The Saboteurs (Men at War 5)

Bayer stood. He walked into the bathroom, filled one of the glasses with water, drank it all, then refilled the glass and brought it to Mary.

“Here,” he said, holding out the glass. “Try some of this. You need to drink.”

She closed her eye but did not move.

Bayer stared at her, wondering what to do next. Then he saw that she was moving her feet, ever so slightly, then her legs. He realized that she was attempting to reposition herself—and that it was taking great effort.

She has got to be in terrible pain.

“Can I help?” he said softly.

She shook her head, then rolled onto her back and used her elbows to inch herself up, pulling the sheet with her as she went.

Bayer quickly put the glass of water on the bedside table and started adjusting the pillows to better support her.

When she was sitting up and as comfortable as could be expected, she reached over and picked up the glass. She sipped the water tentatively, drinking only about a quarter of the water in the glass.

She sat there, her good eye closed, and slowly breathed in and out. After a moment, she brought the glass back up to her lips, took a deeper sip than before, then opened her eye and watched as she put the glass back on the table.

She looked at Bayer and mouthed, Thank you.

He said very slowly and softly but with some force, “Who did this, sweetheart?”

Mary closed her eye, shook her head, then slid down on the bed, back beneath the sheets.

She pulled the cover over her head and went back to sleep.

[ FOUR ]

OSS London Station

London, England

0915 10 March 1943

As a professional aviator, Major Richard M. Canidy, United States Army Air Forces, knew that to get from New York City to Algiers the faster, more efficient routing—the term “faster” being somewhat academic, as there really was no way in hell to quickly cover such a vast distance—was to go south, then east, then northeast.

That little adventure—about five days in transit if you were lucky, longer if you weren’t—meant taking a Boeing C-75—one of the massive tail-dragger transcontinental Clippers with four 900-horsepower Wright Cyclone engines that the USAAF had taken over from Pan Am—to South America via

Cuba, British Guiana, and Brazil, then getting aboard a converted B-24 bomber for the transatlantic leg to Dakar, French West Africa.

With a fuel stop in the ocean on a speck of rock called Ascension Island.

If good fortune allowed you to find the refueling stop, and to make Dakar, then came the long flight over the Sahara Desert, then another over the Atlas Mountains to Marrakech, then a four-hour hop to Algiers.

To the weary traveler at that point, the ragged little Maison Blanche Airport looked more lovely than Washington National Airport during cherry blossom season.

Conversely, Canidy knew, the northern routing, while arguably not as “fast” or efficient to the Mediterranean Theater of Operations as its southern counterpart, had at least two things going for it:

One—which appealed immensely to Canidy the Aeronautical Engineer, who had a profound sense of self-preservation—it did not require, in an aircraft potentially flying on fumes, the terrifying task of trying to find a speck of solid surface on which to put down in one of earth’s largest bodies of water.

And two—which appealed to Canidy the Love-Struck—it did mean he could stop and see Ann Chambers en route.

If pressed, Canidy was not sure which was the stronger sales point, but together they created a deal that simply could not be passed up.

And so he had gone from the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York City to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and there caught an Air Transport Command C-54 aircraft that ferried him and twoscore of his fellow comrades in arms to Gander Field, Newfoundland, then on to Prestwick, Scotland.

Canidy found himself in London in almost no time.