chief of the Deuxième Bureau of Free French Forces went over these considerations in his mind. Under the circumstances, it would be appropriate to remind le Général of the operational limits his agents were forced to work under: In a “friendly” country they must not get caught. That imperative dominated any seeking of intelligence.
The deputy chief could tell from the look of le Général’s personal adjutant that le Général was already annoyed.
He marched into le Général’s office and saluted.
“Mon Général—” he began.
“Let’s have the information I requested,” le Général snapped.
The deputy chief of the Deuxième Bureau handed le Général the report. Le Général went into his desk drawer, took his spectacles from it, and put them on. Normally, because le Général believed that eyeglasses detracted from correct military appearance, he wore them only in private. Normally, the deputy chief of the Deuxième Bureau would have been dismissed and made to wait outside while le Général read the report in private.
Le Général, his round eyeglasses perched uneasily on his prominent nose, began to read:
At 1605 hours 7 August 1942, a U.S. Navy C-46 long-range transport of the Naval Air Transport Command landed at Croydon Airfield, the usual terminus of flights originating in the United States.
Rather than taxiing to the terminal, the aircraft stopped some distance from the terminal buildings. Two senior officers, the London chief of station of the American OSS and Oscar Zigler of SHAEF counterintelligence, met the aircraft. Two passengers debarked, a naval officer and an American lieutenant colonel, presumably Edmund T. Stevens, the new number two man for the OSS in London. They entered an Austin Princess limousine assigned to the OSS and were driven to the Dorchester Hotel, accompanied by two unmarked American CIC cars.
The driver of a U.S. Army three-quarter-ton truck, plus a man in the uniform of a French Navy seaman, began unloading luggage and several wooden crates from the Navy aircraft. Four American officers then debarked from the aircraft, entered two more Ford CIC cars, and were driven, with the truck following, to the Dorchester Hotel.
Almost immediately, the aircraft was moved to a guarded hangar.
It has been impossible to penetrate the rooms the OSS maintains in the Dorchester Hotel, because that entire wing of the eighth floor is being guarded by both the British (who have a man riding the elevators and another stationed in the fire escape stairs) and by the American Army’s CIC.
It had been learned, however, that the largest of the three OSS suites had been reserved for an unidentified “senior personage.”
The next morning it was determined that the American Air Corps major is a man named Canidy, who was in charge of the safe house where Vice-Admiral de Verbey was interned in the United States.
Based on information previously received from our operative in the safe house in Deal, New Jersey, it is probable that the other three officers are Captain James M. B. Whittaker, an intimate of President Roosevelt; Lieutenant C. Holdsworth Martin III, formerly a French resident and a 1939 graduate of the École Polytechnique in Paris; and Eric Fulmar, a German-American last known to be in Morocco. (There is a rather extensive dossier on Fulmar. In Morocco, he was intimately associated with Sidi Hassan el Ferruch, the pasha of Ksar es Souk. Although there is no intelligence previously connecting him with Vice-Admiral de Verbey, it seems logical to conclude that he is a longtime American agent.)
The dossier of C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., reveals that he is married to a French national and was general manager of LeFreque, S.A., the engineering firm, before the war. He and his wife have a long-standing personal relationship with Vice-Admiral de Verbey. Now residing in New York City, he is known to be associated with Colonel William Donovan of the OSS.
At 0810 8 August 1942, Canidy, Whittaker, Martin, and Fulmar left the Dorchester Hotel in an OSS automobile and were driven to the British SOE Station IX. At 1420, Canidy and Whittaker, in a vehicle assigned to SOE, were driven to Whitby House, Kent, which is the seat of the duchy of Stanfield, where they remained until 1915 hours 11 August 1942, when they returned to the Dorchester Hotel.
The estate has been turned into an OSS installation. A double barbed-wire fence has been erected by American troops, a battalion of which (Infantry, Lieutenant Colonel Innes) has been encamped on the estate since 3 August.
At 0615 hours 12 August, the naval personage and his immediate staff departed the Dorchester Hotel in the Austin Princess limousine of the OSS and were driven to Whitby House. An attempt is presently under way to penetrate Whitby House, or in some other manner confirm the identity of the naval personage.
“Merde!” said the commander in chief of Free French Forces and head of the French State.“‘Confirm the identity’? Who else do you think it could possibly be?”
“The possibility exists, mon Général, that they wish us to believe that it is Admiral de Verbey. That, perhaps, the man is a double.”
“Of course it’s de Verbey, you idiot!” le Général fumed.
“In that case, it would seem, mon Général,” the deputy chief of the Deuxième Bureau said, “that Bedell Smith has lied to you.”
De Gaulle fixed him with an icy glare.
“Find out for me,” he said finally, “why that Navy airplane is being held in reserve. Find out where it’s going.”
3
NEWARK AIRPORT
1130 HOURS
AUGUST 13, 1942
Three of the four men in the 1941 Ford wooden-bodied station wagon were wearing the uniforms of Pan American Wo
rld Airways’ aircrews. The two middle-aged Air Transport Command captains had in fact been Pan American Airways pilots before volunteering for the Air Corps. They had taken Pan American uniforms—including one for Stanley S. Fine—out of mothballs for the African flight.
The C-46 now had painted on the fuselage the insignia of CAT, the Chinese Airline, and Chinese registration numbers. Pan American’s experienced pilots were routinely hired by aircraft manufacturers to deliver aircraft to foreign airlines. All departing transatlantic flights, military and civilian, were controlled by the Air Corps. The great majority of these flights left from Newark. The C-46 had consequently been flown from Lakehurst to Newark three days before; the more routine their flight appeared, the better. From all outward appearances, theirs was just one more routine ferry flight.
As the station wagon approached the airfield, with the skyscrapers of New York City visible beyond the ironwork of the Pulaski Skyway, a B-17E passed over them, flaps and wheels lowered, and touched down.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Fine said dryly. “Four engines, too.”
“Oh ye of little faith!” Homer Wilson, the older of the two ex-PAA pilots, chuckled.
Once they had shown their papers to the guard and been passed inside the fence, they drove past long rows of B-17Es sitting on parking ramps. Sometimes as many as a hundred B-17s left Newark every day for England. The details of these ferry flights had been explained during one of their briefings—an operation Fine thought remarkably casual. They simply formed up flights of twenty or twenty-five aircraft. Two of the planes in each flight had pilots and navigators familiar with the route—qualified people who did nothing but fly back and forth across the Atlantic. The rest of the flight just followed the leaders. The trip was in two legs, first to Gander Field, in Newfoundland, and then across the Atlantic to Prestwick Field, Scotland.
They drove to a Quonset hut with a “Transient Flight Crews Report Here” sign nailed above its door.
The hut was jammed with Air Corps fliers, officers and enlisted men, almost all of them carrying Val-Paks and duffel bags. Some of them, Fine thought, were behaving like a high-school football team en route to a game. A few others, the brighter ones—or perhaps those who weren’t so new to this sort of thing—sat quietly and thoughtfully, as if they knew what they were getting into and were considering their chances of living through it.
There were a harassed-looking captain and several sergeants behind a small counter. The officer spotted the civilians.
“You’re the CAT guys?” he asked.
“Right,” Fine said.
The captain flipped through sheets of paper on a clipboard and pulled one loose and handed it to Fine.
“They took it out of the hangar,” he said. “It’s on the parking ramp, way down at the end. You got wheels?”
Fine nodded.
“When you’ve checked it over, come back here,” the captain said, “and we’ll see about getting you off.”
The C-46, surprisingly, looked larger than the B-17E parked next to it. It was in fact a larger airplane, even though it had only two engines to the B-17E’s four.
As they were walking around it, starting the preflight check, a B-17E on its landing approach came over them at fifty feet, the noise of its throttled-back engines deafening.
They found a work stand, manhandled it into place, and removed the inspection plates on the port engine while the B-17E taxied up the ramp, turned, and parked beside them.
“I am losing my mind,” Homer Wilson said. “If the kid in the left seat of that thing is a day older than sixteen, I’m Eddie Rickenbacker.”
Fine looked up but couldn’t see anything.
By the time they finished inspecting the engine and were pushing the platform around the nose to the other engine, the B-17E crew had shut the airplane down, done the paperwork, and climbed out. They were standing by the nose, waiting for a ride down the parking ramp.
“You’re right,” Fine said incredulously, “that’s a boy. They’re both boys!”
“No, I’m not,” one of the B-17E pilots said to him, shaking her head. Her hair, which she had had pinned up, came loose and fell across her shoulders. “We’re WASPs.”
“I’m afraid to ask what that is,” Homer Wilson said.
“Women Auxiliary Service Pilots,” she said. “We ferry these from the factory.” She nodded at the C-46. “I thought they were flying these over from the West Coast.”
“Not this one,” Wilson said.
“If somebody with fifteen hundred hours-plus of multiengine time wanted a job with CAT,” she said, “who could she ask?”
“There’s an office in Rockefeller Center,” Wilson said. “But I don’t think you’d want to go to China.”
“Yeah, I would,” she said. “Three trips a week here from Seattle get a little dull.”
They gave the WASP crew, two pilots and a flight engineer, all women, a ride back up the ramp. Both the Pan American pilots seemed stunned, Fine saw.
They were sent to base operations for a pilots’ briefing. A major, an older pilot, told them, using a map and a pointer, that a flight of twenty-three B-17Es would soon begin taking off. They would form up at cruise altitude, nine thousand feet, over Morristown, New Jersey. Then, in four- and five-plane Vs, they would fly north over Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine, toward Newfoundland.
“If you can get off the ground now—within the next thirty minutes or so—” he said, “the flight will catch up with you somewhere over Maine. By the time the tail of the flight has gone past you, you should be pretty close to Gander. In other words, you’ll have some company on the scary part of the first leg.”
“Let’s go wind it up,” Homer Wilson said, and they went directly back to the plane, loaded their luggage aboard, and climbed up the ladder into the cabin. There were several fire extinguishers on wheels scattered along the parking ramp, and Fine drafted the security agent to help him wheel one into place.
Once he had his engines running, Homer Wilson paid no attention to Fine at all. Fine heard the hydraulic hiss as the brakes were released; then the C-46 moved onto the taxiway and headed for the far end of the field.
4
WHITBY HOUSE
KENT, ENGLAND
AUGUST 14, 1942
Lieutenant Jamison went looking for Dick Canidy late in the afternoon, carrying with him a six-inch-thick stack of printed forms. He found him in Colonel Innes’s command post, formerly the gamekeeper’s cottage, listening with something less than enraptured fascination to the colonel’s most recent inspiration about what he called “perimeter security.” Jamison had learned that Colonel Innes had fresh ideas on the subject at least twice a day.
Jamison decided that Canidy would probably like to be rescued.
“Sorry to interrupt, Sir,” he said, crisply military. “But there are some matters that require the major’s immediate attention.”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to get back with you later, Colonel,” Canidy said.
“I understand, of course,” Colonel Innes said.
As they walked back to the house, Canidy asked, “What’s up?”
Jamison hoisted the stack of requisitions.
“Well, I appreciate being rescued, Jamey,” Canidy said. “If I had spent another five minutes in there, I would have fallen asleep and really hurt his feelings.”
“He does try hard, doesn’t he?” Jamison said.
“Still—as a manifestation of my boundless faith in your ability, and also because I don’t know what I’m signing anyway—you should know that I want you to go right ahead and forge my name to requisitions whenever you think you have to.”
“That sort of puts me on a spot,” Jamison said after Canidy had flipped through the stack of requisitions.
“How?”
“One of those requisitions you are about to sign is for a car,” Jamison said. “A real car, not a jeep. I am prepared to defend it, but I’d rather you knew about it. You won’t if you haven’t
even seen it.”
Canidy looked at him curiously.
“A car?” he asked. “You mean an American car?”
“Three jeeps and a couple of three-quarter-ton trucks are supposed to arrive tomorrow with the service troops,” Jamison said. “I thought a car would be nice to have. You just signed what I consider to be a splendid justification for a sedan.”
“Okay,” Canidy said, smiling. “If you think you can ‘persuade’ them to give us one, fine.”
“They just got half a dozen Fords,” Jamison said, and added, “I have a spy planted in the enemy headquarters. I can’t promise, but there’s a chance I can steal one from the motor pool, and we can worry about returning it later.”
“Lieutenant,” Canidy said, “are you actually standing there and proposing theft of an automobile from the OSS motor pool? You don’t really think you could get away with that, do you? Christ, it’s the OSS. They probably chain each vehicle to the pavement. And have you considered the trouble I would be in if you got caught?”
“I guess,” Jamison said uncomfortably, “it’s not such a hot idea.”
“Now,” Canidy went on, “Captain Whittaker could probably get away with it. And he could probably figure out how we could keep it after we stole it. Where is he?”
Jamison smiled. “Playing billiards,” he said.
“How do you plan to get to London?”
“With the message-center car,” Jamison said.
“I am going to hold you responsible if Captain Whittaker returns from London with a social disease,” Canidy said. “With that caveat, you have my permission to have at it. But you should keep in mind that I will follow sacred OSS tradition in this. If you get caught, I never saw you before in my life.”
He handed the requisitions back to Jamison, and they went looking for Whittaker.
Canidy had dinner with Admiral de Verbey, and they played chess for an hour afterward; then Canidy went to his room.
The Secret Warriors Page 29
