He sipped his tea, then went on:
“Now, as to the Royal Marines, they are of course an elite force. And the rank of major is important, but”—he looked at Niven—“no offense to anyone present, not too important so as to draw undue attention.”
“Quite all right,” Niven said nobly, waving it off with a flick of his left wrist. “I’m accustomed to being unimportant.”
“So a major in the Royal Marines met our criteria for ‘a courier of some importance,’” Montagu finished.
“Okay,” Charity said. “That’s logical.”
“We picked Spain,” he went on, “because we know that Admiral Canaris of the Abwehr and Francisco Franco are quite friendly, quite close, actually. Accordingly, it’s commonly overlooked that the quote neutral unquote country teems with German spies, including a very active one in Huelva. Which is why we selected Huelva specifically—nothing goes on there without this German agent’s knowledge. We get our major and his briefcase to shore there, it’s as good as being in Hitler’s hands.”
“We hope,” Fleming added.
Montagu smiled. “Forgive me my exaggeration.”
Charity smiled back.
“Once we had pinpointed Huelva,” Montagu went on, “and began studying it, we found even more reason to use it. The hydrographer of the Navy at the Admiralty ran a number of scenarios for tides and weather. He determined that the conditions in April, particularly the prevailing south-westerly wind, were perfect for our purposes of, one, ensuring that the body would indeed make it ashore—not float farther out to sea—and, two, being logical that the body could have come from a plane that crashed at sea.”
“A body wearing a Mae West?” Charity said.
“A life jacket. Sir Bernard Spilsbury—the pathologist?—explained to us that victims of plane crashes in water die from any number of events. It can be from the crash itself. It can be from drowning. Or, if they survive all that, then from exposure.”
“Which is how our man died,” Charity said.
“Pneumonia, triggered by exposure,” Montagu corrected. “So all that came together. Most important, it was approved by the chiefs of staff and the Prime Minister, who then approved our use of a submarine en route to Malta.
We then convinced Lieutenant Jewell to delay the departure of the HMS Seraph two weeks for us.”
“And here we are,” Fleming said finally.
“Okay,” Charity said. “Thank you. Now I think I’ve got a good idea of where we’re going with this.”
“Incidentally,” Stevens added, “you probably know you were lucky to get the Seraph and Lieutenant Jewell. They seem uniquely equipped for these sort of special operations.”
“Indeed,” Fleming said. “Then you’ve no doubt heard what happened with Giraud?”
Stevens smiled. “Some of it.”
“The French general who escaped from the German prison?” Charity said.
“He was at the Casablanca Conference with all the other leaders,” the Duchess added.
Fleming nodded. “He almost cut off his skinny nose to spite his face. Had it not been for we Brits, he was this close”—he held up his index finger and thumb almost touching—“to spending the rest of the war back in a POW camp instead of there with Roosevelt and Churchill.”
“How so?”
“In late October, prior to the Torch landing,” Fleming explained, “Jewell carried a half dozen Allied officers, including General Mark Clark, to a lonely strip of beach forty kilometers west of Algiers. There, at the home of the head of the underground group Chantiers de la Jeunesse, they met in secret with Vichy French General Charles Mast. They tried to persuade Mast to bring his French forces in with the Allies, or, failing that, have the forces not fight the Allies during the invasion of North Africa. Mast said something could be possible—but only if General Henri-Honoré Giraud were there to lead them. Giraud was in Vichy France, having only months earlier escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. He was more or less hiding from the Germans and their French friends, who wanted to lock him back up in Germany. Arrogantly, Giraud said he would consider being secreted to North Africa to command—but, ridiculously, he refused passage aboard any British vessel.”
Stevens laughed.
“What’s funny about that?” Charity asked.
“For one, it was a ridiculous demand from one with a bounty on his head,” Stevens explained. “Then, General Clark desperately tried to locate a U.S. Navy boat—surface or submarine—close enough to accomplish the mission soon enough. He couldn’t. So, cleverly, it was arranged with the British navy to allow the HMS Seraph to become the USS Seraph—flying a U.S. Navy ensign—and for it to be commanded by a Captain Jerauld Wright, U.S. Navy.”
“What about the crew?”
“All Brits but for Captain Wright,” Fleming said, grinning, “all putting on pitiful American accents. But the bastard Giraud got aboard.”