Secret Warriors (Men at War 2)

"He looks terrible," Sarah said when she saw the photographs. "He looks starved."

"He's alive," Ann said.

"And he's coming home."

"Why didn't you show me this stuff before?"

Sarah demanded. Ann shrugged her shoulders. "I was suffering from perfectly normal postnatal depression," Sarah said furiously.

"I wasn't crazy!" Ann smiled at her. Sarah thought of something else.

"Have you heard from Dick Canidy?

A "Not from or about," Ann said. "Well, they're probably keeping him busy," Sarah said, "and he just hasn't had time to write."

"Sure," Ann said.

"Either that, or there is a Chinese girl, or girls, or an American nurse, or an English nurse, or all of the above."

"You don't know that," Sarah said. "I know Richard Canidy, damn him," Ann said.

FOUR I Warm Springs, Georgia June 8, 1942

The President of the United States and Colonel William J. Donovan took their lunch, fried chicken and a potato salad, on the flagstone patio outside Roosevelt's cottage. The two were shielded from the view of other patients and visitors at the poliomyelitis care center by a green latticework fence. Roosevelt had a guest, who vanished immediately on the arrival of Donovan by car from Atlanta. Donovan wondered why he was surprised and shocked. Roosevelt was a man, even if his legs were crippled. Eleanor, he well knew, could be a pain in the ass. Barbara Whittaker was far more charming, and certainly better-looking, and Chesly Whittaker had died in the bed of a woman young enough to be his daughter.

Why should he expect Roosevelt to be a saint? And, he told himself, in any event it was none of his business. He had come to Georgia to discuss the war, and what COI was doing to help win THE SECRET WARRIORS N TO it, Whether Franklin Roosevelt was getting a little on the side had nothing to do with that. The most important thing on Roosevelt's mind at lunch was neither the beating the nation was taking in the Pacific nor even the first American counter stroke, Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, scheduled for the fall. What he wanted to discuss was the super bomb. Donovan had previously learned that while the experiments at the reactor at the University of Chicago were by no means near completion they had yet to try for a chain reaction-Dr. Conant of Harvard had reported that the scientists were more and more confident that things were going to work. After these reports Roosevelt had been so confident-or, Donovan thought, so desperate-that he had authorized a virtual blank check on his secret war appropriations funds to go ahead with the effort. As of June 1, under an Army Corps of Engineers officer, Brigadier General Leslie R.

Groves, the Manhattan Project had come into being, with the mission of developing a bomb whose explosive force would come from atomic fission.

Manhattan had been chosen for the project name in the hope that the enormous expenditures about to be made would be connected with Manhattan Island, rather than the facilities being built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Han ford, Washington, and in the deserts of the Southwest.

The Office of the Coordinator of Information had so far been involved in this program in the operation that had located and brought to the United States Grunier, the French mining engineer who had worked before the war for Union Mini re in the Belgian Congo. One of the very few known sources of uraninite ore, from which it was theoretically possible to extract uranium 235, was in Katanga Province of the Belgian Congo. From Grunier it had been learned that there were in fact many tons of uraninite in Katanga Province lying around as by-products of other Union Mini re mining and smelting operations. Some of it had simply been removed and pushed aside as slag during copper and tin mining operations. A few people questioned how much to trust Grunier, for he had been brought involuntarily to the United States from Morocco where he was working in phosphate mining. His family was in France, and he was understandably concerned for their welfare. This concern was promptly used as leverage by COI He was thus prevailed upon to draw maps. Donovan then sent an so a agent to the Belgian Congo from South Africa who had returned with fifty pounds of uraninite ore in twenty bags. The source of each bag was labeled according to which pile of spellings it came from. Twelve of his packages turned out to be useless. They were not what Grunier thought--or at least so he told the COI interrogators-were supplies of uraninite. Seven more samples had not contained enough uraninite to make refining possible.

One of the three good samples had contained an adequate parts-per-million ratio, and the last two, on spectrographic and chemical analysis, proved to be very desirable. The next question was: Were the samples truly representative of the pile they were taken from, or were they a fluke?

This problem was magnified greatly because of the enormous quantities of uraninite ore required to produce even minute quantities of pure uranium 235. There was, so far as anyone knew, less than 0.000001 pound of the stuff in all the world. Some scientists believed that as little as an ounce of pure U-235 would be enough to make up the critical mass of an atomic fission bomb. But others, just as knowledgeable, said the minimum figure would have to be at least a hundred pounds. Thus, to determine how many thousands

of tons were going to be necessary to produce as much as fifty pounds of uranium, it was necessary to have refinable quantities. In laboratory terms, that meant a minimum of five tons. For now. And of course much more later, if things went the way everyone hoped they would. As of December 12, 1941, the German government had informed the Belgian government that under the terms of the armistice agreement between them, the export of copper and other strategic minerals and ores from Belgian colonies to the United States of America was no longer permitted. And all other exports would henceforth be reviewed to make sure they would not accrue to the enemy's benefit.

Worrying about how to smuggle several hundred tons of ore out of the middle of darkest Africa would, however, have to wait. The job now was to determine if the Katanga ore was what was needed, and the way to do that was to get five tons of it to the United States. And the way to do that, Donovan decided, was to fly into Katanga and get it. "You're working on flying the stuff out, then. Is that right, Bill?"

Roosevelt said.

THE SECRET WARRIORS 8 el "Yes, Sir," Donovan said. "How are you going to do it?" Donovan was a little annoyed with Roosevelt's interest in details. It was, in a way, flattering, but it took time. He was often saying to his subordinates that of all the shortages that interfered with the war effort, the greatest was time. There simply wasn't enough time to do what had to be done. The few minutes it would take to tell the President how he planned to get the uraninite ore from the Belgian Congo would have to come from the total time Roosevelt was able to give him. He would have much preferred to spend this talking about other things. But Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the Commander in Chief, he reminded himself, and could not therefore be told to stop wasting time with unimportant questions. "You remember the young man who came to dinner with Jim Whittaker?" he asked. "Canidy? Something like that?"

"Richard Canidy," Donovan said.

"Ex-Flying Tiger, and more important now, an MIT-trained aeronautical engineer."

"I'm a little confused. Isn't he the chap you sent to North Africa after t mining engineer and Admiral Whatsisname? "That, too," Donovan said, impressed but not really surprised that Roosevelt had called that detail from his memory.

"At the moment, he's at Chesly's house on the Jersey shore, trying to keep the admiral happy and away from newspaper reporters. But he's also working on this. "How is he working on this)" "He has been provided with the details-weight and distance, I mean, not what has to be hauled or where the stuff is. And he has been told to recommend a way-in absolute secrecy-to move that much weight that far.

He's been getting a lot of help from Pan American Airways."

"Why not the Air Corps?" Donovan was very much aware that he had just walked out on thin ice. Pan American Airways beyond question had greater experience in long-distance transoceanic flight that anyone else-including the Army Air Corps. But their greatest expert in this area was Colonel Charles A.

Lindbergh, "Lucky Lindy," the first man to fly the Atlantic solo the great American hero who had not long before enraged Roosevelt and a large number of other important people by announcing that in his professional judgment the German Luftwaffe looked invincible.