“We have radio contact with London, Major,” the SOE captain said.
Canidy ignored him.
“While you’re fueling the plane,” he went on, “I’ll start encrypting a message for London. You give it, personally, to the station chief. His name is Wilkins, Ernest J. Wilkins, and he’s a lot more competent than he looks. Tell him to get it right out, and then you wait there for further orders.”
Dolan nodded.
“You’ll take the Dyer girl with you,” Canidy said.
“If the decision is for you to go on to London, take her -with you. If it isn’t, turn her over to Wilkins, and have her put on ice. His ice. Make damned sure he understands that. She is not a prisoner, but I don’t want her talking to anybody but you and the station chief.”
Dolan nodded again.
“Daylight will be at 0513,” he said.
“Say twenty minutes to shoot two or three touch-and-gos, another half an hour to land, top off the tanks, and put the girl aboard. That’ll get us out of here at no more than quarter past six.”
“Fifteen minutes to shoot two touch-and-gos, and you’ll be on your way at half past five. It’s fifteen hundred miles, give or take a hundred, from here to Cairo. Presuming no bad head wind, that’d put you into Cairo in six hours, say noon Cairo time.”
“Two other presumptions,” Dolan said dryly.
“That you have your reasons for taking a passenger while Darmstadter’s shooting touch-and-gos, and that you have your reasons for us not to make a refueling stop at Malta.”
“There are reasons, John,” Canidy said, “but none you can’t figure out yourself.”
“Right,” Dolan said.
Canidy turned to Captain Hughson.
“How do you cook your meat here, Captain?” he asked.
The British officer’s eyebrows went up.
“Actually, there are two methods,” he said.
“We usually heat the tins in boiling water. But sometimes, if the meat is your Spam, we take it from the tins and fry it for a treat.”
“Could you rig up some sort of a spit over a fire?” Canidy asked.
“I’m sure you have a reason for asking,” Captain Hughson said.
“There’s four hundred pounds of Four-in-One beef on the plane,” Canidy said.
“I thought perhaps SOE might like to entertain its visitors with the roast beef of Merry Old England.” Four-in-One was boned beef packed for the U.S.
Army Quartermasters Corps, prepared so that it could be roasted whole, cut into steaks, chunked for stew, or ground.
For the first time, Captain Hughson smiled.
“Well, we’ll give it a bloody good try. Major,” he said.
“There’s also some vegetables, but God only knows if they survived the cold,” Canidy said.
“You stick around, Ferniany,” he ordered, “while I do the paperwork.”
“Yes, sir,” Ferniany said.
It took Canidy longer than he thought it would to get what details he needed from Perniany, then to write his report, then to edit it down to as short a version as possible for encryption, and then for the encryption itself.
He carried with him simple transposition codes on water-soluble tissue paper, one for each day, each five-letter code block representing a word or a phrase he and the OSS cryptographic officer had thought might be useful. But they had not considered the possibility that Fulmar and Professor Dyer would be locked up in a Hungarian municipal prison as petty criminals, so coming up with paraphrases for that situation from the available words and phrases was difficult. He had to laboriously build a second code from the code he had available, and by the time he had finally transferred the message Dolan would carry to Cairo for transmission, and had burned his notes and that day’s code, a lot of time had passed. It was dark when they walked out of the cave.
They stood in the dark for a minute, until their eyes adjusted to the darkness, and then they followed their noses farther up the hill to the cave from which came the smell of roasting beef.
[TWO]
OSS Station Whithey House
Captain the Duchess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Stanfield, WRAC, liaison officer of His Majesty’s Imperial General Staff to OSS Station Whithey House, liked First Lieutenant Charity Hoche, WAC, newly appointed assistant adjutant, from the moment she had first seen her getting out of the Ford staff car in front of Why she liked her, she could not explain. There were some women the Duchess liked at first sight, and some she didn’t. But by and large, her snap judgment first impressions were proven correct. Maybe in this case it was because Charity Hoche, although she looked up and somewhat shyly smiled at the Duchess and Lieutenant Bob Jamison as they started down the wide shallow stairs toward her, she did not ask for help, hauled her luggage from the backseat, and, staggering under the weight, started to carry it up the stairs herself.
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