The Double Agents (Men at War 6)

“Speaking of our fearless leader,” Canidy said, “any idea what good ol’ Colonel Wild Bill thinks about all this?”

“That’s good ol’ General Wild Bill,” Fine corrected.

Canidy turned, his eyebrows raised. “Really?” he said.

“Indeed. While you were gone—on the twenty-third, before you were headed back here—FDR had him placed back on active duty and made him a brigadier general.”

“That’s good news.”

Fine smiled. “Yes, indeed it is.”

Stanley Fine was quite aware that it had taken Richard Canidy quite some time to come to hold William Donovan in high regard. Fine knew that because he had known Canidy a long time. Fine’s history of bailing out Canidy went back far before either of them had become part of the Office of the Coordinator of Information and the Office of Strategic Services—well before either organization even existed—back to when Fine was starting out in Hollywood and Canidy was in prep school in Iowa.

The young Stanley S. Fine, Esq., the ink still damp on the juris doctor diploma hanging on the wall of his movie studio office, had been the lawyer for the actress Monica Carlisle when she had sent him to the Iowa school.

Miss Carlisle was known at “America’s Sweetheart,” and the Hollywood studio PR flaks worked hard to maintain that image—and to keep secret from her adoring fans the fact that she had a young son, fathered before the war by a German industrialist.

And so it had been Fine’s mission to smooth over the hysteria that had resulted from a practical joke performed by Eric Fulmar—who the sultry actress herself more or less refused to acknowledge existed—and his buddy, a troublemaker by the name of Dick Canidy.

The joke had backfired, causing a Studebaker President to erupt in flames and, with it, a lot of tempers. Fine had shown up with a new replacement car and a calming influence over those who could have pressed charges. And with the damage thus limited, the friendship between Canidy and Fulmar—and their relationship with Fine—had become solidified for life.

Canidy went on to pursue his dream to be a pilot, and in 1938 graduated (cum laude) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science, Aeronautical Engineering. That had been on a Navy scholarship, in exchange for four years of postgraduation service. By the time he entered the Navy, he’d already accumulated a commercial pilot’s license, an instrument ticket, and three hundred fifty hours of solo time.

A career in the Navy would have seemed the natural path for such a skilled aviator. Not Canidy. He made no secret of the fact that he felt constrained by the rigid ways of the service and that he was determined to stay only so long as to make good on his agreement. He swore not to serve one damn minute more than was contractually required to repay the cost of his education—and was already entertaining an offer of employment at the Boeing Aircraft Company, Seattle, Washington.

But then, in June 1941, with barely a year left to his commitment, a grizzled, gray-haired man named Claire Chennault showed up at Naval Air Station Pensacola, where then-Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Richard M. Canidy, USN, was spending long days in the backseat of a biwing Kaydet, as a Navy instructor pilot for fledgling flyboys.

The legendary General Chennault suggested that the United States of America was soon to join the raging world war and Canidy was kidding himself if he thought his country was going to just let him walk with his skills out of the military.

“Son,” the crusty WWI fighter pilot said in his coarse Southern accent, “you damn may as well go ahead and believe in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and the fucking Tooth Fairy. There’ll be no time in the ramping up for war to adequately train all the new pilots that’re going to be needed. And you’ll be front of the line.”

Chennault said that he was pulling together a group of volunteers—with FDR’s approval, if not direct order, though this was implied and not discussed in any more detail than necessary with Canidy. These top pilots would fly in support of the Chinese, specifically the protection of the two-thousand-mile-long Burma Road that was the critical route for getting Western aid to China.

On behalf of Chiang Kai-shek, Chennault could offer Canidy a one-year contract flying Curtiss P-40Bs against the Japanese. Pay was six hundred dollars a month—twice what Canidy was getting from the Navy—plus a five-hundred-buck bonus for every Jap he shot down.

Ever on the lookout for number one—himself—Canidy took it. He’d decided it was as much for the money as for the honorable discharge from the Navy that it came with.

Being a Flying Tiger in Chennault’s American Volunteer Group (AVG) was not easy work—it was, in fact, damn dangerous—but Canidy quickly found his place and almost immediately had reaffirmed his belief that he’d been born to fly.

Yet it seemed that as soon as he had discovered that he not only loved being a fighter pilot but was damn good at it—five kills on one nasty sortie alone, making him a certifiable ace—a pudgy, pale, self-important-looking bureaucrat by the name of Eldon C. Baker showed up one day in December 1941 on the flight line at Kunming, China.

Baker came across as a supreme prick. But also a very highly placed prick—in his suit coat pocket he carried orders personally signed by the President of the United States—and he said that, as the U.S. had just joined the war, he was there to recruit Canidy.

Trouble was, he added, it was into an outfit described as so secretive that he (a) could not tell Canidy what he would be doing and (b) that in order for there to be no questions asked as to his disappearance—and thus no awkward answers

that might reveal secrets—a cover story would have the newly minted ace whisked away under a cloud of disgrace.

That did not necessarily bother Canidy—“I really don’t give a rat’s ass what anything thinks of me,” he’d muttered when informed of the need for the cover story—but leaving behind his buddies did.

Still, he’d thought, if whatever it is that I’m wanted to do is important enough for the President to send this asshole clear around the damn world to get me, then that’s that. Pack the bags….

Besides, being out of the AVG would mean he no longer would be getting shot at by the Japs. He figured it was only a matter of time before their Mitsubishi A5M 7.7mm machine-gun rounds found his ass. More important, he figured that taking the offer put him one step closer to getting the hell out of his military service obligations.

Back in Washington, however, he found that it all was somewhat more complicated than that.

The supersecret outfit turned out to be the Office of the Coordinator of Information, run by Colonel William “Wild Bill” Donovan and answerable only to Roosevelt himself. And it needed Canidy for his connections to help smuggle a French mining engineer prized by the Germans—and thus the Americans—out of North Africa.

Then Canidy got really pissed.