The Soldier Spies (Men at War 3)

Fulmar continued on to Basel, traveling now on the forged Swiss passport with a forged German “traverse only” visa. It had ostensibly been issued to Martin Reber, an electrical engineer in the employ of Carl Färber und Söhne, Zurich, and stated that Reber’s purpose was to traverse Germany— meaning without permission to leave the train—en route to Stockholm, where Carl Färber und Söhne, who were manufacturers of electrical timing equipment, maintained an office.

When the train had stopped at Lorrach, just inside the German border, for German customs examination, he found the suitcase that had been placed in his compartment. It held a Freiburg-Kassel railway ticket and the uniform of an SS Obersturmführer.

He would change into the uniform and then dispose of the civilian clothes and Martin Reber’s suitcases. Reber’s Basel-Stockholm ticket would be burned.

All that would then be necessary would be for Fulmar to leave the train at Marburg an der Lahn and establish contact with Gisella Dyer. From there, Helmut von Heurten-Mitnitz and/or Standartenführer Johann Müller would take over and arrange transportation for Fulmar and the Dyers to Budapest, where they would enter the pipeline.

The best-laid plans of the OSS began falling apart when Unterinspektor Lorin Wahl of the Gestapo decided to see if he could catch the goddamned Swiss doing something, anything, wrong.

XIV

Chapter ONE

Little Ross Bay

County Kirkcudbright, Scotland

1105 Hours 29 January 1943

Little Ross Bay was near the mouth of the Solway Firth, n

ot far from the English-Scottish border. There wasn’t very much on its western shore. No towns, no villages, just one narrow road, and the cliffs. And the cliffs weren’t much either, not compared to the White Cliffs of Dover. They rose no more than a hundred feet from the rocky beach at the shore of the choppy Little Ross Bay.

But it was just what Richard Canidy wanted—a place with nobody around, with cliffs that could be made to look from the air like the mouths of the sub pens at Saint-Lazare.

H.M.’s Government made the site available to their American allies for a nominal cost, and the Kirkcudbright Constabulary was ordered to evacuate a specified area of the site for a twenty-four-hour period beginning at 1700 28 January.

On 25 January, a platoon of U.S. Army Engineers had gone to Little Ross Bay in an eight-truck-and-two-jeep convoy and spent three days in the blowing rain and icy winds doing what none of them could see any purpose for. But according to a rather passionate speech from the battalion commander himself, whatever it was, it was vital to the war effort, and was consequently to be regarded as a secret that absolutely could not be allowed to become known to the enemy.

What the Second Platoon of “Baker” Company, 4109th Engineer Light Equipment Battalion, did was erect from the base of the cliff a framework of four-by-eights 60 feet high and 155 feet wide. Then they nailed four-by-eight-foot sheets of plywood, lengthwise, to the framework. Then they painted the plywood in diagonal black and yellow two-foot-wide stripes to make it visible, and then draped camouflage netting over whatever the hell it was to make it invisible.

Then, leaving behind an officer and eight men in a truck to make sure whatever the hell it was didn’t get blown down by the wind, the platoon returned to its base in England, where they were again admonished not to discuss with anyone what they had done in Scotland.

Canidy’s delight with the western shore of Little Ross Bay had also caused the U.S. Navy Auxiliary Vessel Atmore YD-1823 to steam the previous evening across the very unpleasant Irish Sea from Liverpool to Little Ross Bay, where it now rode at anchor. Everyone from the skipper down was either seasick or saying unkind things about the idiocy of the Naval Service in general and whichever fucking idiot had dreamed this up. Or both.

"This” was their orders, classified Secret. These, in addition to giving the location of Little Ross Bay and telling them where precisely they were to drop anchor in Little Ross Bay, informed them that they were to be “prepared to take aboard certain U.S. Military personnel who may be parachuted into the bay, or onto the western shore thereof.”

Since the engineers had done a good job with the camouflage netting, the structure the engineers had built was not visible to the skipper or the lookouts of the Atmore, who consequently believed themselves to be sitting all by their lonesomes in the middle of fucking nowhere.

And then, suddenly, a B-17 appeared.

“Battle stations, battle stations,” the loudspeakers boomed. “Boat crews, man your boats. Davit crews, stand by to launch rescue boats.”

The B-17 came right over the Atmore, so low they could see the engine exhausts, and so close that some of the crew swore that there had been no machine-gun turrets on it, or gun positions in the fuselage.

The B-17 flew right into the cliffs on the west shore of Little Ross Bay and exploded.

When the rescue-boat crews finally made their way to the crash site, they found they had been preceded by an Army Engineer lieutenant and eight men, and by a first lieutenant wearing a SHAEF Patch.

Both the lieutenant (j.g.) commanding the rescue boat landing party and the lieutenant from the Engineer platoon were immensely relieved when the officer from SHAEF, a Lieutenant Jamison, told them that the crew of the B-l7 had parachuted to safety about an hour before, so it would not be necessary to search the crash site for bodies.

Both junior officers had questions:

The Engineer lieutenant wondered, If there was no crew in that thing, how come it hit that whatever-the-fuck-it-was we built right in the middle?

The Lieutenant (j.g.) wondered, If that was an accident during a routine training flight, how come they sent us up here maybe twelve hours before that plane took off?

And both of them were very curious about Lieutenant Jamison: How come a SHAEF officer, not even Army Air Corps, just happened to be on the western shore of Little Ross Bay when the B-17 crashed?