The Secret Warriors - By W.E.B. Griffin Page 0,103

Whittaker had a room-service dinner with Admiral de Verbey in the three-room suite provided for him. The service was shabbily elegant, Canidy thought, and the portions very small. He had ordered roast beef, envisioning a juicy slice of rib. He got a two-inch-square, tough chunk of overdone meat.

During the dinner, Colonel Stevens told the admiral politely but firmly it would be best if he didn’t leave his suite or contact anyone while he was in London.

The admiral seemed resigned to whatever indignities the OSS had planned for him. Canidy felt a little sorry for him.

Breakfast in the hotel dining room was much like dinner. The coffee—and they were allowed only one cup—was watery, the jam for the single piece of cold toast was artificial, and the scrambled eggs were powdered. But precisely at eight o’clock a bellboy wearing a round hat cocked over his eye like Johnny in the Phillip Morris advertisements came into the dining room paging Canidy by holding up a slate on a pole with “Major Canidy” written on it.

“Your car and driver are here, Sir,” he announced when Canidy waved him over.

The car was a Plymouth sedan driven by a GI. Even with some of their luggage on the front seat, the trunk would not close over the rest of it, and it had to be tied closed with twine. They made it that way, however, to Station IX.

Canidy found the British Special Operations Executive training school officers to be an insufferably smug collection of bastards who made no effort to conceal their “superiority” over their American cousins.

The lieutenant colonel in charge told Canidy and Whittaker in great detail what was planned for “your young chaps.” What was planned that didn’t sound childish sounded sadistic, and Canidy toyed for a few minutes with the notion of somehow rescuing Fulmar and Martin from the Englishman before he realized that was out of the question. And so was telling the Englishman that Fulmar had lived among the Berber tribesmen of Morocco—some of the most vicious fighters in the world—long enough to be accepted as one of them.

He was also tempted to tell the English officer—a parachutist who made it plain that parachuting was an exclusively English specialty—a story that Fulmar had told him: At the OSS school in Virginia, Martin had given his own high-altitude jump trainees a long moment’s horror by “falling out” of his harness and, with a bloodcurdling scream, dropping out of sight. It turned out that he did not become hamburger. He had hidden a second reserve chute under his field jacket, and was waiting, smiling broadly, immensely pleased with himself, when they themselves had landed.

Martin had made sixty-odd jumps, which Canidy suspected was far more than any of the Englishmen who were going to teach him how it should be done had made.

The temptation to tell the colonel that story was great, but he resisted it, and he went even further in the interest of hands across the sea: he told both Fulmar and Martin, as sternly as he could, that they were to keep their eyes open and their mouths shut and absolutely no fucking around with their English hosts.

When he and Whittaker went outside to get in the Plymouth to be taken to Whitby House, the Plymouth was gone, the driver having apparently decided on his own that he had done his duty for that day.

The British found this frightfully amusing, of course, but ultimately produced an automobile for them. It was a worn-out Anglia, an English automobile that obviously had not been designed to accommodate two large American males, their luggage, and a driver at the same time.

But it was better than walking, Canidy told himself as the Anglia roared along—it sounded, Whittaker solemnly pronounced, “like an overworked lawn mower”—at what must have been all of thirty miles an hour, bouncing and lurching in the rain down what seemed like an endless country road.

There was an American GI in a steel helmet and a raincoat guarding access to Whitby House with a rifle hung muzzle down over his shoulder, but their pleasure at seeing him—“Thank God, a GI! Where there are GIs there is a mess hall,” Whittaker had cried. “Dying for my country is one thing; starving painfully to death on English food is something else!”—was quickly replaced by annoyance.

The guard had been ordered to pass no one, and so far as he was concerned, that included two Army Air Corps officers. It was ten minutes before the officer