The Saboteurs

by W. E. B Griffin

  He paused, caught his breath.

  Then he more quietly added, disgusted, “Jesusfuckingchrist, Tony. How stupid do you think I am?”

  Slowly shaking his head, Lucchese looked down at his boots, then up and out the window, avoiding eye contact. This had all seemed so much easier when it was being planned.

  How’d it go bad? Who talked?

  As he watched a cable swing two U.S. Army one-ton Ben Hur trailers past the window en route to a ship hold, Lucchese thought that he might cry.

  The phone rang.

  Tony turned to the sound, looked at the phone, looked at the clock on the wall showing 8:01, looked at Biaggio.

  It rang a second time.

  “Go on and get it,” Biaggio said after a moment.

  But it had stopped ringing.

  “I’m supposed to answer on the third ring next time they call, at two after.”

  Lucchese looked up at the clock and watched the second hand tick around the face.

  When the phone had rung three times, Lucchese put the receiver to his ear and said, “Yeah?”

  Biaggio sensed Mahoney moving, and when he looked at him he saw that he was leaning down and pulling his Colt .38 caliber revolver out from where he stashed it in the bottom drawer of his desk. Mahoney swung out the cylinder of the snub-nose, checked to see that it was loaded, then softly clicked the cylinder back in. He pulled up his left pants cuff, tucked the pistol in his sock, snugging it inside the top of his leather boot, then pulled the cuff back down. He looked at Lucchese.

  “Uh-huh,” Lucchese was saying into the phone, his eyes glued on Biaggio. “That’s right. It’s done. I’ve passed the word.”

  Lucchese listened for a moment, said, “Right,” then hung up the receiver.

  He looked at Biaggio. “Now what?”

  Biaggio stubbed out his cigarette.

  “You wait,” Biaggio said. “Right there, by the phone.”

  “Another call?”

  “Let’s go, Mike,” Biaggio said, standing up. “We got work to do.”

  “A call from who?” Lucchese pursued.

  Little Joe and Iron Mike ignored the question.

  Lucchese watched them pull on their heavy coats and thick knit caps and steel safety helmets, then go through the door without saying another word.

  The icy wind blew in, and for a moment there was the loud drone of the heavy equipment outside before the door slammed shut with the wind.

  The gang boss office was now quiet except for the sound of the radio playing. Softly, International Longshoreman’s Association gang boss Anthony Christopher “Tony the Gut” Lucchese started crying.

  “Oh, God…” he sobbed.

  As Biaggio and Mahoney walked away from the office, they were aware of a U.S. Army six-by-six—a Truck, General Purpose, two-and-one-half-ton 6×6, meaning all wheels were powered—hanging from the cable of a ten-ton boom.

  The GMC “deuce and a half,” an Army workhorse, had an open cab with a canvas-covered cargo area and was painted olive drab with white markings, including that of a three-foot-diameter star-in-a-ring that about covered the whole door. It was not uncommon for a Ben Hur trailer to be hooked behind a six-by-six.

  “Okay,” Biaggio said to Maloney.

  They gave the signal—each pulled a knit scarf from an overcoat pocket and simultaneously wrapped their necks—then turned to walk toward the farthest Liberty ship.

  Immediately, they heard the pitch of the ten-ton boom winch become deeper, straining under a heavy load. The six-by-six hanging on the ten-ton boom cable was now beginning to swing toward its ship hold.

  Then there came a great screaming of winch gears and the cable started to unspool rapidly as the giant GMC truck fell from the sky.

  As he stared intently at the phone, waiting for it to ring and wondering who it would be, Tony heard a terrible noise on the dock outside the office.

  He looked up at the plate-glass window in time to see a blur of olive drab with a white star fill it.

  In his last conscious moment, Tony the Gut saw the window explode—its shards flying into the office and spearing his flesh—and felt the office ceiling collapse on his head.

  A huge truck tire came to a rest on his back, crushing out his last breath.

  [ FOUR ]

  OSS London Station

  Berkeley Square

  London, England

  0745 28 February 1943

  Colonel David Kirkpatrick Este Bruce, the distinguished-looking chief of London Station, heard the rapping of knuckles on the wooden doorframe and looked up from the stack of documents that he had been reading since he had arrived at six o’clock.

  Bruce had the calm and detached manner of a high-level career diplomat, which is what he had set out to be when he’d joined the diplomatic corps after graduating from Princeton University. His face was stonelike, chiseled, and his eyes burned with an intensity that caused him to appear older than his years, though he had turned forty-five just two weeks earlier.

  His number two, Lieutenant Colonel Ed Stevens, a beginning-to-gray forty-four-year-old whose strong face always seemed to be in deep thought, stood in the doorway to the empty outer office of Bruce’s administrative assistant.

  “Good morning, sir,” Lieutenant Colonel Stevens said, and held up an envelope stamped TOP SECRET. “This just came in from Colonel Donovan.”

  Bruce glanced at a side table. It held photographs in silver and wooden frames of Bruce with politicians and military leaders—one showed him with British prime minister Winston Churchill at the polo grounds, another with General Dwight Eisenhower in Algiers—and there was a silver-framed image taken of Bruce in an Adirondack chair with his wife, Alisa, sitting on his lap.

  It had been snapped in Nantucket some years earlier—a decade, if not longer—and it had captured the young, vibrant couple in a relaxed, carefree moment. A visibly half-in-the-bag Bruce, in a tailored dark suit, had the top button of his crisp white shirt undone and his orange-and-black rep necktie loosened, while his wife, in pearls and a dark silk cocktail dress, held her high-heel shoes in one hand, a drink in the other.

  It was one of Bruce’s favorites because it froze in time a very rare moment when their vast wealth did not matter—Bruce had a great deal of his own money when he married Alisa, née Mellon, the richest woman in America.

  At that moment, they had been simply happy, a loving couple—which wasn’t necessarily the case now, and one reason Bruce found himself more and more on edge.

  “’Morning, Ed,” Bruce said almost absently, waving him in the office.

  Next to the papers on the deeply polished desk was a silver service for coffee—a large carafe, three clean cups and saucers in addition to the cup and saucer Bruce had used, and sugar and milk in their bowl and pitcher—and Bruce motioned toward it.

  “You’ll forgive my manners when I ask you to please pour yourself a cup,” Bruce said, taking the envelope.

  “Thanks. I believe I can manage,” Stevens said agreeably, as Bruce broke the seal on the envelope, flipped past the two TOP SECRET cover pages, and began to read.

  Bruce grunted.

  “Interesting,” he said. “Not exactly surprising.” He put the sheets back in the envelope and looked at Stevens. “Damned good news, as far as I’m concerned.”

  Ed Stevens, settling into one of the two chairs in front of the desk, did not reply immediately, but when Bruce continued to look at him, seemingly expecting some comment, Stevens said cautiously, between sips of coffee, “Canidy is due here this morning.”

  “Good. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I’ve always thought that Canidy is out of his depth here, and he is helping prove my point with his reckless acts.”

  He poked a finger at the stack of documents.

  “There’s a message in here from Howell confirming that Howell arrived in Washington with Fulmar and the Dyers. Just that. Nothing more.”

  Stevens felt unease at what he recognized as Bruce’s ob
vious anger. The slight that had triggered it clearly had not been forgotten nor forgiven.

  David Bruce had learned on February 14—two days after celebrating his birthday—in an EYES ONLY personal message from Colonel Donovan that a mission was taking place in Bruce’s backyard, one of such extreme importance—“Presidential,” Donovan had written—that Bruce was deemed not to have the “Need to Know.”

  That was difficult enough for the chief of OSS London to swallow, but what made matters worse was the fact that Stevens—My deputy, for Christ’s sake! Bruce had thought disgustedly—did have the Need to Know, though Donovan had said that Stevens was privy only to limited details in order for him to act should he suspect that any actions by OSS London Station—or by Bruce personally—might undermine the mission.

  It was not a perfect situation, the OSS director apologized, but it was a necessity, one made by direct order of FDR. Donovan promised to bring Bruce into the loop as soon as possible.

  It turned out that Donovan didn’t have to; of all people, Canidy had done it for him, in a TOP SECRET—EYES ONLY message that he had sent from German-occupied Hungary.

  Dick Canidy was Eric Fulmar’s OSS control officer. He had sent Fulmar, his prep-school classmate and the American-born son of a German industrialist, to Germany to smuggle out Professor Frederick Dyer, whom Canidy understood to be an expert in metallurgy and in the manufacture of jet and rocket engines. The fifty-nine-year-old professor was disgusted with Nazis in general and Hitler in particular, and it was hoped that he would assist the Allies not only in the pinpointing of the factories that were producing these engines, which would then be bombed and thus preserve Allied air superiority, but also in the advancement of the Allies’ own development of jets and rockets.

  What Canidy—and Stevens and Bruce and everyone except a select few on the secret list controlled by the President—did not know was that Dyer was more importantly also a scientist with expertise in nuclear fission, and his escape would (a) deny the Germans his work in the race to develop an atomic bomb and (b) help the Americans in theirs—code-named the Manhattan Project—at which they had already had considerable success, including the first uranium chain reaction on December 2, 1942, in a lab secretly built in a squash court under the football stands of the University of Chicago.

  An escape route had been carefully planned, with a series of OSS and British Special Operations Executive agents and resistance members set to smuggle Fulmar and the professor and his daughter from Marburg an der Lahn in Germany (where Fulmar was leaving a long trail of German SS bodies) to Vienna, then Budapest, and ultimately to the coast of the Adriatic Sea, where a fishing boat would ferry them out to the island of Vis, on which Canidy waited with his hidden B-25 aircraft.

  That had been the plan. But, as plans can, it went bad—placing the President’s extreme mission, as well as the lives of Fulmar and the professor, in jeopardy.

  Canidy had sent a message from Vis saying that only Gisella Dyer, the professor’s attractive twenty-nine-year-old daughter, had made it out via the Hungarian pipeline. Fulmar and the professor were serving ninety days’ hard labor in Pécs, in southwest Hungary, their punishment for being black marketers, ones who failed to pay off local officials.

  When word got back to OSS Washington, Donovan made a cold-blooded decision: If in ten days Canidy failed to rescue Fulmar and Professor Dyer, Canidy was ordered to terminate them to keep them from falling into the hands of the Germans on their trail.

  When Donovan then learned that Canidy, risking everything, had gone after them himself, and then that the OSS team and the C-47 sent to support him was declared late and presumed lost, Donovan had had to cut his losses: He ordered a squadron of B-17s, ostensibly en route for a raid on Budapest, to take out the Hungarian prison as a target of opportunity.

  But the C-47 hadn’t been lost—it’d been forced to land.

  And then, as the B-17s leveled the prison at Pécs, it’d taken off with Canidy and Fulmar and Professor Dyer…mission accomplished.

  Bruce reached out for the carafe and poured himself more coffee as he thought how that damned loose cannon Dick Canidy had again gotten away with not following the standard operating procedures.

  But maybe not, he thought, judging by this morning’s message. Maybe Donovan is about to call Canidy on the carpet.

  Bruce caught the look in Stevens’s eyes and realized that he had put him in an awkward position.

  “Sorry, Ed. Forget I said anything.”

  Bruce thumbed through the pile of messages until he found what he was looking for and passed it to Stevens. “You’ve seen this?”

  “Yeah,” Stevens said after he scanned it. “Another request from Sandman for Corsica.”

  “I know getting the weapons is no problem. But do we have the cash on hand that they request?”

  “Can you give me a minute?” Stevens asked and nodded toward his office, signifying that he wanted to check something.

  “Of course,” Bruce said, then picked up his coffee cup and turned his attention to the decrypted message from the OSS agent on the Axis-held French island of Corsica.

  Two months earlier, in mid-December, the Office of Strategic Services had made history with the landing of the first OSS secret agent team inside enemy-occupied Europe. To the great relief of OSS stations from North Africa to London to Washington, the team, with minimal difficulties, had had textbook success from the time its clandestine radio station, code-named PEARL HARBOR, had, on December 25, 1942, sent to OSS Algiers Station the first of what would become almost daily messages that detailed German and Italian strengths and strategic locations and more.

  It was remarkable for the OSS on a number of levels, not the least of which was that it garnered the young agency genuine credibility—albeit grudgingly in some quarters, such as the British SIS, which had been formed in the sixteenth century and had absolutely no patience for the stumbles of the infant American intelligence organization.

  General Dwight David Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, while not exactly a cheerleader for the unorthodox methods of Colonel Donovan and his merry band of spies, became a cautious convert when, at Allied Forces Headquarters in North Africa, he was provided with the OSS intel relayed from Corsica.

  The covert team, using its growing web of local connections, had reported that only twenty-five thousand Italians had taken the island; that they’d done it with relative ease because the Vichy government had ordered the French army’s two battalions there not to resist; that these battalions were demobilized and their general put under house arrest; and that the Italians had limited their strength on the island only to the west and east coasts and to major highways inland.

  Building on that team’s success, the OSS was continually assembling and training more teams. Two were on standby to go in as soon as possible, one of these an emergency backup to the first—as relief, when the team was exfiltrated, or as replacement, in the event that its cover was blown. The rest were being trained for SO—Special Operations—OSS agents sent in to support the local resistance, the Corsican Maquis, with tools for sabotage and harassment of the enemy.

  As Bruce read the most recent report from the agent on Corsica—this report including a list of the local gendarmes that the team had recruited and their needs—there was a light tap at the door.

  “Good morning, sir,” the pleasant voice of a woman said.

  David Bruce looked up and saw Captain Helene Dancy, Women’s Army Corps.

  Captain Dancy was Bruce’s administrative assistant, an attractive brunette in her thirties who had left a position at the Prudential Insurance Company as executive secretary to the senior vice president for real estate. She was professional and thorough, with the golden ability to get things done when others would have long ago given up.

  “Good morning, Captain. Everything well with you this morning?”

  “Just fine, thank you, sir.”

  She nodded at the stack of reports.

  “An
d you? I see you’ve managed your usual early start. Anything for me?”

  “Never early enough, it would seem,” he said with a tone of resignation. “Colonel Stevens just left to find something. I have nothing for you right now, but should Stevens require help that could change.”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “Were you able to locate Captain Fine?”

  “Yes, sir. Late yesterday. And I just passed by him in the hall. He said he would be by momentarily.”

  Bruce glanced at the file on his desk that held the TOP SECRET message from Donovan.

  “So should Major Canidy. While I’d like to keep Canidy at bay, I don’t think that that’s going to happen.” He paused. “But I might be able to use that to my advantage.”

  “Sir?” Captain Dancy said. “I don’t follow.”

  “Never mind it, please. Just thinking aloud. Show them in when they get here.”

  Captain Dancy had finally sat down at her desk after having replaced the coffee service in David Bruce’s office with a carafe of fresh coffee and clean cups when a tall scholarly looking man in the uniform of a United States Army Air Forces captain entered her office.

  “Sorry I took so long,” Captain Stanley S. Fine said.

  “Not a problem,” Captain Dancy replied with a smile. “Colonel Bruce said you were to go right in when you got here.”

  She had long been impressed with the thirty-three-year-old Fine and not just because she knew that before joining the OSS and before being a commander of a B-17 squadron (this despite his great desire to be a fighter pilot) he had been a Hollywood lawyer. That, of course, did impress her—the movie business had that effect—but what Captain Dancy really understood about Captain Fine was that he was a very wise man and she knew this judgment of his character was widely shared, including by both Colonel Donovan and Colonel Bruce.

  “His nose out of joint that I’m late?” Captain Fine said.

  “You’re not late. And I don’t think that it’s you he’s—”