The Secret Warriors

by W. E. B Griffin

Captain the Duchess Stanfield could not remember the last time she had had an orange. They were rationed out to British children even more strictly than eggs and milk.

  No wonder, she thought as she slammed the door angrily, our refrigerator is inadequate for their needs.

  When she was in the stairwell she began to consider the most likely place the staff would have put her clothing. The answer was immediately obvious. There were two small rooms just above what had been her own apartment where her personal maid—now a Leading Aircraftswoman, Royal Air Force—had lived.

  Just as she had hoped, a neatly lettered sign was thumbtacked to her personal maid’s door:

  THESE ROOMS CONTAIN THE PERSONAL EFFECTS OF

  THEIR GRACES, THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF STANFIELD.

  WE ASK THAT THEY NOT BE DISTURBED.

  And the door was not locked.

  The small room was crowded with steamer trunks, ordinary luggage, and even some paper cartons, all neatly labeled.

  She was lifting a cardboard box labeled “HG Personal Summer Linen” when an automobile horn blared. It was cheerfully tooting “Shave and a haircut, two bits.” She wondered what peculiarity of American culture that represented. When the horn sounded again, she grew more curious. When it sounded a third time, she went to the window and looked down.

  An American army car, a Ford, had pulled up to the house. As she watched, a young American Air Corps captain stepped out.

  A rather good-looking one, Captain the Duchess Stanfield thought.

  He had his cap, with its crown crushed, on the back of his head. For some reason, American pilots felt that was chic. His jacket was open, his tie pulled down, and he wore the self-pleased look of someone in his cups. He went to the trunk and opened it, then returned to the driver’s door and blew the horn again, this time a long, steady, almost angry blast.

  At the same moment the duchess was noticing that the Ford’s left front fender was crumpled, a window below her, Edward’s window, opened and Major Canidy looked out.

  “I thought you were in the stockade,” he called down.

  The duchess remembered Canidy had said something about Lieutenant Jamison being off “stealing a car in London.”

  “We ran off the road and hit a stone post,” the captain called up, “and we couldn’t get it out of the ditch in the dark. Aside from that, it was worthy of John Dillinger.”

  “Does anyone know you stole it?” Canidy asked. “Are you a half mile ahead of the MPs?”

  “I told you, Dick, it went like clockwork.”

  “Until you ran it off the road.” Canidy chuckled. “Where’s Jamison?”

  “We also stole some whiskey,” the captain reported. “He drank some of it.”

  At that moment, a lieutenant stumbled out the other side of the car. Since he was deeper in his cups than the captain, the duchess concluded that this one was Lieutenant Jamison, the man to whom she was supposed to report.

  “You can’t leave the car there,” Canidy said. “Not out in the open.”

  My God, they did steal it!

  “I stole a tarpaulin for it,” the captain announced, then went back to the trunk and hauled out a huge canvas tarpaulin. Lieutenant Jamison went into the backseat of the car and began to unload cases of whiskey and beer.

  “Did you steal that from the OSS, too?”

  “No,” the captain said. “We found it in the middle of the road.”

  “Jimmy, behave yourself and come in,” Canidy called. “That English captain we’ve been waiting for showed up. It’s a female, a real tight-assed bitch. I’m sure she’s been sent to spy on us, anyway, so keep your hands off her and your mouth shut. That applies to you too, Jamison.”

  Deeply offended, her face coloring, the Duchess of Stanfield stepped back from the open window and very carefully closed it.

  She rummaged through her summer linen for suitable underclothing, then went through the steamer trunks until she found nightgowns. She wrapped one of the nightgowns around everything else and descended the stairs to the kitchen.

  When she pushed open the door, she startled Major Canidy, the captain, and Lieutenant Jamison, who were sharing various breakfast-preparation tasks. One of the unused stoves was littered with what they obviously planned to eat; this amounted to a week’s ration for a British family of six, not counting the oranges.

  “Up early, aren’t you, Captain?” Canidy asked sarcastically.

  “Tight, all right,” the rather good-looking captain observed, “but not too tight.”

  That was a reference to my fanny!

  “I told you to watch your mouth,” Canidy snapped.

  “I was gathering some personal possessions,” the duchess blurted, and exhibited her nightgown bundle.

  “You’ve been here before, then?” Canidy accused.

  “Yes,” she said, “I have.”

  Obviously, he has never even looked at my orders. If he had, he would know who I am.

  “The captain has been sent by the War Office to ‘liaise’ with us,” Canidy said. “Apparently, ‘to liaise’ means to roam through the place before anybody is up.”

  “I’m Jim Whittaker,” the rather good-looking captain said, advancing on her with his hand extended. “I think I should warn you that I am a pervert and find females in uniform terribly exciting.”

  He was looking at her with great fascination, and she flushed.

  “I’m not going to tell you about your mouth again, Jimmy,” Major Canidy flared.

  “I didn’t catch the name, Captain,” Whittaker said. He had her hand now and seemed reluctant to let it go.

  “My name is Stanfield,” the duchess said.

  “Like the duke?” Canidy asked.

  “I am the duchess,” she said.

  It did not produce the reaction she expected: Major Canidy, she saw, was more annoyed than awed.

  “You should have told me that last night,” Canidy said.

  “You didn’t give me the chance, Sir,” she said.

  Jim Whittaker bowed deeply, with an accompanying sweep of his arm.

  “How’s that, Duchess?” he asked. “Is that the way to do it?”

  She had to restrain herself from smiling at him. The rather good-looking young captain was drunk. A happy young man who is drunk can almost be expected to stare at a female bosom. Major Canidy was the unpleasant one.

  A question of protocol occurred to Lieutenant Jamison.

  “If you’re the duchess,” he asked somewhat thickly, “what are we supposed to call you? Captain or Duchess?”

  “I had a dog named Duchess one time,” Captain Whittaker announced. “You remember her, Dick? Great big Labrador bitch?”

  “I am ordinarily addressed as ‘Your Grace,’” she said. “But I think that would be a bit awkward, wouldn’t it? My Christian name is Elizabeth.”

  “Isn’t that the other extreme?” Canidy asked.

  “Please,” she said softly. “You and I seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot.”

  He’s thinking that over, the insufferable bastard!

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ll start all over. Put your package down and have some breakfast. The cooks don’t show until half past six, so I’m afraid it’ll have to be an omelet.”

  A sudden rage swept through her, unstoppable. “My God, you Americans are something! ‘Since there’s nothing decent to be had, we’ll have to make do with an omelet’!”

  He looked at her curiously.

  “Is there something wrong with an omelet?” he asked.

  “Do you know what the British egg ration is?”

  “No, and I don’t really give a damn,” Canidy said.

  They locked eyes for a minute, then she gave in.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “No,” Canidy said. “Sorry won’t wash. Let’s have it out in the open.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I don’t like your attitude, Duchess,” Canidy said. “I may have to put up with those arrogant bastards at S
OE, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to put up with you. I don’t like the way you came in here last night, playing captain without letting me know this is your house. And I have no intention of putting up with a litany of ‘what’s wrong with you Americans is’ from you, duchess or no duchess. Whittaker here ate cavalry horses in the Philippines until the horses ran out—”

  “Hey, Dick—” Whittaker tried to interrupt, but Canidy was not to be stopped.

  “—and neither of us needs any lectures on short rations from the likes of you. If you feel uncomfortable eating our fresh egg omelets, Your Grace, I think you should ask to be reassigned. As long as I’m running this place, I’m going to get my hands on and pass out to the people here all the goddamned luxuries—from fresh eggs to high-class whores—that I can. And I don’t want you standing around with a corncob up your ass looking down your aristocratic nose at us.”

  “Jesus Christ! Dick!” Whittaker said.

  The duchess of Stanfield took a moment to find her voice. Then she said, “Perhaps it would be best if someone else were assigned to liaise with you, Major Canidy. And now, if you’ll please excuse me?”

  She marched out of the kitchen and down the corridor to what had been the downstairs housekeeper’s broom closet, closed the door, threw herself on the folding cot, and with a great deal of effort managed to keep from crying.

  She thought she was going to look like a bloody fool when she had to report back to the War Office that she had immediately gotten into it with the man she was supposed to liaise with over something as bloody silly as how many eggs the Americans had.

  She could also report, of course, that they apparently spent much of their time drunk, and that they considered it great fun to steal automobiles from one another. The problem was that the War Office didn’t give a damn about such things. They would simply see that she had failed.

  What I am going to have to do is go to the bastard and apologize. And sound as if I mean it.

  She pushed herself off the bed.

  And be properly dressed when I do it.

  She picked the bundle off the floor and unrolled it on the bed. She picked out underwear, then started to take off her shirt.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Yes? Who is it?”

  “Room service,” a voice she recognized as Captain Whittaker’s called cheerfully.

  She went to the door and pulled it open.

  He had found a butler’s cart somewhere. It was covered with food: ham, eggs, toast, and what certainly—since it was American—was genuine strawberry marmalade.

  “No matter what,” he said, “you have to eat.”

  “I made a fool of myself in there, didn’t I?” she asked.

  He rolled the cart to a chair at the far end of the bed and stood behind it like a waiter.

  “I don’t know what happened between you two last night,” he said. “But I know what’s generally wrong with him.”

  “Generally wrong with him?”

  “For the first time in his life, he’s in love,” Whittaker said, “and almost immediately upon getting jabbed with Cupid’s arrow, they shipped him over here.”

  “Being in love produced that tirade?” she asked.

  “That, and knowing that a mission he set up is under way,” Whittaker said. “Despite what he says, he really thinks he should be doing it.”

  “You seem to know a great deal about the major,” she said.

  “We’ve been pals since we were kids,” Whittaker said.

  “What did he mean about you eating cavalry horses in the Philippines?”

  “Eat your ham and eggs, Duchess,” Whittaker said. “After which, Friendly Jim Whittaker will take you to Nasty Dick Canidy so that you can kiss and make up.”

  “But you were in the Philippines?” she pursued.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I was in the Philippines.”

  She looked down at the huge slice of ham and the four fried eggs on her plate. And saw that her shirt was unbuttoned halfway to her navel. She felt her face color.

  He was still behind her, which meant that he was almost certainly looking down her dress. She was not furious with him. He was, she reminded herself, in his cups.

  2

  LISBON, PORTUGAL

  AUGUST 16, 1942

  There were a dozen German fighter bases around Brest and Saint-Nazaire, whose pilots would have been happy to shoot the China Air Transport C-46 down, but they had come no closer to Brest than two hundred miles. And they’d been four hundred from Saint-Nazaire. En route to Lisbon, they picked up some air-to-air conversation in German, which gave Fine time to experience vicariously what bomber pilots went through.

  Four and a half hours after taking off from Shannon, the Lisbon tower operator, in a strangely accented English, cleared China Air Transport Two-naught-six to land on runway twelve.

  The Portuguese customs officials, who were accompanied by a Portugese Air Force officer, were considerably more pleasant than the Irish had been. The Air Force officer’s request to be shown around the airplane was pure flier’s curiosity. The C-46 was the first he had ever seen.

  When they asked him if there was someplace they could get something to eat and a few hours’ sleep, he summoned a taxi, bargained with the driver for them, and sent them to “a place I think you will like” in Lisbon.

  It turned out to be an elegant turn-of-the century hotel. They were met by a desk clerk in a morning coat who told them he had had a telephone call about them from the Air Force officer.

  He then took them to a finely furnished two-bedroom suite on an upper floor overlooking Rossi Square and the Dona Maria II National Theater. The bathroom contained an enormous bathtub and thick towels. After Fine came out of his bath, he found the others sitting before a large assortment of hors d’oeuvres.

  “No Scotch,” Homer Wilson said dryly. “The war, you know. But they did manage to scrape this up.” He raised a quart bottle of I. W. Harper.

  The dining room offered a wide menu at incredibly low prices, and they ate ravenously. Wilson arranged with the maître d’hôtel for box lunches to be prepared for the morning, chicken and ham sandwiches.

  At half past six the next morning, China Air Transport Two-zero-six requested taxi and takeoff for Porto Santo, in the Madeira islands.

  Almost exactly four hours later, they were telling another smiling, friendly Portuguese Air Force officer that all they were going to do was top off the tanks and get back in the air.

  The next leg was a long one, twenty-six hundred miles, ten hours plus, to Bissau in Portuguese Guinea on the lower tip of the Horn of Africa. They climbed slowly to twenty thousand feet and set up a course that would place them no closer than a hundred miles off the African coast. They also planned to fly just to the west and out of sight of the Spanish Canary Islands. If they were spotted by Spanish aircraft, it was likely that the Spanish would make their presence known to the Germans.

  Twenty minutes after Wilson had turned the pilot’s seat over to Will Nembly, the other ex-PAA pilot, and gone back into the cabin to sleep, a buzzer sounded and the oil-pressure warning light for the starboard engine lit. Almost immediately, there was another warning buzzer, louder than the first, and the fire light for the starboard engine lit.

  “You better go get Wilson,” Nembly ordered calmly as he quickly shut off fuel to the starboard engine and pulled the lever that engaged the carbon dioxide fire extinguisher. Fine looked out the window as he entered the cabin. Thick black smoke was pouring from the engine nacelle. It turned gray and white as carbon dioxide mixed with the smoke, and then the gray smoke vanished.

  Wilson, instantly awake, went to the cockpit and sat down, hastily fastening his seat and shoulder harness. Fine stood between the two pilots’ seats. He could see that the starboard propeller, feathered, had stopped spinning, and that the airspeed was already down well under two hundred miles per hour and dropping.

  Wilson did not take over the controls from Nembly. He didn’t eve
n seem especially upset.

  “We have an oil leak,” he announced conversationally.

  “No shit?” Nembly asked sarcastically.

  “What the hell do we do now?” Homer Wilson asked rhetorically. “Go back? How long can we rely on the other engine? And where the hell are we?” He reached beside him for the chart.

  “We’re a hundred fifty miles, roughly, from Santa Cruz in the Canary Islands,” Nembly said. “The Spanish Canary Islands.”

  “Christ, if we sit down there, we’ll be interned for six months,” Wilson said. “And when they finally let us go, there will be a flight of German fighters waiting for us.”

  Nembly began to adjust the engine controls. Fine saw that he was unable to maintain altitude without moving the RPM needle into the red.

  “We’re just going to have to dump some fuel,” Nembly said finally. “And try to make it back.”

  “Set a course for Lanzarote,” Fine said.

  “That sounds like an order,” Wilson said with a hint of annoyance.

  “I suppose that’s what it amounts to,” Fine said.

  Wilson considered that a moment, then looked at the chart.

  “Lanzarote, you said?” he asked. “There’s only a fighter strip on Lanzarote, according to the chart.”

  “There is a contingency plan,” Fine said, “for an emergency like this.”

  “Why is this the first I’ve heard of it?” Wilson said, but then, without waiting for a reply, told Nembly to “Steer zero-eight-five.” Nembly began a slow, wide turn to the east.

  “I’m going to start dumping fuel,” Nembly said.

  “No,” Fine said.

  Wilson looked at him questioningly.

  “Our only hope to continue the mission is that when we have a look at the engine, we’ll be able to fix it. With a little bit of luck, we’ll find we have a loose—not broken—oil feed line. If we have fuel aboard, we can take off again.”

  “What makes you think they’ll let us take off? Or that there won’t be a squadron of Messerschmitts waiting for us? Lanzarote is close to the Moroccan coast, well within the range of German fighters.”

  “If the Spaniards at Lanzarote don’t tell them we’ve landed, they won’t come looking for us,” Fine said.