The Double Agents (Men at War 6)

“You mind if I speak with them as a group?” Canidy said.

“Captain Fine said to give you what you want.”

“Get ’em in here,” Canidy said. “I can do this quickly, especially if I only have to do it once.”

Canidy looked at Darmstadter.

“This will be good for your education, too, Hank. You might want to take advantage of picking out a good seat before the rest arrive.”

[FOUR]

OSS Whitbey House Station Kent, England 1630 2 April 1943

The three-vehicle caravan wound down the rain-slick narrow country road that cut through dense forest. Lieutenant Colonel Ed Stevens’s olive drab 1941 Ford staff car was in the lead. Behind it was a British Humber light ambulance—a large red cross within a white square painted on its side panels and its back doors—and trailing the ambulance was another U.S. Army ’41 Ford.

As they approached the grounds of Whitbey House, Stevens noticed the faded cardboard signs nailed to trees and affixed to stakes driven in the ground. These the Brits had placed every twenty meters around the perimeter of the lands of Whitbey House. They bore the now barely legible legend GOVERNMENT ESTABLISHMENT ENTRY PROHIBITED and the seal of the Crown.

The procession came to an unmarked gap in the trees that was an ancient lane which wound into the forest.

Stevens’s driver steered the Ford through the gap and began winding up the lane, and the trailing vehicles followed.

Stevens smiled.

Before the war, when he’d been living with his family in London, he liked to take his wife and sons on Sunday drives to admire the countryside. And now, despite the war—Or maybe in spite of the damn thing, because it’s refreshing to get out of that dreary London—he discovered that he enjoyed the trip all the more. He found Whitbey House, and its storied history, to be absolutely magnificent.

Whitbey House—the ancestral seat of the Duchy of Stanfield—consisted of some twenty-six thousand acres. This included the eighty-four-room Whitbey House itself and its various outbuildings (garages, stables, et cetera), the village of Whitbey on Naer (population: 607), the ruins of the Roman Catholic abbey of St. William the Martyr, St. Timothy’s Anglican Church, a ten-year-old, forty-six-hundred-foot gravel runway with an aircraft hangar, plus various other real property that had come into the hands of the first Duke of Stanfield circa 1213.

Like most of England’s “stately homes,” Whitbey House had been requisitioned for the duration of the war by His Majesty’s government. The government’s need for space had been bad enough—damn near insatiable—but when the United States entered the war, it quickly became unbelievably worse. U.S. air, ground, and naval forces arrived in the British Isles, and all of these people—and the supply depots they brought with them—required their own places.

Once requisitioned, Whitbey House had passed from the control of His Majesty’s Office of Properties to the War Office, then to the Special Operations Executive, then to the Office of Strategic Services.

Shamelessly copying the Research and Development Station IX of their counterparts in the British Special Operations Executive—“Because they know what they’re doing,” Wild Bill Donovan had said, only half in jest—the OSS set up the facility as a safe house and, as the Operational Techniques School, a training base for agents.

What Dick Canidy more accurately called the Throat-Cutting and Bomb-Throwing Academy.

There had been “improvements” to the property, beyond the Brits’ cardboard warning signs that hung faded and limp on the perimeter.

A kilometer up the ancient lane, a shoulder had been added to either side of the road, one wide enough for vehicles to be able to turn around. A low stone wall crossed the shoulder, from the trees to a gatehouse, and served as a barrier. The Kent Constabulary supplied constables to man the gatehouse around the clock. The constable’s job was to serve as the first level of security, passing those with proper clearance while turning back the casual visitors curious about the estate.

Stevens saw that after the constable—this one a rather portly fellow stretching his uniform buttons to the point of popping—had checked their identification and cleared the caravan to pass onto the estate, the constable cranked a U.S. Army EE-8 field telephone. He then reported to the sergeant of the U.S. Army Guard at the next barrier that he had just passed three authorized vehicles, the first carrying an American lieutenant colonel.

This next barrier, far out of sight of the roads bordering the estate and the first barrier, was protected by tall coils of concertina, a razor-sharp barbed wire. Plywood signs hung from the concertina at intervals of fifteen meters. These bore a representation of a skull and crossbones with the legend: PERSONS TRESPASSING BEYOND THIS LINE WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT.

Stevens was quite aware that the skull and crossbones and rolls of concertina were American, and that the guard was U.S. Army infantry.

That was because, just outside of the barbed wire, there was an American infantry battalion housed in a tent-and-hut encampment. While the OSS station did not need the twelve hundred men of a battalion, the soldiers had been stationed there anyway, the reasoning being that the battalion had to be stationed somewhere, so why the hell not show the British that the Yanks were serious about keeping safe the secrets of their new OSS.

The officers of the battalion had been told that Whitbey House housed a highly classified organization and that its mission was to select bombardment targets for the Eighth Air Force. The officers had no reason to doubt that, but it wasn’t uncommon for them to wonder among themselves—“My God, George, eighteen hundred men? What the hell else is in that old house?”—if this wasn’t a bit of bureaucratic overkill to guard one lousy facility.

The battalion’s four companies were on rotation. As three companies carried on routine training (keeping themselves available as needed), the fourth provided the guard force between the concertina and a third barrier.

This third barrier enclosed just over three acres around Whitbey House itself. It consisted of an eight-foot-high fence of barbed wire, with concertina laid on either side of the fence. Atop poles planted every thirty meters were floodlights, three to a pole.

Past this point, the forest became manicured, and Stevens marveled at the two-kilometer-long path they followed. He knew that it had been carved out centuries before, designed not as the quickest route from Point A to Point B but, in order to accommodate the aristocracy’s heavy carriages, as a route that was as level as possible up to the house.

They emerged from the forest, and there, at the end of a wide, curving entrance drive, was Whitbey House itself. Stevens smiled. The structure was so impressively large—three stories of brick and sandstone—that he could not take it all in without moving his head.

At the final U.S. Army guard post, the officer of the guard checked ID cards against a list of authorized personnel. Beyond him, Stevens saw Canidy’s Packard parked in front of the front door of Whitbey House.