It was a thick file from the Navy’s BUAIR (Naval Bureau of Aeronautics), with addenda and comments from the U.S. Army Air Corps and the War Production Board, expressing the Navy’s bureaucratic outrage: An R-5D transport which they had loaned to the Army Air Corps had not only not been returned, but the Air Corps professed to have no knowledge of its whereabouts. Further, the Navy complained, in the absence of a Certificate of Loss Due to Enemy Action, the War Production Board refused to grant them anything higher than a “B” Priority for its replacement from the Curtiss Production Stream.

This wasn’t as funny as it first appeared. Bureaucratically, it was necessary to find the Navy a replacement aircraft as soon as possible, which meant arranging an “AAA” priority for them. Otherwise, the next time the Navy was asked to loan the Air Corps an aircraft, it would find sufficient reason to delay indefinitely doing so, priority or no priority.

The “loan” process had to be kept moving smoothly not only for operational reasons but—at least as important—for security reasons. The OSS would in the end get what it wanted, but questions would be asked if it took a personal telephone call from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Director of BUAIR ordering him to immediately produce an airplane.

The mess was not helped by the fact that the R-5D Commando that Canidy and Whittaker had dumped in Kolwezi had been intended as a VIP transport and had been borrowed by the Air Corps for no longer than thirty days for use “in transporting senior U.S. and Allied military and civilian officials to, and within, the British Isles.”

The Commando had been destroyed on a mission so secret that the full details were known to only the President, General Marshall, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, USA, Colonel Donovan, and Captain Peter Douglass, Sr., USN.

Fine still had no idea what the sacks he had transferred from Canidy’s Commando to his had contained. And the operation was still classified Top Secret. Obviously, the Navy could not be told that the plane, accidentally overloaded, had crashed on takeoff in the Belgian Congo, and had then been burned to inhibit identification.

Meanwhile, the Navy wanted either the VIP airplane back, or one just like it. And they w

anted it immediately.

Happily, a solution born of his experience in Hollywood came to Stanley Fine. For a moment, as a result of his training at Harvard Law, he had to reject the solution. But before long, expediency won out over ethics. At Harvard Law he had been taught that at the head of the list of Thou Shalt Nots for a member of the bar was “uttering, issuing, or causing to be uttered or issued a statement, written or oral, he knows to be false.”

Fine’s solution, anyhow, was a rewrite: If the Office of War Production and the Navy wanted a Certificate of Loss Due to Enemy Action, write them one.

He was a little uneasy when Captain Douglass—an Annapolis graduate and thus almost by definition a straight shooter—smiled, patted him approvingly on the shoulder, and told him to go to it.

As Fine typed out the revised scenario—the Navy’s R-5D was missing and presumed lost following a takeoff from Great Britain bound for North Africa, with the presumption that it had been intercepted by German fighter aircraft based in France—Fine reflected upon the implied, if unintentional, slur behind Captain Douglass’s joy at Fine’s solution to the R-5D mess:

This was exactly the sort of thing a lawyer, for the obvious reasons, would immediately think up, while a professional officer, for the obvious reasons, would not. When Fine reached the signature block, he typed PETER DOUGLASS, SR., CAPTAIN, USN. If the Navy was to be lied to, let a sailor do it.

Donovan climbed into the back seat of the Princess. Stevens followed him, and the WRAC (Women’s Royal Army Corps) sergeant driver closed the door after them and got behind the wheel.

As soon as they had left the airfield, Stevens laid his rigid briefcase in his lap, worked the combination lock, and opened it. It was full of yellow Teletype and cryptographic foolscap, all of it stamped either SECRET or TOP SECRET. There was also a .38 Special-caliber Colt “Banker’s Special” revolver.

He handed the yellow messages to Donovan. Some were addressed to Donovan personally. Others were messages addressed to the chief of station that Stevens felt Donovan would wish to see.

Donovan read them carefully as the Princess limousine, trailed by the Ford, headed down narrow county blacktop roads toward Kent and Whitbey House. Stevens read over Donovan’s shoulder, taking the messages back from him and often making notes of Donovan’s reactions to them.

“Curiosity practically overwhelms me about that one,” Stevens said when Donovan came to one brief message. It was only classified “priority,” which, because most of the other messages were “operational immediate” and “urgent, ” made it apparently of low import:

PRIORITY

SECRET

NAVAL COMMCENTER WASH DC I800 HOURS 2 DEC 1942

STATION CHIEF LONDON FOR DONOVAN

REGRET TO INFORM YOU FOOTBALL STADIUM CHAINS CRACKING STOP

LT COMMANDER HUDSON USNR STOP

END

"Jesus! ” Donovan said, and exhaled audibly.

“Bad news?” Stevens asked, surprised at the out-of-character blasphemy.

Donovan looked at him almost as if he didn’t know who he was, and then shook his head. He folded the message carefully and put it in his breast pocket.

“You don’t want to give that back to me?” Stevens said.

“I—uh—Ed, I’m keeping sort of a personal file of significant messages,” Donovan said, then leaned forward to crank down the glass partition.

Tags: W.E.B. Griffin Men at War Thriller
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