“You -write it, Joe,” Donovan ordered.
“Be vague. But let them know he went in as a volunteer doing something important.” He thought about saying something else, realized that he shouldn’t, but said it anyway:”I wish we could report them KIA. Until we have positive word, of course, they’ll have to be carried as MIA. But I don’t think there’s any real hope.”
“Yes, Sir,” Kennedy said.
Donovan had been avoiding making the decision what to do about taking the necessary action about Dick Canidy and Ferniany. At the very least, they were missing in action. It might even be better to hope that they were dead.
Just before it went off the air, interrupting a code block, the OSS radio station had sent the code for “Station discovered, in immediate danger of being captured.”
It was reasonable to presume that Ferniany had been captured in Budapest.
If that was true, and he was lucky, he would be dead. If that was true, and he was unlucky, he was alive and in the hands of the SS; and it might be some time before they were through with him and shot him. Or hanged him with a length of piano wire.
If they had caught him alive, it had to be presumed that he had given them Canidy’s location and told them what he knew. No matter how little that was, it was certain to be damaging to von Heurten-Mitnitz, the Countess Batthyany, and the whole Hungarian pipeline.
There seemed to be little doubt that Fulmar and Professor Dyer were dead.
The last B-17 had carried photographers, and there was proof beyond question that St. Gertrud’s prison and three square blocks around it had been bombed into rubble.
Canidy, to be sure, might still be alive, on the run somewhere in the forests near Pecs. He had as many lives as a cat.
It was the particularly obscene nature of this business, Donovan thought,
that I am forced to hope that he is dead. If he is dead, what he knows will not become known to the Germans.
He had decided that when he made up his mind to do it, he would personally write to the Reverend Doctor George Crater Canidy. He knew that it would be important, that Canidy would really want his father to believe he had died saving lives, not taking them. In a sense that was true, and maybe, Donovan decided, he would be able to make that point.
A more immediate problem was telling Ann Chambers. She had no legal right to know, of course. But legality had nothing to do with it. Donovan wanted her to hear it from him, and that meant he would have to tell her in the next couple of hours, before he got on the Washington plane.
“Joe,” he said, “you understand, of course, that Operation Aphrodite is now your responsibility?”
“When Stan Fine gets back, he will fill the role Canidy had. You will report to him.”
“There’s more to it than the sub pens at Saint-Lazare,” Donovan said.
“I assumed there was,” Kennedy said matter-of factly
Donovan’s eyebrows rose.
“I’ll have Colonel Stevens fill you in,” Donovan said.
“We have to expect setbacks, Joe,” Donovan said, wondering if he was talking as much to himself as he was to Kennedy.
“And not everything has gone wrong. Just before you came, there was word that Jimmy Whittaker is safely ashore in the Philippines.”
“Sir?” Kennedy asked, confused.
I am more emotionally upset by all this than I like to think I am; there was no reason for me to tell Kennedy that, and I should have known that he didn’t know what was planned for Whittaker.
“That’s out of school, Joe,” Donovan said.
“You don’t have the Need-to Know
“You sent Jimmy back to the Philippines?” Kennedy asked incredulously.
“He volunteered to go,” Donovan said.
That’s pretty lame, Donovan, and you know it. You did indeed send Jimmy back, knowing full well the risks.
The door opened. Capt. Helene Dancy walked in.
“I asked not to be disturbed,” Donovan said, coldly angry.
“Do I have to lock the door to keep from being interrupted?”
Just because you don’t like yourself right now is no reason to jump all over her.