The Saboteurs

by W. E. B Griffin

  Start with the little guy, he thought. Be nice. Don’t make waves.

  That had been a disaster.

  At every step, they gave him a variation on the same bullshit line: “It’s going to take more than a little time to pinpoint the problem—a day, maybe longer—then fix it—did you see the full maintenance hangars as you came in?—or arrange for an available backup aircraft and get it in the air, or failing all that, find everyone an empty seat here and there on various other aircraft. We’re sorry, Major. It’s the best we can do. We didn’t break the aircraft on purpose.”

  And the more Canidy pushed, the more resistance he encountered.

  To hell with this, Canidy thought.

  He made a direct path to the airfield’s Flight Operations.

  There he learned from a clerk that another C-54—this one freshly refueled and headed for Washington—had just about finished embarking its passengers.

  “As the major might expect,” the clerk added, in what he thought was a helpful manner, “the aircraft is completely full. The passenger manifest is closed.”

  With some effort, Canidy tracked down the Air Officer of the Day and explained his situation. This of course could not have fallen on less sympathetic ears.

  “Everybody’s in a hurry to get home, Major,” Canadian Air Force Group Captain Pierre Tugnutt said.

  Tugnutt was an officious prissy type, tall and slight, with a meticulously trimmed pencil mustache and thin strands of hair combed over an enormous bald spot, who practically sniffed with contempt as he handed back Canidy’s USAAF travel orders.

  “I’m not every—” Canidy said to Group Captain Tugnutt before he realized others in the room were watching their interaction and he stopped.

  “Captain,” he began again, calmly, “could we have a private moment?”

  “I believe our business here is complete, Major.”

  “Captain,” Canidy replied evenly and with a forced smile, “it would really be in the best interests of both of us.” He paused, then nodded toward the small adjoining office. “Please.”

  Captain Tugnutt’s bony face contorted to show his obvious annoyance. He finally said, “Very well.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Canidy said loudly, more for the benefit of those in the room than for Tugnutt.

  In the office, Captain Tugnutt said, “Now, Major—”

  “Captain,” Canidy interrupted, his voice low as he spoke with an edge to his words, “know that I share this with great reluctance.”

  Canidy produced a small leather wallet containing his OSS anywhere-anytime-anyfuckingthing credentials.

  “You get me on that plane, sir,” Canidy added, “or we get the air vice marshall on the horn.”

  The AOD raised an eyebrow as he reviewed the credentials—twice, since it was clear he had never seen any like them before—before he handed them back.

  “If you’d made these available from the start, Major,” Captain Tugnutt said snottily, “there’d been no problem, and certainly no call for threats.”

  It was all Canidy could do not to suggest that the captain make himself genuinely useful to at least one person by going off and performing on himself what his surname implied.

  But Canidy wanted on that damned airplane—and out of Gander—and impressed himself by keeping his automatic mouth shut for once.

  As Canidy climbed aboard the about-to-depart flight, he realized that his problems would likely not end with the fastening of his lap belt. He saw his open seat—the only open seat on the whole aircraft—and it was right next to a lieutenant colonel who had a very sour look.

  He clearly was not at all happy that his traveling buddy, also a light bird, had been bumped—and, worse than bumped, made to get off of the plane—to make room for a lowly major.

  Canidy, not in any mood to deal with another by-the-book type, dealt with the situation in what he felt was the best manner: He ignored it.

  Then he thought, Why the hell not? I’m ordered home to take my medicine, so what’s the worst that can happen? They send me back to fight the Krauts?

  Canidy pulled a silver flask from his tunic, lifted it toward the prickly lieutenant colonel as if in a toast, said with a smile, “For medicinal purposes,” then, in three healthy swigs, drained half of the scotch contained therein, put the flask back in his tunic pocket, pulled his cap down so the brim covered his eyes, and with vivid memories of the bittersweet hours in the arms of Ann Chambers at her flat the previous night—Or was it thenight before? Jesus, I hate this travel—he slid into a deep sleep.

  [ FIVE ]

  Anacostia Naval Air Station

  Washington, D.C.

  1520 5 March 1943

  The change in pitch of the four Twin Wasp radial engines on the Air Transport Command C-54 when the pilot throttled back for a slow descent from its cruising altitude of nine thousand feet caused Major Richard Canidy, USAAF, to stir from his sleep. He had awakened briefly once before when he thought he may have felt another odd vibration, but all engines continued to turn and he had dozed off again.

  He cracked open one eye now, then the other, and after his pupils adjusted to the painfully bright afternoon sunlight that was flooding into his window he glanced out over the right wing. He could see a beautiful blanket of snow covering everything on the ground of what he guessed was Delaware. No, Maryland, he corrected himself when he recognized the geography of the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay.

  The pilot banked a bit to the right, and when the brilliant sun reflected off the wing, Canidy winced, then turned away from the window.

  The lieutenant colonel was still strapped in next to Canidy, and though he did not seem to be as much out of sorts as he had been at takeoff, he was not exactly about to offer, say, his services as a D.C. tour guide—or even share transportation into the district.

  Sharing transportation, Canidy saw as he carried his duffel on his shoulder down the aircraft steps behind the lieutenant colonel, was not going to be a problem.

  There, parked among a line of olive drab Chevrolet staff cars, was a 1941 Packard 280 convertible coupe. Leaning on its fender, reading a copy of the Washington Star, was a stocky chief boatswain’s mate wearing an expensively tailored United States Navy uniform. On the chief’s sleeve were stitched twenty-four years’ worth of hash marks.

  Canidy realized that the scene fascinated the lieutenant colonel, and he intentionally picked up his pace across the tarmac enough to move ahead of the lieutenant colonel.

  The lieutenant colonel watched as the goddamned major who had bumped his buddy off of the C-54 approached the chief.

  When the major barked, “Ellis!” the chief quickly looked up from his paper, scanned the line of arriving passengers, then even more quickly folded the Star and tossed it in the Packard, and saluted the major crisply.

  “Major Canidy, sir!”

  The major tossed his duffel to the chief, who caught it, then moved ahead of the major and opened the passenger door of the coupe. Once the major was in the car, the chief closed the door, put the duffel in the trunk, slid in behind the wheel, and began to drive away.

  The lieutenant colonel stood stiffly as the car passed, the major saluting smartly and smiling from its passenger’s seat. It took a moment or so for the stunned lieutenant colonel to answer with barely a wave of a salute.

  “How the hell are you, Chief?” Canidy said as the Packard turned left onto South Capitol Street, SE, then started to cross the bridge into the city.

  “Doing pretty good, Dick,” Ellis replied with a warm smile. “That light bird with you have a bug up his ass or what?”

  Canidy picked up the copy of the Star and scanned the headlines. “I had to bump his buddy off the flight at Gander, and, if that wasn’t enough, the AOD refused to tell him why. And then I wouldn’t, either.”

  Ellis grinned, shaking his head. “Damned good to see you. Didn’t think that I would.”

  Ellis worked for Colonel Donovan as special assistant to the director. He und
erstood that to mean that he was to do “everything and anything” to make the life of the head of the OSS easier and that kept him going round the clock. He was privy to ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of everything the director read, wrote, uttered, or otherwise transmitted, and knew all about Canidy having been in German-occupied Hungary.

  He was also quite aware that Donovan had called Canidy back from London in a SECRET—EYES ONLY message—Ellis was the one who had hand-carried it to the commo room for encryption and transmittal. That duty of course naturally fell under the heading of doing everything and anything for the director. But, as far as Ellis was concerned, so did an errand to fetch Dick Canidy at the airfield.

  Truth be known, Ellis had the greatest respect for Canidy, and would have done anything for him.

  “Should I ask about the wheels?” Canidy said.

  “I’ve got orders to drive it once a week so it don’t just sit and rot behind the house on Q Street.”

  The house on Q Street, NW, a turn-of-the-century mansion that had long belonged to the wealthy Whittaker family, was being leased for one dollar a year to the Office of Strategic Services as a place to safely and discreetly house whomever—agents, politicians—was deemed necessary in the course of duty.

  Whittaker Construction Company, which had begun by building and operating railroads before the Civil War, now included various areas of heavy construction (ports for ships and planes, hotels, office buildings), and continued to be quite prosperous.

  With enormous wealth came very high connections and the majority shareholder of the firm—James M. B. Whittaker (Harvard ’39), presently a U.S. Army captain on an OSS mission behind enemy lines in the Philip-pines—had been known to address the President of the United States as “Uncle Frank,” and not always pleasantly.

  “Sounds like something Jimmy Whittaker would say,” Canidy said.

  “Yeah, and so I was doing just that, just about to go on my usual thirty-minute spin, when the boss, who didn’t want you looking for him in his office, said to go find you at Anacostia. ‘Why don’t you take the convertible out to the prodigal son?’ is what he said.”

  “I’m not the prodigal son. Jimmy is. That’s why it’s his car. Hell, his house. Any word from Jimmy?”

  Ellis looked at him blankly. He didn’t respond.

  “I’ll take the absence of bad news to mean good news,” Canidy said with a smile.

  Ellis, eyes on the road ahead, shook his head.

  Canidy went on: “The boss have much to say about me otherwise?”

  “Only that he’d meet us after he stopped by his town house in Georgetown.”

  “That works,” Canidy said. “I definitely need a change of clothes.”

  “A shower wouldn’t hurt, either,” Chief Ellis said, and smirked as he turned left onto M Street, headed for Rock Creek Parkway.

  The house on Q Street, NW—a mansion on an estate—was surrounded by an eight-foot-high brick wall. Ellis brought the Packard to a stop with its bumper against the heavy, solid gate in the wall.

  He was about to tap out “Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits” on the horn—mostly because it drove the ex–Secret Service guys nuts, and Ellis didn’t much care for them or their holier-than-thou attitudes—when a muscular man in civilian clothing and a woolen overcoat stepped out from a break in a hedgerow and approached Ellis’s window, his shoes crunching the snow as he walked.

  Canidy thought the overcoat more than adequately concealed what he probably held underneath—a Thompson .45 caliber submachine gun. The man looked inside the vehicle, nodded at Ellis, then disappeared back in the hedgerow.

  A moment later, the double gate swung inward, Ellis pulled forward, and just as soon as the car was inside, the gate doors swung closed again.

  Ellis followed the cobblestone driveway back to the five-car garage, which was called the “stable” because that was what it had been before being converted to hold automobiles. He parked the car, then went to the trunk and retrieved Canidy’s duffel.

  “I’ll get that, Chief,” Canidy said, holding out his hand.

  “I can use the exercise,” Ellis said, waving him off. “Besides, I know how it feels when you get off that plane from London.”

  “Nothing a good belt won’t fix,” Canidy said.

  They walked up to the mansion, and Ellis opened the door that led into the kitchen, then followed Canidy inside.

  It was a very large space—filled now with the delightful smell of onion and garlic sautéing in olive oil—and had the industrial-sized stoves and cookware and the stocked pantries and huge refrigerators that one would expect to find in a restaurant. And it was noisy.

  A short, rotund, olive-skinned man in his fifties, wearing a white chef’s hat and coat, was loudly directing a staff of four, waving a large knife as his pointer. Before him on the marble counter were two large uncut tender-loins of beef on a cutting board.

  “Chief Ellis!” the chef, now waving the knife at him, said in a deep, thick accent that Canidy guessed was Italian or maybe Sicilian. “You don’t interfere!”

  “Just passing through, Antonio, just passing through,” Ellis replied. “Say hello to Major Canidy.”

  Chef Antonio approached Canidy, stopped within five feet, put his hands stiffly to either side—the knife still held in the right one—and in an exaggerated fashion looked down at his feet for a long moment, then up and at Canidy.

  “It is my great honor, Major,” he said formally.

  Then he glanced at Chief Ellis and said to Canidy, “Chief Ellis is banned from my kitchen. He interferes, and food disappears.” He motioned back and forth over his round belly to illustrate.

  Canidy laughed.

  “It is my pleasure—Antonio, is it?” Canidy noticed that the chef beamed appreciatively that he had addressed him correctly, then went on: “And you’re right, Antonio. I’ve yet to meet a Navy man you can trust around food or booze. Speaking of which”—he looked at Ellis and nodded toward the heavy wooden door on the other side of the kitchen—“I’m going to get a taste of the latter and take it to my room.”

  “Your bag will be waiting when you get there. And I took the liberty of having the staff clean and press the suit you left here. Might be a good idea to dress for dinner. The boss said to expect him about six o’clock.”

  Canidy nodded. “Thank you, Chief,” he said sincerely. As he went though the door, he added, “It’s always wise to dress for what might be one’s last meal.”

  [ ONE ]

  Q Street, NW

  Washington, D.C.

  1755 5 March 1943

  Dick Canidy left his room on the third and uppermost floor of the north wing of the mansion and walked down the long hallway. He had had difficulty getting the top button of his heavily starched dress shirt buttoned, and, when he finally did, he could not believe how tight the goddamned shirt collar felt. He wondered if the cleaning staff had done something terrible to his shirt—at one point questioning if it was even his shirt—then decided it was simply a very heavy starching that likely caused some shrinkage. Whatever the reason, the collar was extremely stiff and extremely uncomfortable and so he worked his necktie back and forth to loosen it, then squeezed fingertips inside the collar on either side of his neck and gently pulled, stretching the material.

  That seemed to provide some comfort, and so he carefully snugged up his Windsor knot just enough to hold it in place but not so tightly as to cancel out what he’d just accomplished. He then closed one button on his dark gray, single-breasted Brooks Brothers suit jacket, surveyed himself in the enormous, etched-glass oval mirror hanging at the end of the hallway, then went down the wide stairway.

  One of the heavy wooden double doors to the library was partially open and Canidy entered through it, closing it behind him with a squeak from its heavy brass hinges.

  It was a huge room paneled with deeply polished hardwoods that held large oil paintings of family portraits of generations of Whittakers. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves w
ere filled. The dark wooden floor area was segmented by four large Oriental area rugs of equal size, on each of which were the same heavy leather couches and armchairs with overstuffed ottomans arranged facing inward, the design creating a quad of individual areas.

  On the farthest wall, above and on either side of the ornate brick fireplace, which crackled with a just-beginning-to-burn fire, there were mounted trophies of great animals—among them a lion, a wildebeest, a zebra, and a pair of spectacular horned heads that Canidy seemed to recall were commonly known as Greater Kudus, which he thought was an antelope or such—in a gallery, near which a rollaway bar service had been positioned.

  The bar was Canidy’s immediate destination and the soles of his leather shoes made a resounding thump-thump-thump in the quiet room as he crossed the wooden floor to reach it.

  The service contained a wide selection of spirits, light and dark and very expensive, as well as aperitifs and two brands of VSOP cognacs he had never heard of. Canidy found what he was looking for—a delightful twenty-year-old single malt made by the Famous Grouse folks—and he poured himself a double, neat, in a crystal tumbler.

  He took his drink and stepped closer to the fire, and, deep in thought, stood and stared silently at the flames.

  So this is how it ends? Canidy thought somewhat morosely. In a glorious mansion with exquisite scotch? The unwashed amid the trappings of great wealth and comfort and success? How rich!

  He took a healthy drink of the single malt and waited a moment before swallowing, enjoying its deep flavor and warmth on his tongue.

  He looked up at the exotic animals. He raised his glass to them.

  “Make room for me up there, boys. I’m soon to join your lot….”

  As he took another drink, he heard the door hinges squeak across the room and he turned.

  Canidy recognized the distinguished-looking gentleman of sixty standing in the doorway. He was stocky yet fit, with a full head of silver hair neatly trimmed and strong eyes set in the ruddy face of an Irishman. He wore a well-cut, double-breasted dark gray suit, a crisp white shirt, and a marine-and-white rep necktie. He had a strong presence; his confidence filled the room.