The Secret Warriors - By W.E.B. Griffin Page 0,105

there’s a good bit to do, and precious little time to do it in, so I’ll have to ask you to excuse me.”

“I understand, Sir,” Colonel Innes said.

Canidy marched purposefully down the long hall and passed through a door, with Jamison on his heels.

“Where are you going?” Jamison asked when he stopped.

“Damned if I know,” Canidy confessed. “I just thought a purposeful march seemed called for.”

2

HEADQUARTERS

FREE FRENCH FORCES

LONDON, ENGLAND

1305 HOURS

AUGUST 12, 1942

The deputy chief of the Deuxième Bureau of Free French Forces was responsible for the most delicate intelligence function: gathering information from allies. Because the consequences of discovery while conducting such operations were not pleasant to consider, these consequences had to be constantly kept in mind.

Spying on one’s friends, especially when one is drawing one’s entire financial and logistical support from them, has a considerably different flavor from spying on the Boches. One can accept the loss of compromised agents to a German firing squad. It is quite another thing—quite impossible—to accept the penalties that would likely result from the compromise of a mission against one’s allies.

As he made his way to le Général’s office, the deputy chief of the Deuxième Bureau of Free French Forces went over these considerations in his mind. Under the circumstances, it would be appropriate to remind le Général of the operational limits his agents were forced to work under: In a “friendly” country they must not get caught. That imperative dominated any seeking of intelligence.

The deputy chief could tell from the look of le Général’s personal adjutant that le Général was already annoyed.

He marched into le Général’s office and saluted.

“Mon Général—” he began.

“Let’s have the information I requested,” le Général snapped.

The deputy chief of the Deuxième Bureau handed le Général the report. Le Général went into his desk drawer, took his spectacles from it, and put them on. Normally, because le Général believed that eyeglasses detracted from correct military appearance, he wore them only in private. Normally, the deputy chief of the Deuxième Bureau would have been dismissed and made to wait outside while le Général read the report in private.

Le Général, his round eyeglasses perched uneasily on his prominent nose, began to read:

At 1605 hours 7 August 1942, a U.S. Navy C-46 long-range transport of the Naval Air Transport Command landed at Croydon Airfield, the usual terminus of flights originating in the United States.

Rather than taxiing to the terminal, the aircraft stopped some distance from the terminal buildings. Two senior officers, the London chief of station of the American OSS and Oscar Zigler of SHAEF counterintelligence, met the aircraft. Two passengers debarked, a naval officer and an American lieutenant colonel, presumably Edmund T. Stevens, the new number two man for the OSS in London. They entered an Austin Princess limousine assigned to the OSS and were driven to the Dorchester Hotel, accompanied by two unmarked American CIC cars.

The driver of a U.S. Army three-quarter-ton truck, plus a man in the uniform of a French Navy seaman, began unloading luggage and several wooden crates from the Navy aircraft. Four American officers then debarked from the aircraft, entered two more Ford CIC cars, and were driven, with the truck following, to the Dorchester Hotel.

Almost immediately, the aircraft was moved to a guarded hangar.

It has been impossible to penetrate the rooms the OSS maintains in the Dorchester Hotel, because that entire wing of the eighth floor is being guarded by both the British (who have a man riding the elevators and another stationed in the fire escape stairs) and by the American Army’s CIC.

It had been learned, however, that the largest of the three OSS suites had been reserved for an unidentified “senior personage.”

The next morning it was determined that the American Air Corps major is a man named Canidy, who was in charge of the safe house where Vice-Admiral de Verbey was interned in the United States.

Based on information previously received from our operative in the safe house in Deal, New Jersey, it is probable that the other three officers are Captain James M. B. Whittaker, an intimate of President Roosevelt; Lieutenant C. Holdsworth Martin III, formerly a French resident and a 1939 graduate of the École Polytechnique in Paris; and Eric Fulmar, a German-American last known to be in Morocco. (There is a rather extensive dossier on Fulmar. In Morocco, he was intimately associated with Sidi Hassan el Ferruch, the pasha of Ksar es Souk. Although there is no intelligence previously connecting him with Vice-Admiral de Verbey, it seems logical to conclude that