The Spymasters: A Men at War Novel Read online

  “Yes, si—” van der Ploeg began automatically before catching himself. He absently looked at the sheets of newly decrypted messages he held. “Right.”

  * * *

  Van der Ploeg was eighteen, with a youthful energy about him. He had olive skin and an unruly shock of wiry jet-black hair that stuck out at odd angles. He easily could pass as Sicilian—which was what Canidy was looking for in a team member for the second mission that ultimately set up MERCURY STATION—but even better for Canidy was the fact that van der Ploeg was a master at operating the SSTR-1 wireless telegraphy (W/T) set.

  He’d readily accepted Canidy’s offer to join the mission—but when he showed up dockside at the Port of Algiers and saw the submarine that would be taking the team to Sicily, he admitted that he suffered from acute claustrophobia.

  “A train, a plane, a ship—anything with windows I can do,” he had said with great resignation, his youthful energy clearly shot. “No one will be happy with me if I board that sub.”

  With the Casabianca ready to sail, postponing the mission was not an option. That had forced Canidy to recruit one of the radio operators from the commo room at the Sea View Villa.

  Twenty-four-year-old Jim Fuller was another master at W/T. Before the war, he and John Craig van der Ploeg had learned Morse code in the Boy Scouts and now had become fast friends as they practiced sending coded messages back and forth. The tall and easygoing Fuller, with shaggy blond hair and all-American features, looked and talked like the Californian that he was. He even had a surfer nickname—“Tubes”—which he earned at age ten from riding under the curl of the wave, where it formed a tube.

  In early April, Canidy had been sitting in the same seat at the teak table on the balcony reading messages from MERCURY STATION when van der Ploeg came from the commo room and handed him another message that he’d just decrypted. In it, Tubes said that Nola wanted OSS Algiers to send weapons for them to stockpile and more money for bribes. Canidy responded by saying to send whatever they said . . . until van der Ploeg announced that he did not believe Tubes actually had sent the message.

  “That’s not his hand,” he’d explained. “It’s Mercury Station’s radio frequency, but whoever is operating the W/T has all the finesse of a ham-fisted gorilla. Tubes is silky smooth.”

  That Tubes had not sent the code for a compromised station only made it appear more suspicious.

  * * *

  “Have a seat,” Dick Canidy said to John Craig van der Ploeg, motioning to the chair nearest Stan Fine’s. “You should hear for your general wealth of knowledge what I was just telling Captain Fine.”

  As John Craig van der Ploeg took his seat, he said, “What’s that?”

  “That what the SS is up to in Poland is every bit as vicious as what I found them doing with the yellow fever experiment in Palermo,” Canidy said, then looked back at Fine. “Torture, slavery, slaughter—same as I saw in Sicily. It all boggles the mind. Even as you begin to comprehend what is happening, you are in denial. You can’t believe that humans—supposedly civilized man—could treat another with such cruelty.”

  “And that’s in Sicily?” John Craig asked.

  “On a smaller scale than Poland, but yes, it’s there,” Canidy said, then added, “You haven’t heard any of this?”

  “Read, yes,” John Craig said. “As I sent and received the messages about what the SS did to those Mafia prisoners, I tried reading between the lines . . . and wondered. But heard? Not directly from you.”

  Canidy raised his eyebrows as he took a sip of coffee, then nodded.

  “The inside of that old villa they were using for the yellow fever experiment was a cesspool,” he began. “The rancid smell of rotting flesh made you sick to your stomach. The men, their bodies bruised and disfigured, were on wooden gurneys. Leather straps secured their wrists and ankles. Dirty gray sweat- and bloodstained gowns more or less covered their torsos. Their arms and legs—with festering wounds oozing dark fluids—were exposed. The bodies all had rashes. The dead ones were bloated.”

  Canidy looked over the lip of his cup at Fine, and added, “It really was hellish—something out of Dante’s Inferno. Knowing that the SS does this, I don’t know how Francisco and Mordechaj control their rage as much as they do—”

  “Who is Mordechaj?” John Craig asked.

  “—because if that were happening in my country,” Canidy finished, ignoring the interruption, “and I had a family, nothing could hold me back from getting my pound of flesh out of the bastards.”

  Fine—who was Jewish and did have a wife and three children waiting for him in Santa Monica, California—drained his coffee, then nodded appreciatively as he put the empty cup on the table.

  “Trust me,” Fine said, an edge to his voice, “that thought has crossed my mind more than a time or two.” He paused, then in a more pleasant tone said: “And speaking of family, how is Ann?”

  Canidy shrugged. “If she had her way we would be a family right now. I told her that this was not the time to get married. She kept a stiff upper lip, as our Brit cousins would say, but she’s not overly happy with me right now.”

  Twenty-year-old Ann Chambers—a highly intelligent gorgeous blond southerner whose father’s empire included nine major newspapers and more than twice that many radio stations—and her girlfriend had been injured in March when Luftwaffe bombs leveled Ann’s London neighborhood. The friend had died from head trauma. Ann had suffered amnesia, and she and Canidy had only recently been reunited after Ann was found sixty miles north of London, in a barn that had been converted into a makeshift infirmary.

  “I actually meant her health,” Fine said.

  “She seems fully recovered,” Canidy said. “Operative word seems. The doctors have told her to take it easy for now. With her flat destroyed and housing tight, we’re grateful to you that she could sublet the studio’s apartment. She is very comfortable there, and starting to write again for her old man’s news service.”

  Continental Motion Picture Studios quietly maintained a luxurious penthouse apartment in Westminster Tower, which overlooked Hyde Park, and was two blocks from the Dorchester Hotel. When Brandon Chambers heard that doctors said his daughter needed time to recover, cost for her room and board was not a consideration.

  “It must have been hell wondering about her,” Fine said. “I’m glad you know she’s now comfortable.”

  Canidy clearly remembered the gut-wrenching feeling he’d had when he first saw Ann’s flat leveled, and then the overwhelming emotions in Sicily when Tubes Fuller had handed him the message from Stan Fine announcing that Ann had been found—and was safe at OSS Whitbey House Station.

  The helplessness I felt at Ann gone missing because of those goddamn German bombs came close to a simmering rage.

  The thought of losing someone you deeply love triggers emotions more powerful than I ever imagined.

  And then to think how the Nazis so savagely treat prisoners . . .

  “Getting back to the goddamn Krauts,” Canidy then added, “I saw more compassion, more respect for life and death when they took all of us in Saint Paul’s lower school to the slaughterhouse to show us where hamburgers really came from.”

  Fine knew all about Saint Paul’s. It was there that he had first crossed paths with Dick Canidy.

  * * *

  Stanley S. Fine had been a very young Hollywood lawyer—the vice president, legal, of Continental Motion Picture Studios, Inc. His responsibilities included keeping secret from the general public that “America’s Sweetheart”—Continental’s virginal movie star Monica Carlisle, born Mary Elizabeth Chernick—had not only been married to a German aristocrat and soon thereafter divorced, but that the union had produced a son by the name of Eric Fulmar.

  After Eric’s father returned to Germany, his mother had decided that Eric was the last thing she needed in her Hollywood lifestyle. She ordered Fine to ship her son to boarding school.

  The headmaster of Saint Paul’s School, Cedar Springs, I
owa, was one George Crater Canidy, Ph.D, D.D. It was said of the Reverend Canidy, a widower, that he wasn’t simply devoted to the Episcopal school—he and Saint Paul’s essentially were one and indivisible.

  Reverend Canidy had a son about the age of Eric. Dick Canidy and Eric Fulmar quickly became buddies—and almost immediately seemed to be in constant mischief. Or worse.

  Once, on the annual fall nature walk, Dick and Eric were horsing around, shooting wooden kitchen matches from toy pistols that were supposed to shoot suction-cup darts. The matches set a leaf pile on fire—and the Studebaker parked next to it went up in roaring flames.

  Fine had had to rush to Cedar Rapids. He bought the owner of the destroyed automobile a new one. That calmed everyone, and freed the boys from the clutches of a fat lady at the Juvenile Authority. Even more important, it kept the whole escapade out of the newspapers.

  Some six months later, just barely released from school probation, Eric and Dick were allowed—after repeated warnings of what would happen if there was anything but golden behavior—to join a field trip to the Iowa Cattlemen’s slaughterhouse.

  Reverend Canidy had not been at all thrilled with the idea of this particular educational activity, especially its gore, of course, which he considered beyond grisly. But he was an educated man, and knew that even the Bible depicted the gruesome sacrifices of animals. He also understood that young teenage boys should not be coddled, and finally gave his reluctant approval to the biology teacher who with great enthusiasm had offered to run the field trip.

  The boys had indeed been fascinated with the facility, including the actual processing of the cattle, which the biology teacher had pointed out was conducted as humanely as possible. And with the exception of someone having unlatched a holding pen gate and a score of cows having to be herded back in—fingers were pointed, but Dick and Eric dodged all accusations—there had been no real trouble on the field trip.

  The only problem had come that night in the school dining hall. By unfortunate coincidence the main dinner course served to students in both the upper and lower schools was spaghetti with a pulpy red tomato and meat sauce.

  When Dick, and then Eric, covered their mouths and moaned a long and deep Mooooo!—and that got picked up by the older boys, who made it echo in the dining hall—many of the younger boys, their plates untouched, went to bed hungry that night. A couple, having rushed to the restroom when their faces went white, fell asleep with completely empty stomachs.

  For the next week, Reverend Canidy saw to it that the chefs left red meat off all menus.

  * * *

  “Who is Mordechaj?” John Craig van der Ploeg repeated.

  “Kapitan Mordechaj Szerynski,” Canidy said, looking between van der Ploeg and Fine. “Code name Sausagemaker. He’s a resistance leader in the Polish Home Army. Lost most of his family—including his teenage brother, who the SS dismembered last Christmas—in the Warsaw ghetto. Before I came here from OSS London, I helped with the team that was working with him. Ever hear of Sikorski’s Tourists?”

  John Craig shook his head.

  “The prime minister of the Government of Poland in Exile is a general—a real warrior—by the name of Wladyslaw Sikorski. When Poland was invaded by Germany in ’39, Sikorski fled with his army and navy to regroup. Now the ones who go back and forth to Poland supplying the resistance—with supplies provided by the OSS—call themselves Sikorski’s Tourists. They, like the Poles trapped in Poland, revere him. He really is one tough sonofabitch.”

  John Craig nodded.

  “Dick, what do you think are the real chances for the Poles?” Fine said.

  Canidy sighed, then shrugged.

  “Hell if I know, Stan. In the big picture, I just don’t think anyone gives a rat’s ass about liberating Poland right now.” He waved with his coffee cup uphill, in the direction of Allied Forces Headquarters. “Not with all of AFHQ’s effort going into the biggest picture—taking Sicily and Italy and, ultimately, Normandy.”

  Fine shook his head. “It’s been more than five months since the Polish foreign minister gave those details on the concentration camps—and has anything really been done?”

  “Done about what?” John Craig van der Ploeg said.

  “Count Edward Raczynski,” Canidy said, “gave a speech—‘The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland’—to the United Nations. The SS runs concentration camps that work the stronger prisoners to death—the rest they send directly to death camps. There’re at least a half-dozen camps in Poland alone. I think I brought one of the booklets that a London publisher reprinted with the speech. You should read it for your edification.”

  Canidy paused, drained his coffee, then added: “The nasty truth is that the Poles are really being screwed. Especially considering it’s our Bolshevik buddies taking turns with the Krauts to exterminate every Pole they can when the two aren’t bitterly fighting each other and snatching up parts of Poland for their own.”

  “The Katyn Massacre?” Fine said, making the question more of a statement.

  “That’s one nice example,” Canidy said, his tone bitter. “Our so-called Ally.”

  “The mass murder of all those Poles,” John Craig said. “I heard about that. The Russians really did it, huh?”

  Just the previous month, in mid-April, Radio Berlin announced to the world that the Germans had discovered the mass graves of more than twenty thousand Polish intellectuals—army officers, businessmen, priests, and other leaders—executed in the Katyn Forest area of the Soviet Union, territory that Nazi forces had taken. The dates on papers found in the pockets of the dead ended a year earlier, in April 1940—which had been after the Soviet invasion of Poland and after Joseph Stalin’s signing of an order for the execution of the entire Polish Officer Corps.

  Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels, relishing the high propaganda value of the horror, declared to the world that what had come to be called the Katyn Massacre was proof that the USSR—and by association its Allies, especially the Americans and the British—were mass murderers.

  “Red Joe,” Fine said, “took offense at the accusation that the blood is on Soviet hands. He’s ‘outraged,’ and has unequivocally denied any connection whatsoever. It’s so blatantly a lie you’d expect him to profess not even knowing a Katyn Forest exists.”

  Canidy shook his head, disgusted.

  “And getting back to all the slaughtering by the Germans,” he said. “The evidence is overwhelming. That’s bad enough, but now we know there is the threat of them using chemical or germ weapons on the battlefield. While Kappler, the SS-obersturmbannführer in Messina, said that he was ordered to stage the howitzer rounds with the Tabun only as insurance, that hothead SS major in Palermo—the same prick who was running the yellow fever experiment that came from Dachau—Müller, that’s the sonofabitch’s name—he found the gas and had to have plans to use it.”

  “Fortunately you took it out first,” Fine said.

  Canidy met Fine’s eyes, then went on: “Here’s the nice scenario I mentioned to Donovan in London: We know the Germans are testing the Fi-103—those Fieseler ‘aerial torpedoes’—and plan to lob them at London. What’s to stop another hothead SS sonofabitch like Müller from thinking that with the SS already using gas in the death camps—as Poland’s foreign minister unequivocally outlined before the United Nations—and already having it on howitzer rounds, what’s the difference with putting the nerve gas on an aerial torpedo and aiming it at, oh, say, Number Ten and Westminster . . . ?”

  Prime Minister Winston Churchill was using the annex at 10 Downing Street as his residence. The Palace of Westminster, England’s equivalent of the United States Capitol, housed its Parliament.

  Canidy added: “I’d be really surprised that that hasn’t been considered, starting with that sonofabitch Hitler himself.”

  “Even if the bombs didn’t hit directly on target,” Fine said, “the scenario is . . .” His voice trailed off as he considered the ramifications. “Horrific com
es to mind.”

  Canidy nodded. “It could—it would—bring Britain to its knees.”

  John Craig van der Ploeg’s eyes grew wide.

  Even John Craig gets the gravity of that, Canidy thought.

  He motioned again uphill.

  “And then what would the big guns do?”

  * * *

  Fine knew that by “big guns” Canidy meant the full effect of General Dwight David Eisenhower, commander in chief, Allied Forces Headquarters. At AFHQ (pronounced “aff-kew”) Ike, with his second in command, General Sir Harold Alexander, had under him nearly five hundred thousand soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the U.S. Seventh Army and the British Eighth Army.

  The AFHQ brass had taken over the luxurious Saint George Hotel, which was uphill from the OSS’s headquarters. The Saint George was very much like the Sea View Villa, built in the same style in the 1880s, but twice the size and with a brilliant white masonry exterior (Pamela Dutton had her villa painted a faint pink). It was surrounded by well-kept gardens and neat rows of towering palm trees. Its impeccable interior featured grand gilded ceilings and walls adorned by thousands of multicolored hand-painted tiles. If it weren’t for all the “guests” wearing military uniforms, it would take some convincing that there actually was a war going on.

  The overflow of officers from the Saint George—particularly all the brass’s aides—filled a score of nearby buildings. It would have taken the Sea View Villa had Stanley Fine not played the OSS’s Presidential Priority card and told one of Ike’s flunkies, a pompous ass by the name of Lieutenant Colonel J. Warren Owen, to go to hell.

  That the OSS technically reported to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and that Top Secret–Presidential did not directly apply to protect OSS Algiers Station—was something Owen either did not comprehend, or was too afraid—“More like too lazy,” Canidy suggested—to confirm with JCS.

  The big guns were of course the conventional forces. What the spies, saboteurs, and assassins of the Office of Strategic Services did was anything but conventional. Their unorthodox methods were held in contempt—leaving the OSS to more or less operate all on its own.