The Secret Warriors - By W.E.B. Griffin Page 0,136

The standard solution—“psychiatric evaluation”—could not be applied to the daughter of the owner of the Chambers Publishing Company.

Cynthia finished reading the message and looked up at Chief Ellis. He was fuzzy. Cynthia realized her eyes were wet.

“If I didn’t know better,” Chief Ellis said, “I’d think you were really worried about them.”

She didn’t trust herself to speak. If she opened her mouth, she realized, and could find her voice, she would say “Fuck you!” or something else she shouldn’t.

She went to the dining room, slid open the door, and handed the decrypted message to Colonel Donovan. He read it and wordlessly handed it to Captain Douglass.

Everybody was smiling.

Douglass finally broke the silence.

“I think under the circumstances, Ellis, it would be all right if you sent Colonel Stevens a cable telling him he’s authorized to inform Miss Chambers that Major Canidy will shortly be in London, and there will probably be an opportunity for her to meet with him.”

“We can do better than that, Pete,” the Director of the Office of Strategic Services said. “Chief Ellis, send a separate Urgent to Colonel Stevens over my signature. The message is ‘Have Juliet meet Romeo at the airport.’”

9

CROYDON AIRFIELD

LONDON, ENGLAND

2345 HOURS

AUGUST 25, 1942

Dick Canidy—who had been sleeping on the fuselage floor most of the way from Portugal—was first down the ladder when the China Air Transport C-46 was led to a remote corner of the airfield and parked.

He walked directly to the London chief of station, who was standing with Lieutenant Colonel Ed Stevens.

“We have one really sick—it may be food poisoning—man aboard, and another one with a cut head and a broken arm,” he announced. “What about an ambulance?”

Stevens pointed wordlessly to a black Anglia ambulance.

Canidy gestured at it impatiently. Two men, one carrying what looked like a medical bag, came trotting up.

“In the plane,” Canidy ordered.

When he looked where he was pointing, he saw Whittaker climbing down the ladder.

“I’ll need a detailed report on everything, Canidy,” the chief of station said. “But I think that can wait until you get some rest. How about first thing in the morning?”

Jesus, what the hell is this concern for my comfort and rest all about?

“We are not, Major Canidy,” Colonel Stevens said, “all of your welcome-home greeting party.”

He pointed to where the ambulance was parked, and then raised his hand in a “come up” signal.

A woman wearing what he first thought was a WAC officer’s uniform came running up.

Who the hell is the WAC?

And then he saw the uniform had a “War Correspondent” insignia on it, and finally realized that Ann Chambers was inside the uniform.

“Jesus Christ, what are you doing here?” he blurted.

“You know what I’m doing here,” she said, and threw herself into his arms.

“Oh, baby, am I glad to see you,” Canidy said.

“Ain’t love grand?” Captain Whittaker asked, and then another female in uniform walked up.

Whittaker shifted into his very good British accent.

“I’ll be dashed if it isn’t Her Grace,” he said. “Fancy meeting you here, Your Grace. Might one inquire what you’re doing here at this unspeakable hour?”

“I knew you would need transportation, Captain Whittaker, and I wanted to make sure you didn’t take the wrong tram, so to speak.”

“Am I going to be needed here, Dick?” Whittaker asked.

The chief of station answered for him.

“I think between Canidy and Captain Fine we can get all we need,” he said. “If we need you, we’ll send for you.”

“In that case, I think I’ll let Her Grace take me out to Whitby House.”

“Get a good night’s rest. We may need you,” the station chief said.

“Yes, Sir.”

He followed the duchess to the stolen Ford and got in the front seat beside her.

“Like bloody hell you will, Jimmy,” Her Grace said.

“Like bloody hell I will what?”

“Get a good night’s rest,” Her Grace said. “Not on this tram.”

END NOTE

The refining of sufficient quantities of uranium ore to manufacture nuclear weapons, should this theoretical possibility actually prove feasible, began in early September 1942 at a secret facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, using a stock of uranium ore secretly imported from the Belgian Congo at the direct order of the President of the United States.

On December 2, 1942, in a laboratory under the seats of the University of Chicago’s stadium, the first chain nuclear reactor, composed of graphite and uranium, operated as predicted, resulting in the sustained, controlled production of atomic energy.

An atomic bomb was now possible. It would be irresistible against any enemy.

The problem now became to produce a functioning weapon before the Germans could build one. . . .

1 Navy Bureau of Ships.

2 Rule One: The way to attract an attractive woman who is used to attention is to ignore her.

3 Leon Blum, First Socialist Premier of France, 1936-1938.

4 The federal government’s psychiatric hospital in the District of Columbia.

5 Ernst “Putzi” von Hanfstaengel, a classmate and close friend of Roosevelt at Harvard, was one of the early aristocratic supporters of Hitler and the Nazi party. Later, his disillusionment with Nazism became known to Heinrich Himmler, who ordered von Hanfstaengel murdered. He learned of the plot and managed to escape with his family through Spain. Roosevelt established him in an apartment in the Hotel Washington, where von Hanfstaengel spent the war offering his knowledge of the Nazi inner circle to Roosevelt and the several intelligence services.

6 U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics.

7 U.S. Navy Bureau of Personnel.

8 Newspaper columnist Drew Pearson, who loathed Franklin Roosevelt and seldom passed over an opportunity to attack him, had pieced together one or two facts with a good deal of vague hearsay and written a column in which he accused Roosevelt, through Colonel William J. Donovan, of keeping his rich, famous, and social dilettante friends out of combat service by recruiting them for his propaganda organization. Pearson had even heard about the house on Q Street, calling it a “luxurious mansion requisitioned to serve as a barracks for Rooseveltian favorites,” but had mislocated it in Virginia.

9 A sealed-in-plastic officers’ identity card issued by the Adjutant General’s Office.

10 In April 1915, in a plan devised by Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, fifteen British Commonwealth divisions were landed at Gallipoli with the intention of capturing Constantinople and forcing the Dardanelles Channel. After suffering 213,980 casualties, the force was soundly defeated by the Turks and withdrawn. Churchill was forced to resign as First Lord, and went to France to command a battalion of infantry in the trenches.

11 An embroidered blue triangle with the letters “US,” worn sewn to the lapels.

12 On the postflight examination form, mechanical problems that would make further flight hazardous are marked with a red X.