The Secret Warriors - By W.E.B. Griffin Page 0,106
he is a longtime American agent.)
The dossier of C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., reveals that he is married to a French national and was general manager of LeFreque, S.A., the engineering firm, before the war. He and his wife have a long-standing personal relationship with Vice-Admiral de Verbey. Now residing in New York City, he is known to be associated with Colonel William Donovan of the OSS.
At 0810 8 August 1942, Canidy, Whittaker, Martin, and Fulmar left the Dorchester Hotel in an OSS automobile and were driven to the British SOE Station IX. At 1420, Canidy and Whittaker, in a vehicle assigned to SOE, were driven to Whitby House, Kent, which is the seat of the duchy of Stanfield, where they remained until 1915 hours 11 August 1942, when they returned to the Dorchester Hotel.
The estate has been turned into an OSS installation. A double barbed-wire fence has been erected by American troops, a battalion of which (Infantry, Lieutenant Colonel Innes) has been encamped on the estate since 3 August.
At 0615 hours 12 August, the naval personage and his immediate staff departed the Dorchester Hotel in the Austin Princess limousine of the OSS and were driven to Whitby House. An attempt is presently under way to penetrate Whitby House, or in some other manner confirm the identity of the naval personage.
“Merde!” said the commander in chief of Free French Forces and head of the French State.“‘Confirm the identity’? Who else do you think it could possibly be?”
“The possibility exists, mon Général, that they wish us to believe that it is Admiral de Verbey. That, perhaps, the man is a double.”
“Of course it’s de Verbey, you idiot!” le Général fumed.
“In that case, it would seem, mon Général,” the deputy chief of the Deuxième Bureau said, “that Bedell Smith has lied to you.”
De Gaulle fixed him with an icy glare.
“Find out for me,” he said finally, “why that Navy airplane is being held in reserve. Find out where it’s going.”
3
NEWARK AIRPORT
1130 HOURS
AUGUST 13, 1942
Three of the four men in the 1941 Ford wooden-bodied station wagon were wearing the uniforms of Pan American World Airways’ aircrews. The two middle-aged Air Transport Command captains had in fact been Pan American Airways pilots before volunteering for the Air Corps. They had taken Pan American uniforms—including one for Stanley S. Fine—out of mothballs for the African flight.
The C-46 now had painted on the fuselage the insignia of CAT, the Chinese Airline, and Chinese registration numbers. Pan American’s experienced pilots were routinely hired by aircraft manufacturers to deliver aircraft to foreign airlines. All departing transatlantic flights, military and civilian, were controlled by the Air Corps. The great majority of these flights left from Newark. The C-46 had consequently been flown from Lakehurst to Newark three days before; the more routine their flight appeared, the better. From all outward appearances, theirs was just one more routine ferry flight.
As the station wagon approached the airfield, with the skyscrapers of New York City visible beyond the ironwork of the Pulaski Skyway, a B-17E passed over them, flaps and wheels lowered, and touched down.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Fine said dryly. “Four engines, too.”
“Oh ye of little faith!” Homer Wilson, the older of the two ex-PAA pilots, chuckled.
Once they had shown their papers to the guard and been passed inside the fence, they drove past long rows of B-17Es sitting on parking ramps. Sometimes as many as a hundred B-17s left Newark every day for England. The details of these ferry flights had been explained during one of their briefings—an operation Fine thought remarkably casual. They simply formed up flights of twenty or twenty-five aircraft. Two of the planes in each flight had pilots and navigators familiar with the route—qualified people who did nothing but fly back and forth across the Atlantic. The rest of the flight just followed the leaders. The trip was in two legs, first to Gander Field, in Newfoundland, and then across the Atlantic to Prestwick Field, Scotland.
They drove to a Quonset hut with a “Transient Flight Crews Report Here” sign nailed above its door.
The hut was jammed with Air Corps fliers, officers and enlisted men, almost all of them carrying Val-Paks and duffel bags. Some of them, Fine thought, were behaving like a high-school football team en route to a game. A few others, the brighter ones—or perhaps those who weren’t so new to this sort of thing—sat quietly and thoughtfully, as if they knew what they were getting into and were considering their chances of living through it.