W E B Griffin - Men at War 4 - The Fighting Agents

by The Fighting Agents(Lit)

  The door opened and a tall Air Corps officer, a major, the one Darmstadter had seen climb out of the B-25, entered the Quonset hut. For the first time, Darmstadter got a good look at his leather A-2 jacket. There was a Chinese flag and what was apparently some kind of a message in Chinese characters painted on the back.

  "What the hell are you doing flying in that shit?" one of the other Navy flyers said. He was the oldest of the three, a ruddy-faced middle-aged man.

  "Oh, ye of little faith!" the Air Corps major said, then turned to Darmstadter.

  "You must be Darmstadter."

  "Yes, Sir," Darmstadter said.

  "I could tell because you looked confused," the major said.

  "And like the kind of guy who would dump a C-45." He paused a moment.

  "You're in good company, Lieutenant. Commander Bitter also dumped one, didn't you, Commander?"

  The middle-aged Navy flyer laughed.

  "Goddamn, I'd forgotten about that," he said.

  "He did, didn't he?"

  "Presumably," Commander Bitter said, his voice revealing that he was a little annoyed at the reference to a dumped C-45, "you're going to explain what this is all about?"

  "I'm going to borrow Dolan for a couple of days," the major said, and then, as if he had just remembered his manners, offered his hand to Darmstadter.

  "I'm Dick Canidy, Darmstadter. Welcome aboard."

  "Sir," Darmstadter said, "I'm a little confused."

  "So am I," Commander Bitter said.

  "Where are you and Dolan going?"

  "An island called Vis in the Adriatic Sea," Canidy said, then turned to Darmstadter.

  "You checked out in the B-25, Darmstadter?"

  "No, Sir," Darmstadter said.

  "I've never even been in one."

  "Fine," the major said.

  "I was afraid you might have picked up some bootleg time."

  Darmstadter was now wholly confused.

  "No, Sir," he said.

  "Eric needs a ride home," Canidy said.

  "We're going to take Lieutenant Darmstadter along with us."

  "He just said he's never even been in a B-25," Commander Bitter said.

  "That's the whole idea," Canidy replied. He turned to face Darmstadter.

  "What I want to find out is whether a pilot with about your level of skill can be taught to land and take off from a dirt runway with a stream running through the middle of it."

  "Sir?"

  "It'll be two or three days before we go," Canidy said, "time enough for Commander Dolan to check you out in the B-25. That is, presuming you're still an eager volunteer?"

  "Sir, I'm still confused," Darmstadter said.

  "But maybe you've heard enough to rethink a little? Reconsider volunteering?

  If you want to walk, you can walk right now. No hard feelings, and no black marks on your record."

  "You aren't pulling my leg, are you. Major?" Darmstadter said.

  "You're making a joke of it, but you really meant everything you said, didn't you?"

  Canidy nodded.

  "And that's all I'm going to be told, isn't it?"

  The major nodded again.

  "In or out, Darmstadter?" Canidy asked.

  "It's up to you."

  "In, Sir," Darmstadter said.

  "Commander Dolan," the major said, "may I suggest we follow that delight nil naval custom of splicing the main brace to welcome a new officer to the wardroom?"

  "Aye, aye. Sir," Commander Dolan said, and took a bottle of bourbon from a file cabinet.

  "For Christ's sake," Commander Bitter said, "it's half past ten in the morning!"

  "I'm Joe Kennedy," the third naval aviator said to Darmstadter, offering his hand. The gold letters below the aviator's wings on the leather patch sewn to his flight jacket identified him as LT. JR

  KENNEDY, JR." USNR.

  "It's a little crazy around here, but you get used to it."

  Dolan passed around glasses that had once contained Kraft cheese spread.

  They now held a good two inches of the bourbon. Commander Bitter shook his head but took one.

  Canidy took a small swallow of the whiskey.

  "Rule One around here, Darmstadter," he said, "is that you don't write home to Mommy about what you're doing or what you've seen. And you don't tell your pals, either. The Second Great Commandment is like unto the first.

  You don't ask questions. But before we put that into effect, you can have one question."

  There were at least a dozen questions spinning around in Darmstadter's mind. He was surprised at the one he blurted:

  "Why are the tops cut off those B17s?"

  "That's not the question I expected," Canidy said.

  "I thought you'd ask what's going on around here. Then I would have told you that you have just joined the OSS on a probationary status. If you turn out, you'll join the OSS's private air corps. If you don't... you won't like what will happen if you don't. Not a threat, a statement of fact."

  Darmstadter had heard about the OSS. Very hush-hush, involved in all sorts of things involving espionage and sabotage and dropping agents behind enemy lines.

  Canidy saw the shock on Darmstadter's face and smiled.

  "As far as the B-17s are concerned," Canidy went on, "what we're trying to do with them is turn them into radio-controlled flying bombs. We fill them with an English explosive called Torpex. Then Joe gets in, fires it up, and takes off. We cut the roof off so he can bail out. The plane is then flown to the target by radio control. If we can get the sonofabitch to work twice in a row, we're going to fly one into the German submarine pens at Saint-Lazare. So far we haven't been able to get it to work twice in a row."

  Darmstadter looked into Canidy's face and saw that he had been told the truth.

  "You've had your question," Canidy said.

  "I answered it. That's all you get."

  "I understand. Sir," Darmstadter said seriously.

  The door of the Quonset creaked again as it opened. Darmstadter saw an enormous Packard limousine sitting outside. It had been adopted for military service by having a serial number stenciled onto the hood and the words "U.S.

  Army" on the doors. But it still looked, Darmstadter thought, as if it should be rolling up to Buckingham Palace and not a Quonset hut in a B-17 graveyard.

  A tall, attractive woman wearing the uniform of a sergeant of the Women's Royal Army Corps came in. The uniform was of rough woolen material and ill fitting but it did not hide the fact that beneath it was a very well set-up female, indeed.

  She looked curiously, hesitantly, at Darmstadter.

  In the prescribed British manner, the WRAC sergeant came to stiff attention and stamped her foot.

  "Sir," she said to Canidy.

  "Sorry to be late, Sir. There was a dreadful smashup on the way."

  "It's all right, Agnes, he's now one of us. Lieutenant Darmstadter, Sergeant Agnes Draper."

  "Hello," Sgt. Draper said. Her smile was dazzling.

  "To answer your unspoken question, Commander Bitter," Canidy said dryly.

  "Yes, Sergeant Draper and I can find time in our busy schedule to take lunch with you. And how lucky for you both that I have just given Darmstadter the 'no questions allowed' speech."

  Commander Bitter's face tightened in anger. Commander Dolan and It.

  Kennedy laughed. Sgt. Draper blushed.

  "Damn you, Dick," Sgt. Draper said.

  "Military courtesy around here, you may have noticed. Lieutenant Darmstadter, is sometimes a bit lax. In the future. Sergeant Draper, you will make that 'damn you. Sir."" "Oh, go to hell," she said, but she smiled at him.

  [FOUR]

  Petty Officers' Club Navy Yard, Washington, D.C.

  Radioman 2nd Class Joe Garvey, USN, moved his beer glass in little circles on the bar, spreading the little puddle of condensation in ever-larger circles. Joe Garvey was more than a little drunk. He had been drinking in the petty officers' club since half past five, when he'd
come to the club from the petty officers' mess. And he was not used to drinking. Sometimes, out at Mare Island, after he'd made radioman third, he had a beer. It was bad enough in boot camp being a skinny little guy with glasses who had never been afloat on anything bigger than a whaleboat, without getting the reputation for being a teetotaler too. Real sailors drank. It was as simple as that.

  Joe Garvey hadn't wanted to be a radioman when he joined the Navy. He had wanted to go to sea as maybe a gunner on a twin-Bofors 20mm, something like that, maybe on a destroyer. Maybe even in a submarine. If he had known more about the Navy, he would have kept his mouth shut about having a ham license. But he'd been a boot, and when they'd asked him, he'd told about being a ham. So they gave him a code test, at twenty words per minute, and he'd flown through that; he'd been copying forty words a minute since he was fifteen.

  So he'd gone right from Great Lakes Naval Training Station to Mare Island as a radioman striker--a USN enlisted man working to qualify for a rating--instead of going to sea. And they'd made him seaman first and given him the exam for radioman third, and he'd passed that with a 98.5. And then he'd been on the next promotion list. And six months after that, he'd made 97.4 on the exam for radioman second.

  And when he'd asked his chief about maybe getting sea duty, his chief told him the Navy needed him right where he was; there weren't all that many guys around who could handle a key the way he could; and it made more sense to have the best operators in an important commo center, rather than afloat, where they might average maybe fifteen minutes a day on the air.

  The first interesting thing that had happened to him since he'd been in the Navy was the Chief coming to him and telling him to pack his gear, that he'd been placed on TDY to Washington, and that they were holding the courier plane for him.

  A couple of times at Mare Island, when he couldn't think of a way to get out of it, he'd sometimes had two beers, or even three, but he was not used to just sitting at a bar and drinking one beer after another.

  They had been treating him real well at the Navy Yard. Instead of what he expected--a bunk and a wall locker in one of the big bays reserved for in transit white hats--he had a private room, with a desk and even a telephone.

  "These are chief's quarters," the master-at-arms had told him.

  "If anybody asks what you're doing in them, you tell them to see me."

  "What am I doing in them?" Garvey had asked.

  "Let's just say that's where Chief Ellis said to put you," the master-at-arms said.

  "What about formations?"

  "You don't have to stand no formations," the master-at-arms said.

  "All you got to do is be available, in case they need you. You can go anywhere you want to go, so long as there's a telephone where you're going and I know where you are and what the number is--and you can get back here in thirty minutes. You want to go get your ashes hauled, Garvey, just make sure she's got a telephone and that you'll be able to pull your pants on and get back here in thirty minutes."

  Joe Garvey had not been summoned, and neither had he gotten his ashes hauled. The truth of the matter was that they had shown him a Technicolor movie in boot camp that had scared the hell out of him. Guys with balls as big as basketballs, and guys with their dicks rotting off. And the chief who had given that lecture had said that if you didn't want to get promoted and wanted to spend the rest of your time in the Navy cleaning grease traps or chipping paint, catching a dose of clap was a good way to do that.

  The smart thing to do, the chief had said, was to keep your pecker in your pocket and wait until you got home and could stick it in some nice, clean, respectable girl you knew wasn't going to give you nothing that would fuck up your life permanently.

  There were a couple of nice girls Joe Garvey knew back in Louisville, but none who had given him any hint that they would go to the movies with him, much less let him do that to them, but he had decided to keep his pecker in his pocket anyway. He didn't want his dick rotting off before he had a chance to use it.

  And he wanted to get promoted. He was already a petty officer second, and if you were a skinny little shit who wore glasses, he knew that was a good thing to be. What he had wanted most out of life, at least until they'd put him on a plane at Mare Island and flown him here, was to make chief radioman.

  That wasn't such an impossible dream. Not only was he one hell of a radio operator--he could knock out fifty words a minute and read sixty--but he knew about radios.

  There were a lot of radiomen who were good operators, and there were a lot of radiomen who were good technicians, but there weren't all that many who were both. Since the Navy wasn't going to send him to sea, the next best thing was to make chief radioman. Nobody would believe that a chief radioman had never been to sea. Or if that came out, people would understand that the Navy had its reasons for keeping him ashore. If he was a chief, it wouldn't matter that he was a skinny little shit who wore glasses. A chief was a chief, period.

  And making radioman first was going to be easier than he had thought it would be. He was going to go back to Mare Island when they were through with him with a letter of commendation from a goddamned Navy captain.

  "Makes you sound like John Paul Jones, Garvey," Chief Ellis had told him.

  "I

  know, 'cause I wrote it."

  The next time the promotion board sat, he was probably going to be the only radioman second going for first with a letter of commendation like that.

  just kept his mouth shut, he was going to make radioman first, and a little later, he would make chief radioman.

  But that was no longer good enough. He didn't want to sit out the war in the commo section at Mare Island. He wanted to get into the war. When somebody asked him, later, what he'd done in the war, he didn't want to have to tell them he'd been at Mare Island, period.

  And he thought he had figured out what to do about it.

  "Puck it!" Radioman Second Joe Garvey said aloud, which made the bartender look at him strangely.

  Then he got off the bar stool, shrugged his arms into his peacoat, put his hat at a jaunty angle on his head, and walked, somewhat unsteadily, out of the bar of the petty officers' club.

  He didn't stop to pick up his Liberty Card. He was afraid the master-at-arms would smell the beer on him and not give it to him. He had been given an "any hour in and out" duty card, which would get him past the Marine MP at the gate.

  As he went through the gate, a taxicab rolled up and an officer got out. Joe Garvey saluted and got in.

  sense to have the best operators in an important commo center, rather than afloat, where they might average maybe fifteen minutes a day on the air.

  The first interesting thing that had happened to him since he'd been in the Navy was the Chief coming to him and telling him to pack his gear, that he'd been placed on TDY to Washington, and that they were holding the courier plane for him.

  A couple of times at Mare Island, when he couldn't think of a way to get out of it, he'd sometimes had two beers, or even three, but he was not used to just sitting at a bar and drinking one beer after another.

  They had been treating him real well at the Navy Yard. Instead of what he expected--a bunk and a wall locker in one of the big bays reserved for in transit white hats--he had a private room, with a desk and even a telephone.

  "These are chief's quarters," the master-at-arms had told him.

  "If anybody asks what you're doing in them, you tell them to see me."

  "What am I doing in them?" Garvey had asked.

  "Let's just say that's where Chief Ellis said to put you," the master-at-arms said.

  "What about formations?"

  "You don't have to stand no formations," the master-at-arms said.

  "All you got to do is be available, in case they need you. You can go anywhere you want to go, so long as there's a telephone where you're going and I know where you are and what the number is--and you can get back here in thirty minutes. You want to go get your ashes hauled,
Garvey, just make sure she's got a telephone and that you'll be able to pull your pants on and get back here in thirty minutes."

  Joe Garvey had not been summoned, and neither had he gotten his ashes hauled. The truth of the matter was that they had shown him a Technicolor movie in boot camp that had scared the hell out of him. Guys with balls as big as basketballs, and guys with their dicks rotting off. And the chief who had given that lecture had said that if you didn't want to get promoted and wanted to spend the rest of your time in the Navy cleaning grease traps or chipping paint, catching a dose of clap was a good way to do that.