You’d think they’d want to give him a medal for shooting down enemy planes, not be furious with him.
“Major Canidy,” she said chastisingly.
“I let all the pretty girls call me “Dick,”” he said.
“You are impossible,” she said.
“This is supposed to be a military organization.”
Canidy’s face registered great surprise.
“You’re kidding! “he said.
“Mr. Bruce is down in crypto,” she said.
“You are to wait.”
“And you’re not going to tell me what I’ve done wrong, are you, Dancy?”
“No,” she said, unable to resist smiling back at him.
“But it may have something to do with this.”
She opened her drawer and took from it a top secret cover sheet.
As he took it from her, she said softly, “If it doesn’t come up, it would probably be better if you didn’t mention I’d shown you that.”
Canidy raised the cover sheet and read the partially decrypted message.
Even if the Germans intercepted the message and succeeded in decrypting the text, they would not know the meaning of the code words.
EX LAX FOUR PROCEEDING ALL WELL YACHTSMAN
“Speaking to you both as your military superior, Captain,” Canidy said, “and as someone you know has the Need-to-Know, have there been any developments in the Balkans I should know about?”
Shaking her head and smiling, Capt. Dancy said, “You have it in your hand.”
“Well, now you’re off the hook with the dragon,” Canidy said.
“I asked you for this. You had no choice but to give it to me.”
She smiled at him. She thought that was nice of him.
“Have you got a copy of the OP PLAN [Operations Plan] here, or am I going to have to root around in the basement?”
Capt. Dancy walked to a sturdy safe from which, quite unnecessarily, for the door was ajar, hung a sign reading “Open” and took from it a manila folder with top secret stamped on it.
Canidy unfolded a map. On it was drawn in grease pencil Eric Fulmar’s route into Germany, and his escape route. Along it were marked, in Roman numerals, the stages of the route. There was a I at Marburg an der Latin, in Germany.
There was a II beside Vienna on the map, and a III beside Budapest. The fourth leg of the route ended at Pecs, in southwest Hungary.
Pecs was the site of the Batthyany family coal mines. Most of the coal in Hungary is low-grade “brown” coal. The mines at Pecs produced a high-grade anthracite that for hundreds of years had contributed to the Batthyany wealth.
Now it was of value because one of the heavy, multi wheeled Tatra trucks that had carried bagged anthracite to Budapest (including, through the influence of Helmut von Heurten-Mitnitz, some to Batthyany Palace) had returned to Pecs with Eric Fulmar and Professor Dyer and his daughter concealed in a box under a stack of coal bags.
Professor Dyer was a physicist. There was a tenuous connection between physics the science and physics as in laxative. Hence, “Ex-Lax.” In the planning stages of the operation, when they were picking code names, David Bruce had reluctantly admitted that the Germans would probably be baffled by references to a laxative, although he privately thought Canidy’s suggestion was one more indication that Canidy was not as serious as he should be.
“Yachtsman” was an OSS agent in Hungary. He was a first-generation American from Hamtramck, Michigan, who had learned Hungarian from his mother.
Equipped with the appropriate forged identity documents, he was employed with relatives as a deckhand on a Danube River barge. It permitted him to move around the country and when necessary to disappear from the barge for a couple of hours, or days.
Completely decoded, Yachtsman’s message meant that Fulmar and the Dyers had made it from Budapest safely to Pecs, and were proceeding to V This leg of the route was by barge.
“Ex-Lax “would travel down the barge canal built under the auspices of Emperor Franz Josef of Austro-Hungary to transport coal from Pecs to the Danube.
The barge canal crossed the border between Hungary and Croatia (Yugoslavia) in a sparsely populated region near Ben Manastir, and joined the Danube at Batina. Shortly before reaching Backa Palanka, where the Danube turned east toward Belgrade in another desolate unpopulated area, there would be a signal–in response to lights arranged in a special way on the barge–from the western shore of the Danube.