The Spymasters: A Men at War Novel Read online

  Being a Flying Tiger with Chennault’s American Volunteer Group (AVG) in Kunming, China, turned out to be damn dangerous. But Canidy rose to the challenge. And he proved that not only had he been born to fly but—with five kills on a single sortie, making him a certifiable ace—he was a natural fighter pilot.

  About the time he was counting out his twenty-five-hundred-buck bonus, a self-important bureaucrat type showed up on the AVG flight line. His name was Eldon Baker, and he wasted no time showing that he was a consummate prick. But when he produced from his suit coat pocket his orders personally signed by the President of the United States, Canidy paid attention.

  It was December 1941, and Baker announced that with America now in the war, he was there to recruit Canidy into an outfit so secretive that he couldn’t tell him anything about it, only that it was important enough for the President to send him clear across the world to bring Canidy back.

  That did not exactly convince Canidy to go along—for starters, he did not like the fact that he would be leaving his buddies alone to keep shooting Japs out of the sky.

  He was, however, realistic enough to know that, no matter how good of a fighter pilot he was, odds were that eventually he’d meet his match—or that he’d screw up or that a Jap just got lucky, or all of that—and he’d be sent to meet his maker courtesy of a hundred-plus 7.7mm rounds from a Mitsubishi A5M machine gun. And, getting back to taking care of Number One, accepting the asshole Baker’s offer would mean he would be another step closer to being done with his military service obligations.

  He soon discovered he was dead damn wrong.

  Back in Washington, D.C., Baker finally revealed to him that the outfit was something called the Office of the Coordinator of Information, and its director, a Colonel Donovan, was answerable only to Roosevelt himself. Baker said COI needed Canidy—and certain of his connections—to help smuggle out of North Africa a French mining engineer who the Germans also were after—an engineer who both sides knew was critical to the building of a nuclear bomb that would win the war.

  When Canidy idly inquired as to what would happen if he now decided that he didn’t want any part of the COI in general, and the mission in particular, Baker practically shoved the answer down his throat.

  “You either agree to this ‘mission of considerable risk,’” Baker coldly replied, “or, now that you’re privy to information that’s classified as Top Secret–Presidential, you could be institutionalized for ‘psychiatric evaluation’ for a period of time—habeas corpus having no bearing on the mentally disturbed being protected from themselves—which, in the interest of ensuring that our secrets stay secret, will last for at least the duration of the war.”

  Canidy was furious at himself for being caught in what he considered was little more than a high-level government con game. Yet intellectually he knew that what Baker said was more than a loosely veiled threat. He really had no option but to choose the mission—and then decided that, assuming he survived the damn thing, he could somehow figure a way to get the hell out of COI afterward.

  Soon thereafter, Canidy was assigned the assimilated rank of a major in the United States Army Air Corps and given credentials that stated that. He also was given other credentials—ones to be used as a last resort—declaring that he worked for the Office of the Coordinator of Information, which carried a presidential priority.

  Baker’s “considerable risk,” Canidy soon learned, was something of an understatement. The mission had required life-or-death decisions, ones that were cold and ruthless. And ones, somewhat surprising him at first, that he found himself perfectly capable of carrying out.

  And Canidy then came to the realization that his experience in COI was not unlike what he’d had in Chennault’s AVG. Which was to say, Canidy not only rose to the challenge of being a spook, but was damn good at it.

  Wild Bill Donovan also recognized that Canidy—having proven expert at espionage and sabotage, at the “strategic services” needed to win the war—was an extraordinarily natural operative. And over time, Canidy was given greater responsibility.

  More missions included grabbing other engineers and scientists out of German hands, smuggling uraninite for those scientists to use in building the nuclear bomb in the President’s Manhattan Project, modifying B-17 Flying Fortress bombers as explosive-filled drones, even getting involved with the head of the New York City Mafia, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, leading Canidy to discover that the Germans held weapons of chemical and biological warfare in Sicily.

  Donovan was said to be of the opinion—one which Stanley Fine agreed with—that Canidy had become almost the perfect spy.

  Almost, because Canidy had managed to put himself in a position that no spy was supposed to be in: absolutely indispensable.

  * * *

  Canidy handed the message back to Fine, then gestured toward the taller of the two stacks on the massive teak table.

  “And all of those are from Tubes?” Canidy said.

  “All from Tubes,” Fine confirmed.

  The first week of April, Canidy had set up in Palermo a clandestine OSS wireless telegraphy station, code-named MERCURY STATION. Its operator was twenty-four-year-old Jim “Tubes” Fuller.

  “Well, at least all are from Mercury,” Fine went on. “Those, and there are others in the commo room files, a couple of which state that the crates you found with the nerve gas never existed either.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  Fine held up the thermos toward Canidy, making a more? gesture with it. Canidy glanced at his cup, made a face when he saw that it was empty, and pushed it to him.

  “This is insane,” Canidy went on. “The station clearly is compromised. Because whoever is running it does not realize that Tubes would know that I was involved with destroying both. I just don’t understand why they’re denying that either was there in the first place.”

  Fine took a sip of coffee, then offered: “Damage control? The SS knows that it was blown up—maybe not that you did it but that it did get destroyed—so the lie becomes it never existed to try to make all of it secret again.”

  Canidy considered that for a long moment. Then his eyebrows shot up.

  “And the reason to make it secret again,” he said, “is because they brought more in? Nerve gas and/or yellow fever?”

  Fine met his eyes, then slowly nodded.

  “That is a real and distinct possibility,” he said. “There is no doubt more Tabun—both stockpiled and being manufactured—and there certainly has been time for more shipments to arrive.”

  Canidy looked out across the Mediterranean Sea, in the direction of Sicily, and sighed audibly.

  “Not fucking again!” he said.

  [FOUR]

  Almost two months earlier, on the moonless night of March 22, Canidy had smuggled Professor Arturo Rossi out of the Port of Palermo aboard a forty-foot wooden fishing boat, the Stefania. To suggest that Rossi—a metallurgist carrying a suitcase that contained no clothing but was instead packed with all his scientific papers from the university—was anxious to leave Sicily would have been akin to suggesting that the Pope might be a little bit devout.

  Rossi was under no delusion as to what he could expect from the Nazis should he in some fashion disappoint them. He had seen one colleague executed by SS-Sturmbannführer Hans Müller of the SD and watched another die slowly and painfully in the SS’s yellow fever experiment that Müller oversaw.

  Canidy, with the Stefania’s engine idling and her lines already let loose, then learned from Rossi that the rusty ninety-foot-long cargo ship tied up alongside at the dock had arrived that morning with nerve gas munitions in her hold. Canidy made the split-second decision to sink the ship at its mooring, and had quickly rigged it with C-2 plastic explosive and a time-delay fuse.

  When Wild Bill Donovan had read Canidy’s after-action report, then met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to relay the information that the Nazis had sent nerve gas munitions to Sicily, FDR
became furious. He wanted absolute proof. And so, nine days after seeing the moonless sky glow with the flames of the burning cargo ship, Dick Canidy, at the direct order of the President of the United States, was headed back to Sicily, this time leading a three-man team.

  Aboard the submarine Casabianca, Canidy had briefed his team that their main mission was to find out if nerve gas had indeed been on the boat that he’d blown up at the dock and, if so, what damage had been caused by it.

  “We’re supposed to get in, get the intel, and, if the place is nothing but rotting corpses, get the hell out.”

  But it turned out that there had not been mass casualties. Canidy’s team found only two dead in the harbor area. Agents of the Sicherheitsdienst had tortured a pair of Sicilian fishermen—bashed out their teeth with the steel-plated butt of a Mauser Karabiner 98 and gouged out their eyes with its bayonet—and left them hanging from a yardarm.

  The mission then became threefold: One, to find out what had happened to the nerve gas munitions. Two, to ensure that the villa with the yellow fever experiment had been destroyed. And three, to establish MERCURY STATION—a clandestine wireless telegraphy station—that would send intel to OSS Algiers for developing underground connections in Sicily and building a resistance that could rise up when the Allies arrived with OPERATION HUSKY.

  It had been Stan Fine’s idea to use Roman mythology for the mission’s code names—“There’s so much of it here, who would think twice about it?” Thus, they code-named the radio station after the messenger god, Mercury, and the submarine Casabianca after the god of the sea, Neptune. Dick Canidy became Jupiter (the supreme god of Italy and Rome), Jim “Tubes” Fuller was Maximus (“the greatest”), and Franciso Nola was Optimus (“the best”).

  Canidy had first met Franciso Nola—a solidly built thirty-five-year-old with an olive complexion, thick black hair cut close to the scalp, a rather large nose, and a black mustache—in New York City, where he’d fled with his family mostly because his wife was Jewish but also because his cousins had been imprisoned by Mussolini’s secret police. A commercial fisherman, he still owned boats in Palermo that worked the Mediterranean waters. He not only offered Canidy the use of these but volunteered to personally help fight the fascists in any way he could.

  It had been through Nola that they learned what happened with the howitzer rounds with the Tabun in Palermo. The warehouses that Nola’s fishing boats used for his import-export business were overseen by a pair of dense longshoremen. When Canidy met the Brothers Buda—Giacomo and Antonio were in their early thirties, around five-five and two hundred pounds, with bad bowl haircuts and belly fat rolls that stretched tight their dirty overalls—he quietly nicknamed them Tweedle Fucking Dee and Dumb.

  With some effort, the Budas explained that their crews had off-loaded wooden crates of what they called “buh-lets,” pallets of fuel, and field rations from the rusty ninety-foot-long cargo ship that Canidy had asked about—but of course had not said that he’d sunk with the plastic explosive.

  Shortly thereafter, they said, two SS officers had arrived at the warehouse, had an argument with SS-Sturmbannführer Müller, and then Müller had ordered the Brothers Buda to make certain that the wooden crates of buh-lets with the painted stencil marking of SONDERKART.6LE.F.H.18 T83 10.5-CM would get loaded aboard another cargo ship that was en route.

  When Canidy had read through his binoculars the stencil markings, he decided that the “10.5-CM” signified the crates contained 105mm howitzer rounds. He sent that information via wireless message to Professor Rossi at OSS Algiers. Rossi confirmed that they were howitzer rounds—and, more important, that the “T83” was the code for Tabun.

  Having finally met the mission’s main objective—finding conclusively that the Germans did have ready munitions for chemical warfare—Canidy made plans to destroy them. Then he blew up the villa where the SS was conducting the yellow fever experiments. And he announced to Frank Nola and Tubes Fuller that they would be staying behind and manning the clandestine MERCURY STATION.

  That night, Dick Canidy had been back aboard the Casabianca, awaiting the cargo ship now carrying the Tabun howitzers, when Captain Jean L’Herminier dialed it in and gave the command to fire the torpedo that sent the nerve gas to the bottom of the sea.

  And the next day, back at OSS Algiers Station, the first of the message traffic from MERCURY STATION began coming in regularly. Including confirmation that the Germans were furious that the villa and cargo ship had been destroyed.

  * * *

  Stan Fine flipped through the taller stack of decrypted typewritten messages, found what he wanted, and handed it to Dick Canidy.

  Canidy read it:

  * * *

  TOP SECRET

  OPERATIONAL IMMEDIATE

  X STATION CHIEF

  FILE

  COPY NO. 1

  OF 1 COPY ONLY

  26MAY43 0615

  FOR OSS ALGIERS STATION

  EYES ONLY CAPT FINE

  FROM MERCURY STATION

  BEGIN QUOTE

  1. ITALIAN AND GERMAN FORCES ARRIVING PORT OF MESSINA DAILY VIA FERRY FROM ITALY MAINLAND.

  ITALIANS -- ELEMENTS OF ITALIAN 6TH ARMY. EXPECT TOTAL OF 250,000 TROOPS BY END OF MONTH.

  GERMANS -- 2 PANZER DIVISIONS WITH 60,000 TROOPS SPLIT BETWEEN PALERMO AND MESSINA. ANOTHER 4 DIVISIONS WITH 120,000 TROOPS SAID TO ARRIVE BY MID-JUNE AND MOVE TOWARD SOUTH COAST. MESSINA BEGINNING TO LOOK LIKE IT COULD BE DOWNTOWN BERLIN.

  SOURCE: OPTIMUS BOAT CREW

  2. EVERY DAY 4 HEAVILY GUARDED TRAINS, WITH 25-30 CARS EACH, LOADED WITH MILITARY VEHICLES, TANKS, AND ACK-ACK GUNS LEAVE MESSINA AT 1700 GMT FOR CATANIA AND SYRACUSE, AND 1 TRAIN WITH SIMILAR CARS AND CARGO LEAVES EACH DAY AT 1900 GMT FOR PALERMO.

  SOURCE: TRAINMASTER AT MESSINA

  MAXIMUS

  END QUOTE

  TOP SECRET

  * * *

  “That’s almost a half-million soldiers,” Canidy said, handing back the message. “And a hundred and fifty railcars loaded with tanks and howitzers every day?”

  Fine nodded.

  Canidy thought for a moment, then said: “It’s—what?—two miles across the Strait of Messina to the toe of Italy?”

  “A little farther, but not quite three.”

  “And Sicily is the same time as here—”

  “Same, GMT plus one,” Fine supplied.

  “—so that means they’re moving the trains at night. Which would make them harder targets.” Canidy paused, then said, his tone incredulous, “A half-million men? Those have to be exaggerated numbers. How the hell could Tubes possibly know that?” Then his tone turned sarcastic as he added, “Not from Frank Nola’s brilliant boat captains.”

  “Well, those fishing boats do spend a lot of time in the various ports, and their crews have a lot of connections there—”

  “Connections?” Canidy interrupted. “They’re all practically related. Tweedle Fucking Dee and Dumb come immediately to mind.”

  “—But I agree the numbers are likely inflated. It makes perfect sense that the Germans would want us to believe they’re putting more forces there, particularly after Mincemeat.”

  Canidy knew a number of minor ruses de guerre had been put in play in anticipation of the Sicily invasion, including British Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson’s army, based in Egypt, making movements that looked like preparations for its invasion of Greece and then the threat of advancing further to the Balkans.

  But the biggest deception had been OPERATION MINCEMEAT.

  In late April, “Major Martin”—a cadaver in a Royal Marines battledress uniform with a briefcase chained to him—had been set adrift from a British submarine just off “neutral” Spain. Secret and personal papers in the briefcase had been created at OSS Whitbey House Station to suggest the major was a courier en route from the United Kingdom to Allied Forces Headquarters when his aircraft crashed and he washed ashore. After the “most secret” papers—disinformation on the true plans for OPERATION HUSKY
—fell into the hands of Spaniards sympathetic to Hitler, they were photographed by German agents and the copies sent up to the German High Command.

  ULTRA—the code name given to intelligence that was taken from intercepts of secret messages encrypted by German Enigma cipher machines—quietly revealed every step along the way. Including that German intel personnel in Berlin then judged the content of the materials to be entirely credible.

  “According to Ultra,” Fine went on, “Hitler has just now—on May thirteenth—announced that he believes the Sicily invasion is a diversion, and that, as Major Martin’s Top Secret papers said, Greece is next. Which of course was exactly what he feared, making the whole deception even more believable to him.”

  “Tell them what they want to hear,” Canidy said.

  “Right. So Hitler has demanded that ‘measures regarding Sardinia and the Peloponnese take precedence over everything else.’”

  He gestured at the shorter of the two piles of messages.

  “There’s traffic in there from the two Sandbox teams that we sent in to support the Greek resistance. As the Germans begin moving armored divisions by train to Greece, the teams will help the resistance in taking out bridges and rails to keep those divisions there—and far away from being able to reinforce Italy and Sicily.”

  Canidy pointed to the message from MERCURY STATION.

  “It would not hurt to have another team go in to see if we can corroborate any of what’s in that. And another team to save Tubes’s ass. I left the poor bastard there. . . .”

  Fine exchanged a long look with Canidy, then said, “Jim wanted to go operational. You know that, Dick.”

  “Yeah, I do. And he actually did a damn good job while I was there with him.”

  “And you do know that twice we sent in teams to try locating him and Nola, right?”