Secret Warriors (Men at War 2)

"And I wasn't a very good aviator anyway and a worse naval officer."

"You don't mind not being in the service?"

"They're shooting at naval aviators these days," he said. "Haven't you heard?" I like that, Roberta Whatley decided. Not only is it exactly opposite from what Tom would say, but it's honest. "And you like what you're doing now?"

"It's all right," he said. "What exactly are you doing?"

"Research, in airfoil design for Boeing," he said. "I don't know what that means," she said. "An airfoil is a wing," he said, "As a wing approaches the speed of sound, strange things happen. We're trying to find out exactly what and why. "You mean you're a test pilot?"

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

TEE SECRET WARRIORS M 13

"The only thing I fly is a slapstick," Canidy said.

"Behind a desk."

"Oh," she said. "What happened between you and Tom?" Canidy asked.

"If you don't mind my asking."

"I don't like to talk about it," she said. "Excuse me," he said. "He wasn't at Great Lakes three weeks before he started running around," she said. "That's hard to believe," Canidy said. "Why is it hard to believe?" Roberta asked. "Look in the mirror," Canidy said. She blushed.

By the time the City of Birmingham landed at Cleveland, Canidy' silver s flask was almost empty. They had a drink waiting for the plane to be refueled, and he was able to refill it at the bar in the airport terminal. Between Cleveland and Washington, she told him all about how Tom had been a rotten sonofabitch almost from the beginning. And he seemed to understand. He patted her hand comfortingly. When they got to Washington, he confessed that he didn't know where he was going to stay, but that he would call her when he found a hotel room someplace.

She replied that he didn't have any idea how hard it was to find a hotel room in Washington these days, and that should do was come with her to her apartment and use her what he phone to call around.

Otherwise, he might wind up sleeping on a park bench. While he was calling around to the hotels, she told him she certainly didn't want him to get the wrong idea, but she absolutely had to have a shower and get into something comfortable. She was not surprised when he came into the bathroom and got into the shower with her. The only thing that surprised her was that she didn't even pretend to be furious.

When she thought about it later, she decided it was all the Scotch she'd had on the airplane. Plus the fact that she had left Tom six months before, and she had the usual needs of a human being. Plus, in a flash of real honesty, she admitted that she had found it really exciting when she saw him naked.

THREE

The St. Regis Hotel New York City April 4, 1942

When the ten gentlemen-the group known as the Disciples-gathered to brief and be briefed by Colonel William Donovan, they found him in pain in bed in his suite at the hotel. He had a glass dark with Scotch in his hand, and there was a Scotch bottle on his bedside table. Though Colonel Donovan, a stocky, silver-haired, ruddy-faced Irishman, was not a professional soldier, neither was he a Kentucky colonel, nor the commanding officer of a National Guard regiment. He had earned both his silver eagle and the Medal of Honor for valor on the battlefields of France in World War I. Between wars, he had become a very successful-and, it logically followed, very wealthy-attorney in New York City, and a power behind the scenes in the Democratic Party, not only in New York but, even perhaps especially, in Washington. He was again in government employ, this time at an annual stipend of one dollar, as the Coordinator of Information, which meant he ran a relatively new government agency. Donovan reported directly to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Most people, to Donovan's joy, believed the COI was the United States government's answer to Joseph Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry. COI did, in fact, have an "information" function-in the propaganda sense-headed by the distinguished playwright Robert Sherwood.

But it also had another "information" function, headed by Donovan himself, which had absolutely nothing to do with whipping the American people into the kind of patriotic frenzy that would impel them, for the sake of the war effort," to abandon "pleasure driving" and donate their aluminum pans to be converted into bomb

ers. The kind of information that Donovan was charged with coordinating is more accurately described as intelligence.

Each of the military services had intelligence-gathering operations, as did the State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and federal government like the Departments of Labor, Commerce, Treasury, and Interior.

Despite sincerely made claims of absolute objectivity, President Roosevelt realized that when, say, the Chief of Naval Intelligence made a report on a problem together with a proposal for a solution, that solution generally involved the use of the U.S. Navy. Similarly, the Army seldom recommended naval bombardment of a target. Heavy Army Air Corps bomber aircraft were obviously better suited for that.

It was the Coordinator of Information's duty-which is to say Colonel William J. Donovan's-to examine the intelligence gathered by all relevant agencies, and then to evaluate that intelligence against the global war effort. If asked, he would also recommend a course of action.

This course of action might well be implemented by an agency different from the one providing the original intelligence.

To assist him in this task, Donovan intended to gather around him a dozen men, each of extraordinary intelligence and competence in his area of expertise. Like Donovan, they would offer to the government for one dollar per annum services that in the private sector would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because there were supposed to be twelve of these men (he had managed to recruit only ten) and because they were answerable only to Donovan, it was natural that they came to be known as the Disciples. Donovan was Christ, answerable only to God-Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Donovan's and his Disciples' mandate pleased virtually no one in the intelligence community. The Army and Navy were especially outraged that amateurs would oversee what their long-service professionals had developed. Their disapproval, however, meant very little as long as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had come to believe that Donovan's original suggestion was one of his own brilliant ideas, was pleased with the way things were going. He conferred at least twice a week with Donovan. One of those meetings had occurred the day before, which was why the Disciples filing into Donovan's St. Regis Hotel suite found him in bed in his pajamas. On his way to Union Station in Washington, where he had gone to catch the 11:55 to New York, the White House car carrying Donovan had been struck broadside by a taxicab.

Though his knee was severely-and painfully-hurt in the impact, he managed to catch the train. In his compartment, the pain grew intense, and he had the conductor fetch a bucket of ice cubes from the dining car. He wrapped some in a towel and applied it to his knee. That helped, but when he began to experience pain in his chest as well, he knew he had a more serious problem than a bruised knee. After he got to New York and taxied to the St. Regis, he stopped in the lobby and asked the manager to send him a doctor. The doctor listened to Donovan list his symptoms, prodded the knee, and then announced he was going to call an ambulance and transport Donovan to St. Vincent's Hospital.

What he had, the doctor told Colonel Donovan, was a blood clot caused by the injury to his knee. The clot had moved to his lung, which was why he had chest pains. The term for this condition was "embolism," the doctor continued. If the clot completely blocked the flow of blood to his lungs, or if it moved to his heart or to the artery supplying the brain, he would drop dead. In a hospital, he would be given medicine intravenously that would thin the blood. If he was lucky, in a month or six weeks the clot would dissolve. Reluctantly-and after pressure-the doctor told the colonel that the medicine which would be used to thin his blood was also available in a pill form. It was, Donovan was fascinated to learn, a pharmaceutical version of rat poison.

The doctor also reluctantly admitted that giving him this medicine-and bed rest-was about all the treatment the hospital could offer. "I can do that here," Donovan announced.

"I can't go to the hospital now. The doctor couldn't argue with that.