Over the course of the previous four days, since leaving Algiers, Dick Canidy had come to admire Commander Jean L’Herminier, the submarine’s chief officer.
Canidy found that L’Herminier was truly an officer and a gentleman, as well as a first-class submariner. Though the commander had a compact frame—five-seven, maybe one-forty—the way he carried himself made him seem much larger. He spoke softly, but there was strength in his voice, a confidence that he knew exactly what he was doing.
And the thirty-five-year-old had real balls. This wasn’t the first time he had pushed his ship hard and fast.
The Agosta-class Casabianca, ninety-two meters long and diesel powered, had been launched February 2, 1935, at St. Nazaire, France. She had been armed with antiaircraft guns and eleven torpedo tubes and carried a complement of some fifty men and four officers.
L’Herminier had pushed the sub to make the nearly five-hundred-nautical-mile trip from Algiers to just north of the northwestern tip of Sicily in four days. During nighttime hours, he ran her as much as he felt comfortable on the surface, which allowed approximately twice the speed than when she ran submerged during the daylight hours.
He had used a somewhat similar tactic four months earlier, when on November 27, 1942, he and his entire crew escaped from Toulon, the Mediterranean port in southern France. Most of the vessels of the French Navy had just been scuttled there to keep them out of the hands of the Nazis, who had invaded in retaliation of the Allies’ OPERATION TORCH.
L’Herminier had set a hard course of 180 degrees and sailed the Casabianca as fast as she would go to Algiers, and there joined the Allies.
And now he was about to send Canidy to the shore of Sicily.
“Ready, Major?” Commander L’Herminier asked.
“At your pleasure, Commander,” Canidy replied.
Stanley Fine had told Canidy that it had been L’Herminier who had come up with the efficient method of putting agents ashore.
The process involved first making a daylight reconnaissance of the shoreline by periscope to locate an appropriate landing spot on shore for the team. (“You don’t want to drop them off at a tall rocky cliff, for example,” Fine had explained.) The next step was to submerge there and lie on the seafloor till dark. Then, in the safety of darkness, the sub would surface and the agents would disembark to infiltrate ashore either by swimming or by inflatable raft.
The process had worked flawlessly on Corsica, Fine had said, and was quickly being adopted as the standard.
Canidy was dressed in nice slacks, a dark-colored sweater, and a navy blue Greek fisherman’s cap that he had pulled from the wardrobe room the OSS maintained at La Villa de Vue de Mer. These clothes were in fact from Sicily—possibly even once belonging to the shoe magnate Dutton himself—and while they did not fit Canidy perfectly, they were close enough.
He had one other set of clothing from the OSS wardrobe in a black rubberized duffel that also contained his Johnson LMG, the six magazines of .30-06 ammunition for it, four full magazines of .45 ACP for his Colt pistol, ten pounds of Composition C-2 explosive, two packages of cheese crackers, a one-pound salami, and a canteen of water.
In a waterproof canister were the fuses for the Composition C-2, his coded notes of Nola’s family contact information—If for some reason I should find myself in Porto Empedocle—the copy of what he considered his “Charlie Lucky’s You’re an Instant Mobster!” form, and his OSS credentials.
In his pocket, kept close at hand, was a tin pillbox with ten or so aspirin—and two glass ampoules of cyanide acid.
When he had put them in there, he had thought, Well,if the aspirin doesn’t cure a headache, an ampoule sure will.
Commander L’Herminier looked one final time in the periscope, and when he was satisfied with what he saw—or, more important, didn’t see—he turned to his executive officer.
“Take her up please,” the captain of the boat ordered in French.
The deck of the submarine was still much awash with seawater as Canidy and a pair of sailors wordlessly came down the conning tower ladder. Canidy carried his duffel. One of the sailors carried a partially inflated rubber boat, a paddle that folded, and a bellows. The other sailor carried a rope ladder.
Out on the deck, just forward of the conning tower, the sailor with the rope ladder began tying it off to hard points while the sailor with the rubber boat fully inflated it.
When both were finished, Canidy was less than enthused.
As far as he was concerned, the rubber boat that had been provided for him to transition from sea to shore left quite a bit to be desired.
“Boat” is a rather fanciful description, he thought, eyeing the rubber doughnut.
It was not much better than a large truck-tire inner tube, and he began to strongly suspect that that was exactly what it was. Or at least a modified version of one, with a circle of rubber material vulcanized to its bottom to serve as a sort of floor.
Its chief—if not sole—positive attribute was that being so small it would not be hard to hide once he reached shore.
He was grateful that he had had some practice getting in it back in Algiers. But now that he stood on a wet sub deck out in the open sea, that training seemed rather far removed from the real world.
He shook his head.
“Now or never, I suppose,” he said, not necessarily to the sailors.