“Well, then,” Owen said, “one other thing before I leave. Any chance you might know about a station called ‘Saturn’ or maybe ‘Mars’? Apparently there is rumor that one or both exist, either on or near Sicily. I know that after all the General has said about Sicily being off-limits, it couldn’t be one of ours.”
Fine chewed and swallowed.
Oh, absolutely not one of ours!
“Saturn, you said?”
“And Mars. That’s what I heard.”
Fine looked off in the distance, toward the operational charts hanging from the bookshelves, then looked back at Owen and locked eyes.
“No, I’m afraid not. Never heard of Mars or Saturn.”
Owen nodded, and gestured toward the envelope he’d brought.
“Well, that’s very good, because the early bombing that has begun on Pantelleria soon will move to Corsica—as well as Sicily and other islands. Softening them up. And as much as the General appreciates the intel he’s getting, it would be tragic to take out our own people.”
“Softening?”
“Softening different targets, of course,” Owen confirmed, and said it with an arrogance that suggested he might be doing it all himself, “to confuse Hitler as to what our real target is next.”
“When?”
“June seventeenth is the first sortie. Everything you need to know is in the envelope.”
; Fine automatically glanced at his desk, to where he had put the messages from Donovan and Dulles.
Jesus Christ! I’ve got to get Canidy to take out that SS bastard in Messina before we bomb the place? And he just got there.
Fine looked up to respond to J. Warren Owen.
He was gone.
[FOUR]
Palermo, Sicily
0810 31 May 1943
Dick Canidy tried to walk casually along Cristoforo Columbo while scanning the activity in the port. He followed nearly a block behind two men who carried a wooden crate by its rope handles at each end. In the ten blocks he’d just walked, he hadn’t seen even a half-dozen soldiers, which he considered one of the first signs that the message declaring a half-million troops were pouring into Sicily was pure bullshit.
Canidy saw at the nearest dock that at least six stevedores were provisioning two forty-foot-long wooden fishing boats. Moored next to those boats was a rusty-hulled ninety-foot cargo ship.
Like the first one I blew up thinking it had the Tabun.
The cargo vessel had a small main cabin at the bow and a long flat deck with large hatches and a pair of tall booms. Through one of the hatches the booms were lowering stacks of wooden crates, much larger versions of the one the men ahead of him carried. Beyond the cargo ship, Canidy noticed there was a pair of hulking Schnellboots under armed guard. The S-boats were tied up at the end of a T-shaped pier.
That’s a new pier. They finally replaced the one that burned when the cargo ship went up.
I wonder if either of those S-boats was the one that we watched machine-gun the crew of the fishing boat.
And I wonder if any of the fishermen here know that an S-boat did that.
Frank Nola damn sure saw it—“This day I vow to never forget,” he said—and would have said something.
Canidy could not shake the image. They had been en route to Sicily aboard the Casabianca, running on her diesel engines near the surface to make better time while charging the batteries. It had been a clear, mostly moonless night, the sky filled with brilliant stars. Through the periscope, they spotted the S-boat alongside the fishing boat half its size, both silhouetted in the soft light of the night sky.